The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 322, July 22, 2023

Collected by L. Curtis Boyle

August 12 we have Matt Harper on (developer of Wizard’s Den sold by Tom
Mix Software).
The interview with Doug Masten (author of The Contras) with co-interviewee
Glen Dahlgren of Sundogs Systems that was originally going to happen
on August 19 is being postponed, due to a fairly major surgery. We are
shooting for around October/November depending on doctor’s orders.
September 9 we have Mark P. & Charlie from Portacoco.com. If you were
at the Fest, you would have seen them at their booth showing Coco’s (and
monitors) running wirelessly together and off batteries that do NOT require
modifications to a Coco case to attach.

For Game On Challenge segment:
Scott Cooper found a cheat for Cuthbert in Space to wrack up the points:

“Here is video showing how to rack up points without getting hurt. It is
done on the Loot Stage. I move up to the very top and position myself
under my number of men left. Make sure to keep shooting to the left,
because sometimes a baddie will come out from the left. For some reason ,
I never see any baddies coming from the right. So just stay here and rack
up points from shooting the falling X shape looking things. The loot stage
starts at 1:25 in the video. Shortly after that I speed up Xroar to make
the process happen faster.”

https://youtu.be/5UXsgdyUZW8

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

1) CocoTown released a different type of video than he normally has his
channel – trying to improve picture quality for his Coco 2 setup (with
a special restriction – not having to open the case). He uses multiple
methods with varying results:
https://youtu.be/VF3wzWV9T7M
He also added a video testing to see if his Tandy branded real Coco 2 had
the T1 VDG in it this whole time…
https://youtu.be/G-PoPtwML98

2) Bob Emery (La Coco Strangiato) did a video on cutting the cord – driving
a Coco from a USB power source instead of the power plu (and getting rid
of the transformer completely in the process):
https://youtu.be/tTwTgGR-jSU

3) Michael Furman posted a promo video unveiling his new cross platform
(within the Coco) CocoSDC utility called CocoSDC Commander, where he
explains what it is and why he made it:
https://youtu.be/T6z_EsNv74E
Current Alpha:
https://github.com/n6il/cocosdc-commander

4) Jamie Cho is working on a transpiler – a program to convert Color BASIC
programs to BASIC09. This is very much a work in progress and currently
does most of the original COLOR BASIC and some of Extended BASIC. He plans
on supporting Disk BASIC and Coco 3 BASIC as well (I should note that this
runs on modern machines, not on a Coco itself):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160786739322641/

MC-10

Dragon 32/64

1) Julian Brown has the first batch of boards made (Rev 2.1) for those
who want to make their own Dragon 32 based on his recreating the motherboard:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3503691376557173/

2) Richard Kelly has now released his Maze Creator version 1.0 (that we
showed last week) for the Dragon 32/64 as well:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160786321627641/

3) John Whitworth put up a demo video of his SuperRGB module for the Dragon,
but for the T1 VDG. It plugs into the VDG socket and converts the T1 to
a true RGB signal for output:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160791523197641/

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

1) Jim Gerrie was busy since last week’s show. First up: A port of
Mindbusters (originally by Ned W. Schultz in the April 1985 issue of
Computer! magazine) that was originally in PC BASIC. This a sliding
row/column game with graphical patterns where you try and solved it the
least amount of time:
https://youtu.be/Wc5nojHTRMI
Next up he did “Adventure Without A Name” originally by A. Sumner in the
1986 book “Bumper Book of Programs Volume 2” that was published by Your
Microcomputer:
https://youtu.be/9Mkgaa31lVI
He also did DONKEY.BAS, a GW BASIC demo game written by Bill Gates &
Neil Konzen in 1981:
https://youtu.be/CzImR9REIdE

2) TRS-80 Retro Programming posted an update to Tales of Suburbia –
including Stage 4 and plans for finishing the game:
https://youtu.be/tpd_GkER2Ow

3) The Coco Show episode 46 features Ciaran Anscomb’s port of Dunjunz to
the Coco and Dragon this month:
https://youtu.be/5uwDCKKCZvw

4) Tom’s Toys on YouTube did a video of using the MiSTer with the Dragon 32
& Coco 1,2,3 cores and points out some bugs and issues he hit. This is all
with one game (Donkey King), where the player can only climb up a ladder
but not down. I do not have a MiSTer, but for those who are experienced
with it, do you see these same issues?
https://youtu.be/pHAeq8fsad0

5) David Mitchell (Davy’s Retro Corner on YouTube) released a video of a type
in game called Stunt Cycle, which originally appeared in the book “Sixty
Programs for the Dragon 32″, written by Robert Erskine, Humphrey Walwyan,
Paul Stanley and Michael Bews (this particular game by Paul Stanley):
https://youtu.be/_c1vVotWNbA
Source code:
https://github.com/daftspaniel/RetroCornerRedux/tree/main/Dragon/TypeIns/Stunt-Cycle
He also released Box Driver, one he wrote himself but based on the common
racing type game a lot of home computers did in BASIC using scrolling to
their advantage:
https://youtu.be/RNRhsUMKJ1c
Source code (just 7 lines!):
https://github.com/daftspaniel/RetroCornerRedux/tree/main/Dragon/Originals/BoxDriver

6) Fabrizio Caruso has released his 7th massively cross-platform game,
Shuriken, using his CROSS-LIB library. Coco 1/2 version is one of the ones
released (.cas format only at this time), which you can get from his github:
https://github.com/Fabrizio-Caruso/CROSS-LIB/releases/tag/shuriken
He has a video to show gameplay from one of the other platforms in the
8-Bit Programming & Engineering group on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/844901978962785/posts/6295799440539651/

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