The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 411, May 3, 2025 =============================================================== Collected by L. Curtis Boyle For those who want to try an online BBS running on a real 512K Coco 3, you can reach Terry Trapp’s RiBBS system here: telnet ribbs.griswoldfx.com 6809 Special Guests today: --------------------- Some CocoFest goes, perchance? Bob Emery will be on to recap the Texas meetup he was at last week? Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people: ------------------------------------------------------------ Retrofest 2025, organized by Tony Jewell, is a retro computer festival happening in Swindon, England May 31-June 1, 2025. Some Dragon people (like Richard Harding and Chris Poacher) have already committed to attending the show, being held at STEAM (the Great Western Railway museum): Retrofest website: https://retrofest.uk/ They even have a promo video: https://youtu.be/UCZ-BtFW9Ok?si=B441wLvpDI2iekLN VCF-SW in Texas has been booked with dates: June 20-22, 2025 at the Davidson Gundy Alumni Center, University of Texas, Dallas, Texas. Tables & Tickets will go on sale January 2025. $20/adult ($25 if bought at the door), $10/student ($15 at the door). 17 and under are free (with accompanying adult). Tables are $50. https://www.vcfsw.org/ The Southeast Michigan Vintage Computer Club is having their 8th public meeting/display June 28, 2025 from 11 AM to 5 PM Eastern at Grace Chapel's Gymnasium, 2515 N. Williams Lake Road, Waterford Township, Michigan (near Pontiac). This covers all retro gaming consoles and home computers. https://semichiganvcc.blogspot.com/2025/04/se-michigan-vintage-computer-club-ver.html BoatFest (now International Retro Computer Expo) will be July 11-13 in Hurricane, WV. There is now a promo video for it: https://www.ticketsource.us/ircexpo2025/t-eanjyje VCF-Midwest (the largest retro show in North America, I believe) is September 13-14 at the Schaumburg Convention Center in Schaumburg, Illinois. This year is the 20th anniversary of this show, and there is a lot of collaboration between CocoFest and VCF-MW, so expect a large number of Coco and Glenside people at the show! Still free admission, and hotel booking is open already. https://www.vcfmw.org/ That same weekend, Retro World Expo will be held September 12-14 at the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford, Connecticut. Tickets and vendor applications aren't quite ready yet but will be soon. This is a gaming oriented retro show (including tournaments) but also includes things like wrestling: https://retroworldexpo.com/ Also that same weekend, for Canadians and anyone wanting to travel up to Canada, the WoRC (World of Retro Computing) show is September 13-14 at the old Goudies Department Store location at 8 Queen Street North, Kitchener,ON, Canada (West of Toronto, and right beside The Museum). This is a general retro show with a bunch of gaming and home computer platforms, vendors, seminars, LAN parties, workshops, door prizes & raffles and is sponsored by Retro Rewind. Admission is free, and it runs noon to 5 pm Eastern on both Saturday and Sunday: https://worldofretrocomputing.com/ Tandy Assembly for 2025 is Sept 26 to Sep 28 at the Courtyard by Marriott Springfield Downtown in Springfield, Ohio: https://www.tandyassembly.com/ And they have some exhibitors already (click Exhibitors link) This year's Portland Retro Gaming Expo runs from October 17-19 in 2025 (they just had this years Sept 27-29). Oregon Convention Center, Portland, Oregon. https://www.retrogamingexpo.com/ Canada is getting it's own official VCF - Montreal, January 25-26 of 2026. It will be held at the Royal Military College outside of Montreal, but I don't have any more details (the venue, for example) yet: https://vcfed.org/vcf-montreal/ Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform) ------------------------------- 1) For those who want to catch the seminars at CocoFest, Glenside is live streaming them from their YouTube channel, and you can go watch ones you missed: https://www.youtube.com/@glensideccc/streams 2) Ken Waters (Canadian Retro Things) has posted his part 2 video of using his Memory Minder with special Diagnostic disk to check a variety of the floppy drives he has in his posession: https://youtu.be/jRY5-fVVuOQ?si=Q2bn0GCGsPjJ-Ox1 3) For those who didn't get a chance to watch it live last Saturday night, the TRS-80 Trash Talk live show episode #43 is available for view on their YouTube channel. They had some Coco related segments from myself, Henry Gernhardt III and Nick Marentes: https://www.youtube.com/live/I0Z0q9zdvbU?si=SeN482vUXbYVvURp 4) And for those of you who missed the Amigos International Computer Club last weekend as well (almost 6 hours!), which also had several of us showing off Coco project updates, as well as stories from developers on other machines ranging rom the ZX Spectrum to mobile games in the 2000's, you can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/live/zrGB_ngpaY8?si=MDmGVb2Gpb2kVt3B 5) Nerdly Pleasures (Great Hierophant) on YouTube put up an almost 3/4 hour video showing Mickey's Alpine Adventure from Disney/Tandy in 1983 - a very early multi-media educational game. He is even running it on his real Coco 1 through RF: https://youtu.be/InXsRT5c9hM?si=PPngeMIe03Ulqqb4 6) Henry of The Break Key has a new video on his YouTube channel, where he adds an OLED status indicator to the keyboard, using the i2c interface: https://youtu.be/FvQc6m-HgZY?si=xGZyu6qRpGsy1Biq 7) Guillaume Major (owner/proprietor of the Color Computer Archive) announced that he has done an updated "master" CocoSDC image, containing over 100 new files from the last time he did one of these. This is basically downloading the whole archive in one ZIP file. He also has a changes.txt file that shows what has been added and/or updated: https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Disks/Coco%20SDC/Image/ 8) Jim Brain posted some photos from the currently ongoing CocoFest in Chicago: https://www.facebook.com/groups/glensideccc/posts/10162920351976163/ 9) Richard Goedeken posted the source code for a 6309 assembly program to calculate pi to arbitrary precision: https://github.com/richard42/calcpi 10) While being released at the totally wrong time of the year, Caleb Short on YouTube released a Coco 1/2 artifacted color animation with music for Away In a Manger: https://youtu.be/A6Wn-8_GSKc?si=tYGzaJI_HUGejduD 11) Terry Trapp has another update on his Multimedia/network board project Coco Blender - he has it talking properly to the network now: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162561131842641/ 12) Stew Kensley sent some updates on the I/O board he is working on for the Coco. This board supports many features (like RGB to VGA output, PS2 keyboard/mouse and more, as shown in the email he sent me: (show PDF from my Coco Nation News folder, plus some of the schematics and photos) MC-10 ----- 1) Jim Gerrie released an MC-10 conversion of a Snoopy printout program (his version does graphics as well) from way back in June of 1972 from the HP BASIC Program Library Handbook. I think he is using SG6 (64x48 resolution) for this one: https://youtu.be/TQRbNQOVBf4?si=ZOjMV83Em2Pw3sre Dragon 32/64 ------------ 1) Julian Brown showed that he received one of the SAMx8 boards designed by Ciaran Anscomb - and plans on testing it on his Dragon 64 later. We covered Ciaran's board last week: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/4018008548458784/ Game On news (all Coco related platforms): ========================================== 1) The Amigos full review of Nick Marentes' only 6309 required game to date, Gunstar, is now out on YouTube (and Twitch, if you look it up on their page): https://youtu.be/Mdl9fvbO4TA?si=6t24CzALa2JNpLDZ 2) Jason Reighard made a 2 minute of his brother Ken playing Rich Natali's Coco 1/2 Spy Hunter - with the special controls that he teased last week - at this years CocoFest: https://youtu.be/iAyJgmx-O-k?si=kmn1AvrdVsF4sgaQ 3) Tim & AJ review Beanstalker on the Coco for their latest episode of Sibling Rivalry on their My Drunk Sibling YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/F7Dy-InmuZ8?si=JS9EZ5vaLUbb3C5x 4)Ultra Gamer81 on YouTube did a longplay video of the Coco version of Pooyan, getting a quite impressive score of 155,250 points (and even had a perfect 1st bonus stage): https://youtu.be/zYqbe5HyCfU?si=mqUey0QvwW1TPU3Z 5) Buck Owens (Steve Rasmussen) put up a complete playthrough (in 6.5 minutes of game time!) of current Game On Challenge game Chispy: https://youtu.be/7RpwFDbU-5I?si=eP-FuFRsNPN9Rwtd 6) Renga in Blue did a two part review of Genesis Sofware's Enchanted Forest - a 1982 graphical adventure game written in Extended BASIC for 32K Color Computers. It had some unique features like look in different directions from the same vantage point. Part 1 shows some definite (and multiple) bugs making the game impossible to win; it looks like this is because it was created for tape only. It uses a couple of variable names that became reserved keywords in Disk BASIC (one example is "AS"), so those had to be renamed throughout the code. The second is when one of his readers patched the game (through several tries), and has made it available for download: Part 1: https://bluerenga.blog/2025/04/30/enchanted-forest-1982/ Part 2 (and winning): https://bluerenga.blog/2025/05/01/enchanted-forest-circle-thrice/ 7) A different platform comparison video of a classic game - the soundtrack for Leisure Suit Larry on a variety of computers, including the Coco 3: https://youtu.be/Ofmd4NXCiZQ?si=XcexbGWCbHOJgjnp 8) Tea Leaves on YouTube does a > half hour video on Madness and the Minotaur: https://youtu.be/5cnIU-fCIFo?si=dQoZ1ihzP9kIXeC4 9) Jim Jewett released another Spacewar update (and instructions) for Spacewar, and also added "Spoofwar", to the Coco group on Facebook. He does mention that he runs it in an emulator at 21 MHz: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162574712037641/ 10) The Mastertronic Collectors Archive released a game review this past week for one of the old Mastertronic Dragon games - Bug Diver for the Dragon 32. I think I tried this some time ago; I think it has gameplay similar to the earlier Shark Treasure?: https://mastertronic.co.uk/game-review-bug-diver-dragon-32-mastertronic/ 11) Attempts: A gaming channel by LRU, put in a score of 4,390 playing the Dragon 32/64 release of Star Spores: https://youtu.be/HCgI1mnmKJY?si=_uAp7KO-8kQGlyRm 12) ZXFrankie released multiple Dragon videos this week as part of Yakzee week (Yahtzee): Yakzee for the Dragon 32 by P.B. Software in 1983: He did 4 videos, with 1-4 rounds in each corresponding video: 4 round as an example (since he shows the grpahical title screen in this one, as well as the credits screen): https://youtu.be/xzwbEdCUiW8?si=zJ_QeCallKBMftRm 13) Pere Serrat and Kees von Oss have released two new AGD engine game packs this past week: MPAGD pack #71, featuring 4 games: Cocoa and the Time Machine Duckstroma Part 2 Magenta Jim Smelly Cat https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11283 And they released NP game pack #17 (Supersprite+ enhanced and with the new color palette), which also has 4 games: Grumpy Santa Hyperkill Mr. Hair & the Fly Rubicon https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11284 14) For those that didn't catch it earlier this week, a bug was found in Chispy's initial conversion. The bug fixed version is on both the Coco Discord and on the world of dragon forums, upload section: https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11275 Speak your mind! Let us know what you think at: ============================================================================== feedback at TheCoCoNation.com Get connected with more of the CoCo, Dragon and MC-10 community here: ============================================================================== https://thecoconation.com/community/