The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 306, March 25, 2023

Collected by L. Curtis Boyle

Jeff Wires (Chronologically Gaming) is on for a full interview next week
(Apr. 1)!

Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform)

1) Don Barber posted on the Coco List about Math Coprocessor cartridge he
has made using the AMD 9511 APU (Arithmetic Processor Unit), which supports
16 and 32 bit fixed point and 32 bit floating point arithmetic. This allows
faster operations for things like MUL, DIV, SIN, COS, ASIN, ACOS, ATNA, EXP,
PWR, SQRT LN and supporting functions, and the chip supports parallelism
(more that one processing at once) which can also be exploited. Currently
he has a patch for Coco 3 BASIC to use this cartridge, and some floating
point heavy programs are running 10x faster. He has also made the hardware
gerber files and the BASIC patch available on his GitHub:
Announcement:
https://pairlist5.pair.net/pipermail/coco/2023-March/179448.html
Github:
https://github.com/barberd/coco9511pak

2) Pedro Pena (Rocky Hill) has posted instructions for installing a Pepper
board in a Coco 2/3 (to replace the SALT chip):
https://github.com/qbancoffee/coco_salt_replacement/wiki/Installing-a-pepper-board
You can order them from his webstore as well:
https://westchester-tech.square.site/

3) TRS-80 Retro Programing goes through his almost finished title screen
for his BASIC Ultima style game that he has started working on:
https://youtu.be/VYuo3afYVNg

4) Allen Huffman continues his deep dive into how tokenized BASIC lines
are stored… and also that the 249/250 character limit he talked about
in his previous blog post is more a limit of INPUT buffers – the way BASIC
lines themselves are structured, there is no limit (within 64K anyways):
https://subethasoftware.com/2023/03/21/alex-evans-basic-utils-change-everything-part-1/

5) Jim Brain, president of the Glenside Color Computer Club (organizers
of CocoFest) put up a blog post on the Glenside site about the fest –
less than 30 days away:
https://www.glensideccc.com/its-almost-upon-us/

6) Regarding NitrOS9 EOU and the CocoSDC not getting along… it has been
discovered that there are two issues that can cause boot failures. One
is if a person has a Coco 3 with both a 1986 (older) GIME and an older
dynamic based RAM upgrade (512K or above). The video mode we have for the
boot screen (40 columns but without attribute bytes enabled) doesn’t seem
to reliably work in this situation, and crashes at seemingly somewhat
random spots in the boot process. We had one person with this issue try
swapping out an older 32 column version of the boot screen (REL module)
and it solved his issue, so we will be reverting the REL module to 32
columns on the next point release. The other problem is that the 6309
version crashes every time after the 127 CocoSDC firmware update. People
who have flashed their SDC’s back to the previous version have all reported
that the problem disappears upon doing so, so it’s something in that update
causing the issue. Bill Nobel has finally been getting some free time and
is contact with Darren Atkinson to see if they can resolve that problem.
The next point release of EOU should have the new REL module, a bugfix for
a rare floating point bug in BASIC09/6309 and hopefully the SDC firmware
problems resolved. No firm date yet.

7) Cathe Cita posted on the Coco Facebook group a picture of a very small
but complete 6809 single board computer. It includes MS BASIC and a 6850
serial chip to talk to a keyboard terminal, and a PIA to interface with
devices. (Apparently there is a 5MHz overclocked 6309 version as well):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160550166842641/

8) Antonio Caballero has been making multiple posts on trying to get
emulators to run Max-10 desktop publishing software from emulators. His
final result – only MAME can run it properly (currently neither VCC nor
XRoar can, although EJ Jaquay apparently is working on a patch for VCC):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160549878307641/

9) James Diffendaffer posted a video and source code for the “animated
running cat” that he had previously made a Coco 1/2 version of:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160546380062641/

10) Emerson Costa posted originally in the Motorola MC6847 group on
Facebook (and it got crossposted to multiple other Coco related groups)
about some possible circuitry to allow changing the default VDG colors
(and did a mockup using Pooyan as an example):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/173737063356725/posts/1305306020199818/

11) “Jacob the Scientist” on Facebook posted photos of the new PCB’s that
he is working on – a UniFLEX capable 6309 system originally designed by
Kees Schoenmaker:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/6809assembly/posts/3110055875954440/

MC-10

1) Simon Jonassen has upload the .C10 cassette file for his graphical wave
demo to the MC-10 Facebook group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/5912077745585665/
And a video showing it in action on emulator (runs the same on real
hardware):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/5908829592577147/

Dragon 32/64

1) Mike Miller, who programmed the AllDream assembler package for the
Dragon, posted a bit of the history behind it in the Dragon Facebook group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3423073364618975/

2) Tony Vincent posted a photo (and started a discussion) on the “Telidon
Graphics System” board for an Apple II – it used a 2Mhz 6809 along with
other chips to program graphics for graphics terminals:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3422866021306376/

3) John Whitworth of DragonPlus Electronics posted an update on his new
batch of Dragon RGB boards – he has the CPLD’s programmed now:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3421675948092050/

4) Chris Poacher uploaded the first full color ad, and the catalog/price
list, for Microdeal’s first Dragon releases to his Microdeal – The 8 bit
years Facebook group. He also uploaded the first generation plain cassette
inserts (1982) and what they were upgraded to the next year):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/204334613785733?sorting_setting=CHRONOLOGICAL

5) Ars Technica did an article titled “Egad! 7 key British PC’s of the
1980’s Americans might have missed”. One of them is the Dragon 32/64:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/egad-7-key-british-pcs-of-the-1980s-americans-might-have-missed/amp/

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

1) Jim Gerrie released “Mission Adventure” (originally by Michel Brassinne
in 1984 from Games & Strategy magazine issue 29) for the MC-10, translate
from it’s original French to English:
https://youtu.be/fGmwzou3MPc
Jim also ported over Spectral Associates “Artillery Duel” (that I just put
up on my site recently) to the MC-10, and then added some enhancements to
it. Still plays in just 4K of RAM (like the original did on the Coco when
it was released in February 1981):
https://youtu.be/qq9_g0yUci4
He also blog posted about his conversion of Mission ADventure:
http://jimgerrie.blogspot.com/2023/03/mission-adventure-by-michel-brassinne.html

2) Paul Shoemaker’s new text based arcade game Coco Ladder is now officially
available for download:
https://pshoemaker70.itch.io/coco-ladder
He also released a longer game play video:
https://youtu.be/uierphJPZoQ

3) Inufuto has caught up a bit this past week, with both the Coco 1/2 and
Coco 3 versions of Cracky now available:
http://inufuto.web.fc2.com/8bit/cracky/
Coco 1/2 video:
https://youtu.be/ps4DYmt15Rg
Coco 3 video:
https://youtu.be/_wwHpVNcutc

4) Chronologically Gaming (our interview guest next week) covered the
earliest PacMan style game on the Coco: Packetman from American Small
Business Computers, written by Greg Zumwalt and on sale by September of 1981:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPj-W2VCQhk&t=451s
Aardvark’s Pyramid and Tandy’s Popcorn:
https://youtu.be/ZGRr0ZX9RRw
He has also put up a spreadsheet of every game that he has covered so far
(and consistently updates it) including direct video links, platform and
his 0-5 star rating for it:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1o_1ivA_kVXZhjqagvJrVZRWI7pw68A7t2Zynly9GHLI/edit#gid=0

5) Pere Serrat has made patched versions of all 13 Inufuto games to allow
some alternate keys (Q/A for up/down and O/P for left/right), automatically
disable DOS so you don’t get little glitches and possible crashes from the
disk timer, and made them available in the Uploads section of the World
of Dragon forums. He has made both Dragon and Coco friendly versions with
these changes. He also included screenshots of all of them as well:
https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11073

6) Eric Monteiro created full map screenshots for both Tut’s Tomb & Shock
Trooper, and gave me permission to put them on my site (there have been
other updates as well over the past week):
http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/tutstomb.html
http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/shocktrooper.html

7) Jim Mullen is working on a Coco 3 arcade game along the lines of a
Kung Fu fighter style game, using BASIC with GrafExpress (by Jeff Steidl
from Sundog Systems), and has released a little video demo of the side
scrolling he has going (recorded on VCC at regular Coco 3 speed):
https://cocodevelopment.tinytake.com/msc/ODAzNDI5MV8yMTE4MDMzOQ

8) The Amigos (Aaron & John) have released the latest Coco Show – episode
42 covers the Tom Mix classic Dragon Slayer:
https://youtu.be/4_taS8pLJ2s

9) SimonWGB on Twitch and YouTube did multiple Dragon 32 game streams
this past week. One that caught my eye was he played Stone Raiders II
(one of our current Game On Challenges)… but at the end of that stream
he played another Boulder Dash clone for the Dragon called Boulder Crash:
https://youtu.be/qDE9kpTe1eU?t=8819

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Get connected with more of the CoCo, Dragon and MC-10 community here:
https://thecoconation.com/community/

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