The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 336, October 28, 2023

Collected by L. Curtis Boyle

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.

Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people:

The First Bay Area Tandy Assembly Meetup is on November 4 from 2-5 pm at
San Francisco State University, and the organizer Arno has an update:
“We are getting ready for the first Tandy Assembly Meetup here in the Bay
Area. Over twenty TRS-80 enthusiasts have signed up and we are looking
forward to the get together in two weeks from now. We will have a round of
lightning talks where people can talk about their favorite machine. Some
will bring their vintage hardware. I will keep everyone posted on this
channel. Exciting!”
Multiple luminaries past and present from the TRS-80 scene will be in
attendance (See poster)

VCF SoCal: Feb 17-18, 2024 in Orange, California
Hotel Fera – Events Center
100 The City Drive, Orange, CA 92868
https://vcfsocal.com/index.html

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

1) TRS-80 Retro Programing Posted a quick video showing his “prism”
graphic from his previous video, but adding the “A” Angle command to the
draw statements, and shows the 4 possible 90 degree rotations:
https://youtu.be/81Fxc9DgK_w?si=ys2te3qvH6HrTyl_
He also did an update on the backyard scene for Tales of Suburbia:
https://youtu.be/mKeqedJquzg?si=RWK7Jt_Uekw-sOFo
And also involving Tales of Suburbia – “How to use ‘Variable Graphics'”
(in this case, changing the graphical status of a door):
https://youtu.be/mdewszwDfGQ?si=VUcjm018MFtnlC-X

2) Chad Doebelin on YouTube uploaded a video of his full recap and 6309
upgrade of a Coco 3:
https://youtu.be/-NAUJMQ8uDg?si=DZan1_LJo6wqlc1F

3) Ron Klein has officially released the 64 bit version of the Coco-Pi
project, which is compatible with the Raspberry Pi’s 3,4 and 400. Along
with this, MAME has been updated to 0.260, trs80gp (which now includes
MC-10 & Coco 1/2 support), and these are all 64 bit as well. Pi5 has not
been tested yet but some people have them on order and testing will begin
then. The Build Menu has also been updated (see Ron’s update post for
details), ugBasic, Cross-Lib & DynoSprite libraries are also included,
and the 64 bit Java version of Drivewire is now also included (along with
the default pyDriverwire)
https://coco-pi.com/coco-pi-project-update-2023-10-27/

4) Geek with Social Skills did a video showing his upgrading his Coco 3
from 512k to 2048K using the Cloud9 Triad+:
https://youtu.be/L6poiGLmf4A?si=oTGKQ8gjovYXR7VL

5) Coco Town returns with further adventures in stack blasting, going
for the maximum speed effect with both using DP and CC as data registers,
and pre-flipping groups of bytes so that it can use just Pulls and Pushes
(most games use the LEAS method which is a little slower but easier to
keep track of). And he teased the next episode – self modifying code:
https://youtu.be/saABRhSNnlc?si=h8O1GAxljD-4QNTv

6) George Janssen’s new YouTube channel has it’s first full length assembly
language tutorial video up. An introduction to the channel and setting up
the environment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w59L7fNqks

7) The original authors of the newsletter “TRS-80 Computing” (renamed Color
Computing for the last 2 official issues) and published from June 1987 until
October of 1991), Joe Ahern and David McNally have showed up recently in
the Coco community again, and have uploaded all issues of their magazine –
including a previously unreleased, unfinished version of what was to be
the final issue in February of 1992. They started this newsletter when
they were only in grade 8 (!), and it was originally only sold to friends
and relatives and a few teachers at their middle school. It ended as they
were getting close to finishing high school. Some issues are on the Color
Computer Archive already, and now the remainder will be uploaded:
(I have all of them downloaded to take a look at it in a desktop folder).

8) Fabian Rodriguez in the Coco group on Facebook pointed out a hardware
project from the All Things Tandy Radio Shack Facebook group – a Coco USB
Serial cartridge. This lets you use RS-232 pak based programs but with
USB to a host PC.
Fabian’s original post:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160999725032641/
Github project post:
https://github.com/barberd/cocousbserial

9) The MiSTer has updates to their Coco 3 development this week:

cycle accurate up to 9.54 MHz (using Greg Miller 6809 core)
multiple changes to SDC/FDC, multipak,etc.
OS9 llcocosdc driver updated
and other changes:
https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/CoCo3_MiSTer

MC-10

Dragon 32/64

1) DragonPlus Electronics has a Halloween sale on until just before midnight
on October 31st. If one purchases any regularly priced products and spends
a minimum of £20.00, you get 5% off your order:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160996344117641/

2) Julian Brown posted a photo os his rev 2 Dragon motherboard
replacement. He mentions (in the main post and the comments) some of the
improvements going beyond the original Dragon Data spec (he also mentions
that a rev 3 board is one it’s way too…) :

# of components largely reduced
PIA2 allows for 4 sets of addresses instead of just 1
256K of banked RAM
dedicated video daughterboards with improved picture quality (NTSC and PAL)
internal cartridge port/connector
VCC pickup point for alternative keyboard (or anything else)
combined ROM image with option for image selection if large ROM is used
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3576310139295296/
He also showed a picture of his NTSC daughterboard taking shape:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3575188326074144/

3) Robcfg in the World of Dragon forums showed a screenshot and a few
details of a French version of SuperDOS E6 (I assume that means “Edition
6″) that was translated to French for the French market – but also adds a
“-1”. The boot screen shows that version being released in 1987. As Rob
mentions in the post: “The lower part of the 16K EPROM is almost identical
to regular SuperDOS E6 but for a couple of translated string and two bytes,
and then there’s the upper part which is filled up to almost 12KB.” It
comes with extra utilities built in – including a Debugger, Hex,Decimal
and BCD conversions, visual view of RAM and other things.
https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11136

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

1) Jim Gerrie ported Gold Mine from Creative Computing February 1979
(originally by Royce A. Jones with RSTS BASIC for the PDP-11 series in 1976)
to the MC-10:
https://youtu.be/S3SyZD_m7Sw?si=_-5eE-pr3vu7mdyb
He also ported Dam Busters by R. Larham that originally appeared in Sinclair
Programs Nov/Dec 1982. This one uses the Semigraphics-6 mode, with 64×48
(which has a max of 4 colors at once):
https://youtu.be/EBbRn-nxkJY?si=d4g9vf4PUD25a_pe

2) Fabrizio Caruso has released both a new game (Stinger) and an update
to his Cross-Lib framework (for writing code once and producing binaries
for 200 different systems). He has now added Coco 3 graphics support (with
help from Simon Jonassen), and the video he posted on the Coco Facebook
group is the Coco 3 version of Stinger in action:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160988190662641/

3) The latest Coco Show episode has been released, with Aaron and new
co-host Brent covering the Coco / Computerware port of Middle Kingdom,
originally published for the Dragon (with some changes) a year earlier:
https://youtu.be/qZ3Pq4dp19o?si=6srEPAN9j4p__Nsp

4) Chronologically Gaming this week is covering August 1982 – which includes
the launch of the Dragon 32 & one of the launch titles – Ghost Attack
(slightly redone version of Computerware’s Pac-Tac):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6324IW0EDE&t=2541s

5) James Diffendaffer posted a video showing his progress on Chess for
the MC-10, cross compiling a C program:
https://youtu.be/0dxZIgOl9kE?si=bk-VYDW8_i42scZc

6) Richard Kelly has uploaded Beta 4 of his Vampire’s Castle 40 column
text adventure game for the Coco 3 to the Coco group on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160997130832641/

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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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