The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 426, August 16,2025 (Aug 9-Aug 15) ============================================================================= 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-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/ 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 some thoughts to Phil Harvey-Smith, which I will let our hardware technical guys explain: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/4118861138373524/ Julian also posted that he is basically ready to order the next batch of Dragon Extended boards for prototyping. He also mentioned that he has designed an ESP32 based board that has a little colour screen, but also has a rotary switch that controls the operation mode with 16 positions, of which will change between different machine types (Dragon 32 with or without an extra 32K RAM and/or DriveWire), Dragon 64 with / without DriveWire, and Coco mode: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/4123187221274249/ 2) The Laird’s Lair on YouTube did a video about 5 unreleased British Home Computers… and the Dragon Professional made the list (see 7:17) https://youtu.be/lL6-Q_kuCVg?si=9lfcFbhjT4huSN02 Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform) ------------------------------- 1) A bit of sad news that was pointed out by Richard Lorbieski of Boysontech: The old Falsoft building in Prospect, KY (the eventual office for Rainbow magazine after they outgrew Lonnie’s kitchen and house) is to be torn down to make room for a parking lot: https://www.facebook.com/ProspectAreaChamberofCommerce/posts/the-prospect-area-chamber-needs-a-new-homeallthe-falsoft-building-where-we-are-c/1038137611833599/ 2) Tim Lindner guested on The Intellivision Gamer show this past week, talking about Lumacode and adaptors for consoles. This isn’t strictly Coco related, but since Tim is such an active member of the community (including MAME), I wanted to plug the show. His segment is at the beginning: https://www.youtube.com/live/NY-y-JMg3Do?si=lDxOplm7T_9qdojR 3) Erico Monteiro posted a few more GIF’s showing progress on this Coco 1,2 artifact game work in progress: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10163062079872641/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10163066999492641/ 4) ugBASIC (the cross platform cross-compiler) has been getting updates the past few weeks. In the Main branch, some bug fixes in the DRAW command were added in addition to some non-Coco bugfixes. The Beta branch has been getting extensive updates; including adding new commands like FCIRCLE & FELLIPSE (filled circle & ellipse), TRIANGLE command, and adding support fro Vtech computers like the VZ200 - which while not directly Coco related, is a distant cousin since it also uses the 6847 VDG chip, just like the MC-10, Coco 1,2 and Dragon 32/64: https://ugbasic.iwashere.eu/changelog/beta 5) Jim Brain did a part 2 blog on the Glenside website about the Oval Window Audio Coco based project using Audio Spectrum Analyzer to help deaf students: https://www.glensideccc.com/the-multisensory-sound-laboratory-part-2/ 6) D. Bruce Moore posted a video of of him retrofitting an old game he wrote at age 16 called SpaceLab with new audio, using the CocoMP3 him and David Kroeker have been working on: https://coco.gracenote.ca/retro-fitting-an-old-game-with-new-audio/ MC-10 ----- 1) Following up on Ron Delvaux’s big reveal last week of Spriteworx upcoming MC-10 game release, it turns out TJ Ferreira is also a secret agent for this game: https://youtu.be/fiDry-rLKA0?si=hv5uESchjFA1asMf 2) Dave Bernazzani, whom we mentioned last week is working on an MC-10 emulator for the Nintendo DS, has an update – the first public beta of the emulator will become available to the public this weekend! But he also mentions that although he already has support for the 16K RAM expansion, he is https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/24080090905024405/ And un update – the Beta release is now available: https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/24086593971040765/ Direct link to Dave’s github page for the project: https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/MicroDS Also, Dave has uploaded version 1.5 of his Coco/Dragon emulator for the DS, adding some features, like cassette swap added to a mini-menu, improved sound, improved SG4/SG6 handling, a bug fix to the MUL instruction, and fixed alternative color set: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10163075992897641/ Download link: https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/DracoDS 3) Jim Gerrie posted a link to the Internet Archive with a port of Harry McCracken’s old game Arctic Adventure,with a few bug fixes. I think we linked to video of the gameplay before, but not the download link. Harry is still in tech these days as a reporter and magazine writer: https://archive.org/details/arctic_202508 4) David Collins posted a schematic of how to do a 15KHz NTSC YPbPR (Component video, I believe) output from the VDG (6847) chip: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10163065298362641/ 5) After showing videos of how his new Pentagon of Power cartridge and SD card case storage assembles and works, Antoinio Caballero has released the 3D Model files for printing your own to Thingiverse: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10163065243677641/ https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7117194 6) Simon Jonassen posted that since his server is offline, his SGEDit online tool can still be found and used elsewhere: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10163075161627641/ The app direct link: https://daftspaniel.neocities.org/tools/sgeditremix/ 7) Thomas Cherryhomes posted that he is working on an article about Fujinet for the recently relaunched Compute! Gazette magazine, and showed a screenshot of some of the text he is preparing, including mentioning the Coco port: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10163073334697641/ Game On news (all Coco related platforms): ========================================== 1) Tim & AJ of Sibling Rivalry fame put up a video showing Protectors by Tom Mix Software: https://youtu.be/J_3jp1BsWls?si=MVWZaqLCgHBxlswv I think I missed one of their previous Coco game videos last month as well, namely Pac Tac II by Computerware. But this version has enhanced colors for the Coco 3 by the looks of it: https://youtu.be/Nb8xmTt4Re8?si=WTTU5K0R1LvEUIi7 2) Brent and Aaron of the Amigos are recording the next Coco show tomorrow, covering a rarely seen game called Eastern World Karate. Tentatively there are two more episodes to record this year as well (dates subject to change), currently planned for October 26 and November 23. And they just announced this week that the next game coming up is Quix (which was tied in their online voting with Juno, so a coin flip was required). Where to find the Livestream: https://www.youtube.com/@AmigosRetroGaming A little on the game itself: http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/eastworld_karate.html 3) PW_32x in the Coco Discord posted a video of his WIP of a Downland port to the Sega 32X system. He indicated that he is almost done the port: (Show local file “Downland-port to Sega 32X WIP from PW-32x.mov”) 4) XperTek on YouTube has released his “summary” video of his “Games of the 80’s” Volume 7. If you haven’t been following his individual game video releases, this is a way to catch up to all of the ones he covered from disk #7 from his Coco 2 collection: https://youtu.be/-SvYBl26N1Y?si=db7zYS4JC0larGtf 5) Paul Shoemaker posted a video of his conversion of his previously Coco 3 only Ms. Paku game to the Coco 1 and 2, with just 4 colors…. And now even an MC-10 version as well: https://youtu.be/w4Qxds4Fq2o?si=ib5dFcga0yA_E_7A Download page: https://pshoemaker70.itch.io/ms-paku 6) Nostalgiavault on youtube released a video of Inufuto’s Aerial gameplay . His description mentions he played it on a Coco 3 – but he played the Coco 1 & 2 version of the game: https://youtu.be/5MM2iZGvqdw?si=ajiy5Jkyt3R7ulJ1 7) Speaking of Inufuto – they have started releasing their next game, called Svellas, although I haven’t seen MC-10 or Coco ports of it yet as of Friday morning. 40 platforms are out, including things like the VZ200 (which shares the same 6847 VDG chip as the Coco 1 & 2 & MC-10), so it should be out shortly: http://inufuto.web.fc2.com/8bit/svellas/ Speak your mind! 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