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 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/