[Index]
The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 417, June 14 (7-13), 2025
===============================================================
Collected by L. Curtis Boyle
Special NOTES:
--------------
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 (please note that
this an active development machine so the BBS occasionally goes down
when Terry is working on hardware, etc).:
telnet ribbs.griswoldfx.com 6809
Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people:
------------------------------------------------------------
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.
I will mention that Dr. Boisy Peter has a special seminar on doing
brain transplants to an Atari 800 and Commodore 64, replace their
6502’s with 6809’s.
https://www.vcfsw.org/
The next meetup for the Manitoba Retro Computer and Gaming Club is
June 21 at 11 am Manitoba time at the Fort Rouge Leisure Centre in
Winnipeg, MB. No specific theme this meeting, anything retro will do!:
https://www.facebook.com/events/3910772042522182/?acontext=%7B%22event_action_history%22%3A[%7B%22surface%22%3A%22group%22%7D]%7D
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
International Retro Computer Expo (formerly BoatFest) 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. NOTE 1: If you
attended CocoFest this year, bring your badge to Tandy Assembly, and
you will get in for FREE! NOTE 2: Peter Cetinski issued an update on
May 13 - all tables are officially sold out:
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/
Tentative date for CocoFest 2026 - April 24-25, as mentioned in the
Glenside meeting this past week. Not 100% confirmed, but sounded
pretty solid.
**** NEW NEWS ORDER TO HELP OUR LIVE EUROPEAN VIEWERS ****
Dragon 32/64
------------
1) Julian Brown posted multiple updates to his ATX Dragon multi-card
project this past week, to the Dragon group on Facebook:
Update 1: VDG replacement board changes are done, and sent off for
samples, expected in around two weeks:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/4059017414357897/
Update 2: New SRAM (static RAM) board is ready to test, but he needs
to get a suitable EPROM to test it:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/4061239650802340/
Update 3: RGB board just about ready - this is not the 6847 replacement
board, but a CPLD driven board to prove the RGB decoding works (he
is expecting to need some tweaks):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/4061241654135473/
Update 4: 63C09E CPU card - he needs a single diode to test further
that he is waiting for. The 6309 is the quad style layout, not DIP:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/4061238337469138/
Update 5: Since larger CPLD development boards from AMD/Xlinix are hard
to find, Julian designed an equivalent for the Atmel ATF15xx CPLD's:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/4061312917461680/
2) YouTube channel SteDubya released 2 videos about his "Early Dragon
32" that he picked up on ebay, which he has to fix to get running:
Part 1:
https://youtu.be/kvl4FatNqsI?si=zWqHS-fcMaEvgcTw
Part 2:
https://youtu.be/2wxy2Lx6Iiw?si=wRAgRUSFBTUVz8Zj
3) Chris Poacher showed photos of the insides of his Dragon 200-E, with
a John Whitworth (DragonPlus Electroncis) daughterboard that enhances
the text modes with true lowercase and really clean inverse video:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/4061487060777599/
Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform)
-------------------------------
1) Glen Hewlett added more details to what he added to Version 4.41
of his BASIC-TO-6809 cross compiler:
"- Added the DRAW command for all graphics modes including the
semi-graphics modes
- Improved the handling of single line IF commands that have THEN or
ELSE with a line number and not a GOTO line number
- Fixed POKE command so it can now handle math funxtions directly
for both the address and the value to poke
- Fixed a bug with LINE command with horizontal lines with two colours,
depending on the offset it could draw the line smaller
than it should be
- Updated SDECB.bas IDE to ignore TIMER, it can now be treated as a
variable to be set just as on Extended Color BASIC"
https://github.com/nowhereman999/BASIC-To-6809
2) Genevieve Tadfafty has set up a Google docs spreadsheet to record
serial numbers for all Coco's. I contributed a list that I off/on again
added to over the last number of years, but people can add their own,
and maybe we can figure out when numbers were re-used, etc.:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iDrUPPlW2_pyES2le_KKaHotI2yc2D-lUGXtao03sGA/edit?usp=sharing
3) TRS-80 Retro Programing on YouTube released a video update of his
Coco Space Ark game work in progress, showing what level 2 looks like
and some of the program and how it works:
https://youtu.be/eNJD8Zk5ocA?si=RNQjBIhXBae7T0Ox
4) For those who missed the Glenside meeting this past Thursday, you
can watch it in it's entirety on the Glenside YouTube channel. This
covers how CocoFest did financially as it's main subject:
https://www.youtube.com/live/3Xs0UNclXlg?si=9eEOu0Xhi4YJIfUy
5) Tony Licari, who posted some photos from the Tandy catalog from
Australia last week in the Coco Facebook group, posted a phot of
some magazines he found. Two are North American ones (Color Computer
News and Color Computer Magazine, but the other two are ones most
of us in North America haven't seen: Softgold and Coco Magazine,
both from Australia:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162738553112641/
6) Paul Thayer announced that the joysticks he announced a few weeks
ago (small modern gamepad style design) are just about ready to ship,
and he hopes to have them out in 2 weeks:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162746929722641/
7) Joel Ewy posted a Libre Office document that shows the cycle time
differences between the Signetics 68070 (used by the MM/1, TC-70 and
CDI) and the regular Motorola 68000. For a lot of operations the 68070
is slower, cycle wise - but it has some options the 68000 does not,
and runs at higher clock speed. It even includes some comparisons
vs. 68000 machines at the time (Amiga, Mac, Atari ST):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/3194643584094250/posts/4875737495984842/
8) Simon Jonassen is still workings on his SG-12/24 "Wobble mode"
graphics viewer, that allows a Coco 1/2 (or Dragon) to show up to 121
colors, and posted more examples (which still have black horizontal
lines that won't be in the final product) to the MC6847 group on
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/173737063356725/posts/1798831704180578/
MC-10
-----
1) Jim Gerrie converted the old Alice title program to the MC-10 -
an SG4 animation featuring Alice herself:
https://youtu.be/-2JcjPletqs?si=I1DJlPF5bB3YAbnZ
Game On news (all Coco related platforms):
==========================================
1) Aquanaut 471 on YouTube uploaded a bunch more 3 minute videos of
Dragon games - including cassette artwork for those that he has the
original cassettes for:
https://www.youtube.com/@CuthbertintheJungle/videos
2) XperTek covers Ice Hockey for the Coco - originally sold by
Intellectronics, and later Computerware, and is based on the Activision
Atari 2600 game. (This shows the later Computerware version):
https://youtu.be/sAv-t7AOFfM?si=P-wDsNt5zNVqvyli
3) Ellimist on YouTube did a speed run of another text adventure game -
this time Wet T-Shirt Contest from the Misadventure series that was
cross ported to multiple computers. This one did have map feature
that was an improvement on previous games in the MisAdventure series
(which are PG13/R rated text adventures); it actually quick scrolls
between rooms:
https://youtu.be/Wgf03W5MS5o?si=n8YYvgt0UOmIpgrl
4) Jim Gerrie did multiple game ports to the MC-10 this past week:
Fantasyland (originally by Canadian Vince Sorensen in 1982 for the
C64 - which is *very* early for the C64). Jim added automatic word
wrap, and corrected some spelling mistakes from the original text
adventure game:
https://youtu.be/1cuo-XuyOdw?si=M1JZERGhieexrqnF
Tied to Fantasyland is Jim's "Canadian Early BASIC Programs" webpage,
which features a bunch of programs for a variety of 8 bit machines
orignally written by Canadian authors (Jim has convered most to run
on the MC-10):
https://jggames.github.io/Type-in-Mania-Canadian-Programs.html
Labyrinthe - converted from the French 1982 game for the Sanyo PHC-25
(I am not positive, but is this in SG6 (64x48)?:
https://youtu.be/TscfrvB0gZU?si=UstdxSDODm5XvOXD
Air Defense, originally for a 4K Coco and published in
Compute! magazine's April 1983 issue, written by T.L. Wahl. Jim
worked on speeding it up a bit, and to use keyboard instead of
joystick controls:
https://youtu.be/tlln7TfwgmM?si=hxBFYm76BYPLXLY-
Dante's Inferno, originally by Gerard Bernor from the January 1980
issue of Softside Magazine (written in late 1979). This is text
advetnure was some minor touchups by Jim. SPOILER ALERT: The video
is a complete walk through of the game:
https://youtu.be/iT4sa-5mf24?si=i3hatYFSo1Pom_9P
The text adventure game site "Renga in Blue" has a write up about
the original version, including the fact that it was a called a
"CompuNovel" ("Text Adventure" wasn't the solified term yet):
https://bluerenga.blog/2019/01/30/dantes-inferno-1980/
5) ZXFrankie on YouTube did some more high score attempts this past
week, on real Dragon hardware:
Starship Chameleon (he did a game each for skill levels 1 and 2):
https://youtu.be/og36mqmJGgQ?si=hKDbY1Hlcn5Ptj2d
6) NMI on YouTube put up a YouTube short playing Richard Kelly's
(Retro Rick on the Coco Discord) "Killer Bouncing Balls" that we
covered last week - a BASIC shoot em up based on an earlier T&D game:
https://youtube.com/shorts/EyjFcIC9Xr8?si=EKGA6ZI4KeLiIYF8
7) Nostagiavault on YouTube posted a lengthy video called
"TheMediaList: Episode 9", which contains a ton of Coco & MC-10
content (educational games, games, and even some demos). The Coco
related content lasts almost 1.5 hours (7:30 to 1:31:00 roughly). The
rest of the almost 4 hours is more modern platform gameplay. He even
plays some of the early Disney multi-medi educational Coco 1 games,
including the tape audio:
https://youtu.be/S7iVh7-IO1s?si=FsVtIFALFmlZzKRs
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