The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 423, July 26,2025 (July 19-July 25) ============================================================================= Collected by L. Curtis Boyle Interview schedule: ------------------- Interviews are being coordinated ... 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 West at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California is August 1-2, from 10 am-6 pm Friday and 9 am-5 pm Saturday. There are usually some Coco people at the show (both attendees and exhibitors), and we have had walkthroughs before that show it to be a fun show with a lot of history since it is in Silicon Valley: https://vcfed.org/events/vintage-computer-festival-west/ 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/ This year’s RetroSC (a general retro show in Brazil, with a lot of Coco and Coco clones present) is November 15, 2025 in Florianopolis, SC, Brazil: https://retrosc.org/ 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. **** NEW NEWS ORDER TO HELP OUR LIVE EUROPEAN VIEWERS **** NOTE: We are planning to do a special “Coco 4” episode in the future, which will included all the computers that were announced in the 1991-1994 time frame that were supposed to be successors to the Coco 3. We have Joel Ewy who has volunteered to show off their MM/1, I am going to try and get my TC-9 up and running at least enough to show it working, and Rick Ulland will show off a Delmar System V… but we still need volunteers with TC-70’s, Kix-20 or Kix-30, Delmar System IV, AT-306 and MM/1 B’s. Anybody still have these machines that they would like to show off in an upcoming show? Email me at curtisboyle at sasktel.net if you are. Dragon 32/64 ------------ 1) Julian Brown posted a brief update that he is currently troubleshooting the PAL padding logic for one of his video projects: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/4096909433902028/ 2) John Whitworth posted an interesting chart of how many of his various Dragon hardware boards he has sold (through DragonPlus Electronics) over the last 7 years: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/4096592183933753/ Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform) ------------------------------- 0) Ken of Canadian Retro Things will be talking about his latest video – programming the Electronic Book, during our Project updates segment, since he has to leave the show early: https://youtu.be/q3Pf-wfpRw0?si=uHv5v1fv1EEpoUT3 1) Desi Villaescusa posted some photos of his CocoEPROMpak cartridge cases that he made for the PCB’s that he is working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162990552552641/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162983092207641/ 2) Toni W Ryan posted in the Coco Facebook group about a custom Coco 3/Os9 Level 2 system they used at his school, where they had Apple 2’s and Coco 2’s hooked up to the Coco 3 via serial ports (they also had a multi-pak, Eliminator, etc.) including custom terminal software for the Apple II that emulated OS9 Level 2 escape codes: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162990398142641/ 3) Somewhat along the same line are some posts by Toni W Ryan in the Coco Facebook group talking about a Coco program he wrote for Pizza Hut back in the day, and how a BASIC program he wrote ended up saving them hours of drudgery previously done by hand: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162977475872641/ And an inventory program he wrote on his Coco 1: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162973431402641/ 4) Dannielle just about has her Coco-Musik solo album, and wants to include video clips of Nick’s Coco Pong game as part of the video. She is wondering if Nick can make Pong run itself in a demo mode. Nick? https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162983284742641/ 5) Erico Monteiro posted an updated animated gif showing a possible new game he is working on – showing the cat he demoed last week, but adding a Coconut crab and some insects: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162980551542641/ And an earlier clip showing what happens when the cat encounters water: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162966857597641/ 6) Terry Trapp – the sysop of he RiBBS Coco 3/NitrOS9 BBS system one can hit through Telnet – shows that he can even log in through his phone: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162976978112641/ 7) Dave Bernazzani has posted yet another update to his Draco-DS (a Coco ˝ and Dragon 32/64 emulator for the Nintendo DS, now up to version 1.2, which has the following updates: Improved FDC disk handling - OS9 games now load and run! Go play Robot Odyssey and enjoy. Improved artifacting - less glitches and 50% faster. DS-Lite no longer has any frameskip! Added 'Muddied Green' artifacting for the non Black/White color set. Added 'Diagonals' as a d-pad option for Q-Bert like games. Speedup POKE is now available to boost CPU speed to an effective 1.78MHz Fixed Skiing cart so it now runs past the 'Get Ready... Get Set' voice. Boosted sound 50% across the board (it was sounding a little weak) Announcement https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162976238162641/ Download from his github: https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/DracoDS 8) YouTube channel JimsElectronicShop posted a 5+ minute video of 6809 general info, if one prefers looking at it in video format (and with voiceover explaining what one is looking at) rather than a text file format: https://youtu.be/q4awmhNgspE?si=lK0ljLwiIvHMJqzK 9) Coco Town has released another video in his series about his Moon Patrol style game. This episode covers generating random numbers in 6809 assembly language… but generated by AI (originally done by Glen Hewlett). He deep dives into the how the algorithm works. He promises a followup to explain how the Microsoft BASIC one works – which appears more truly random, but slower: https://youtu.be/nhuOyMNIbHk?si=ZkxNY8aAq2VAloy5 10) Richard Lorbieski, owner of the resurrected Boysontech, has 3 new product announcements today, all shipping starting Monday (and will show up on store.boysontech.com on Sunday) https://www.facebook.com/BoysonTech1/posts/ pfbid0fUz1xYco6QviwT24t5izgwKVsuGPyeqpAcFw3BAJiY8CtrueMHudaLP3xZWt2hJpl#?dgf Paragon Joystick adapter This allows one to use Atari or Sega Genesis joysticks through the analog ports on Coco 1/2/3’s, Dragon 32/64 (which need an adapter cable), and Tandy 1000’s. $23 USD each Boomerang Classic 512K RAM expansion board Uses static RAM like most modern Coco 3 RAM upgrades, thus drawing far less power and generating less heat than the older dynamic RAM model. No soldering required. $24 USD each CocoSDC – now being sold either as a kit or a fully assembled unit, including 3D printed cases from John Strong. $85 USD each including the case. 11) EJ Jaquay had put up a preview release of the next version of the VCC Coco 3 emulator – version 2.1.9.3p1. This version contains some bug fixes, as well as better support for CocoSDC emulation: https://github.com/VCCE/VCC/releases/tag/vcc-2.1.9.3p1 MC-10 ----- 1) Game On news (all Coco related platforms): ========================================== 1) For those who loved the SPOOKS game that we mentioned last week, Paranoid Cactus has an itch.io page which shows a lot of different games that he has made for other platforms (as well as Spooks itself, which we now know will run in 32K RAM, and has 6 different screens). And we learned a bit from the Cactus himself – he is a fellow Aussie to Nick!: https://paranoidcactus.itch.io/ 2) Pere Serrat has converted the newest Inufuto game Mazy2 to run on the Dragon, and you can download this updated version from the World of Dragon forum: https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11299 3) Marlin Lee has added some more Coco game video playthroughs to his channel: “A clone is as good as a port” – going through some of Marlin’s favourite unofficial clones of popular arcade games: https://youtu.be/DB9v8iOwOXs?si=bEk5D8Eivu5R0DHu Flying Tigers – a Defender clone we just played recently on the Game On Challenge: https://youtu.be/ErEAV-q_knE?si=i9EtUnMVP1qcKzAY Germ Warfare – a cassette magnazine game: https://youtu.be/xFlnKhrnpQ4?si=QXEZnoZCBC8wPhUq 4) XperTek covers the game Protectors by Tom Mix Software this week on his real Coco 2 with amber monitor (After a short bit on a dice game written in BASIC): https://youtu.be/e_ddze4rZ6s?si=oZbEwMcPDXjktZ4T 5) YouTube channel Roy (Random Precision) is making a modern port of the Dragon 32 specific version of Chuckie Egge. It’s running slow and is still in development – but the graphics, sound and game play seems to pretty well be there already: https://youtu.be/M03Q9rr9swQ?si=FFUr64mtYfzZSMKd 6) German YouTube channel EORetro (whom we covered recently when he showed his Dragon 32) released a 45+ minute video that aims to cover a wide range of games on the Dragon 32. He does this with original tapes and original cassette inlay instructions, starting with Ring of Darkness, but including classics like Manic Miner, Downland, Return of the Beast, Dunjunz and more. There are even some demo’s at the end: https://youtu.be/s1GmNP3ZKIA?si=V1hLK7CNZIGHdC0C 7) Marco Spedaletti, author of the cross platform ug (Micro games) BASIC compiler, posted a link to games written using ugBASIC, and which platforms each game is currently available on. There are multiple Coco, Coco 3 and Dragon entries, even including some Coco exclusives, if one wants to try them out or even program their own: https://ugbasic.iwashere.eu/games 8) Paul Shoemaker put up a teaser of a Ms. Paku that he is working on – which is his latest Paku Paku game but with full Coco 3 graphics: (show local file “Coco Nation News/upcoming ms.paku by Paul Shoemaker (ugbasic channel) - Coco 3 only version of paku paku WIP.png” 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/