The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 307, April 1, 2023

Collected by L. Curtis Boyle

Jeff Wires (Chronologically Gaming) is on for a full interview today!

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

1) First a couple of corrections from last week:
a) About the mini 6809/6309 boards with serial ports and a PIA – That
was Torsten Cito who posted that in Facebook. Thanks for the correction,
Torsten. He also mentioned that the docs for it mention that serial
communications “is not working flawlessly if you paste complete programs
into the terminal program – (Torsten is) curious why’s that (might be the
interpreter being to slow?)
b) Mike Miller let me know that the post about the history of the Dream
Dragon assembler was in fact written by the author Mike Kerry; Mike Miller
actually just cross posted it. Apologies to both!

2) James Jones went through the Benchmark from Interface Age magazine that
we covered a few weeks ago. He does the initial speed tests of Microsoft
Coco 3 BASIC and then BASIC09 (as I had done), but then goes through the
benchmark itself reporting bugs and multiple ways to optimize it:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u4iZYkWHVluzqbpyV-CPJxZLFkchP95xDryEYVpESD8/mobilebasic?mibextid=Zxz2cZ

3) TRS-80 Retro Programing put up a video showing a bit more graphics and
working out how the graphics are going to work (on the fly) for his Coco
Ultimate Ultima style game in BASIC:
https://youtu.be/MI4BKfhgZ6o
He also released a video showing progress on Tales of Suburbia, with the
PCOPY routines worked in, tape 3 scenarios, etc.:
https://youtu.be/Nji1TZauFXw

4) Our very own Ken put up a celebration video with some behind the scenes
look at his various retro areas, for his “Canadian Retro Things” YouTube
channel breaking the 1K subscriber mark!
https://youtu.be/0GeeLnd8EHQ

5) Episode 94 of the Coco Crew was released yesterday. A few features are
a review of Space Marauder (by Aussie Craig Stewart) and a discussion on
“sharing time at CocoFest” – basically about being thoughtful of exhibitors
time at the show with questions that may take a long time to answer or
problems that will take a long time to solve (in a weekend with the entire
Fest going on). I agree in principal with this; and as they mention, you
can always followup up later via email, Discord, etc. after the show when
there is more time to go around:
cococrew.org

6) La Coco Strangiato on YouTube (Coconut Bob in our Discord) will be
attending his first ever CocoFest in 3 weeks. So he put up a quick video
of something that he will be showing at the Fest – color LED’s installed
into a Coco 2 or 3, with no cutting or drilling required:
https://youtu.be/GI2ga2UMX4chttps://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640?sorting_setting=CHRONOLOGICAL#

7) Luis Bulek on YouTube put up his first Coco related video – and it
is doing beginner’s assembly language, in this case showing all 256
possible characters that can be displayed on Coco 1/2 (or 3 in the 32
column mode). Since he has/had a CP-400, it is in Portuguese, so turn on
closed captioning and auto-translate:
https://youtu.be/9YHKCUP2LB4

8) Fred Rique posted in the Coco group on Facebook that he has done a
rewrite/update of BASIC DIGNIFIED, which is a tool to help write BASIC
programs in modern programming editors like Visual Studio and Sublime Text:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160564308307641/
His github for the project:
https://github.com/farique1/basic-dignified
And a quick video showing it in action:
https://youtu.be/aQfmmiJ9mzo

9) John Whitworth of Dragonplus Electronics posted some updates (and
screenshots) showing is mini Dragon RGB board (which, because of it’s small
physical size should fit in Coco’s as well). See comments for pictures of
the board itself:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160564959007641/

10) Robert Moore put up a cool picture of his new shelving unit showing
his “real” valuables on it (from bottom to top: Coco 1, Coco 2, Coco 3,
Coco 3.14) :
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160561670647641/

11) Ciaran Anscomb posted a blog post about his experimental branch for XRoar
to do better composite video processing. This gets heavy into the details:
https://www.6809.org.uk/xroar/cvbs.shtml

12) Barry Nelson has posted a side branch version of MAME 0.252 that he
has done, that has a couple of changes:
a) Use a floppy controller in ANY multi-pak slot.
b) Allow a floppy controller to use a custom RGBDOS ROM. Currently just
the Windows binary is up.
https://github.com/abcbarryn/mame/releases/tag/mame0252bn

13) Ron Klein posted about a couple of updates that you can get on your
CocoPi.
a) MAME 0.253 update available
b) XRoar 1.3.2001-WIP available (this is the experimental version for setting
up many video settings, as well starting support for middle button paste,
new tape control controls for Windows, etc.)
https://coco-pi.com/news-updates/

14) Henry Reitveld did a “Crossing the streams (retro computers) video –
He used his Tandy 502 disk drive (a 360 double sided drive) to load and
run CP/M 3.0 on the Nabu – which he used by logging into it from his Coco 3:
https://youtu.be/sUOHNYg_N-s

15) JaysVintageJunk released a video on YouTube showing how he modified
his Coco 2 (UK PAL version) to composite video output without drilling
any holes in the case to mount RCA connectors:
https://youtu.be/Hci1cIkAu24

16) YaggieBoat on YouTube released a video of him test driving his Coco 2
that he had picked up. Sound doesn’t seem to be working on it unfortunately,
but he does test some games that he got with the system:
https://youtu.be/f4UikyC_X6U

MC-10

1) Robert Sieg posted a few large scale maps for the game “Pandemic”
that he started working on in 2019. He also mentioned that his daughter
Rhiannon helped make them:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/5940480916078681/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/5941461579313948/

Dragon 32/64

1) (RGB board is both Coco and Dragon and mentioned above)

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

1) Our guest from today covered some more 1981 Coco games this past week
on Chronologically gaming:
https://youtu.be/p6rUPLVo2bM
Skiing (with proper colors): 1:48
Slashball (an early Aardvark arcade game) 22:57

2) Catching up with CRPG Addict (whom I haven’t checked into for a few
months for Coco games):
He played the C64 version of Quest (from 1983), which was based on the
original TRS-80 and Coco versions from 1981, and the gameplay is pretty
well identical:
http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2023/03/game-489-quest-1981.html

3) Jim Gerrie has ported Cribbage from Creative Computing (originally by
Sheppard Yarrow in 1979), but he is requesting testers as he is not that
familiar with the card game:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/5929144787212294/
Online emulator to try it (select CRIBBAGE cassette on lower right, then
type RUN):
http://faculty.cbu.ca/jgerrie/MC10/JG_MC_AI_Progs.html
He also has a blog post about it just yesterday, and thinks he may have
the bugs fixed:
https://jimgerrie.blogspot.com/2023/03/cribbage-in-microsoft-basic-by-sheppard.html
And now a video:
https://youtu.be/yaD8oVu_Juc

4) “The only way is OLED display” on YouTube did a 2+ minute video called
“Dragon 32 one game a letter” (showing tape cover artwork). (mute as he
had his TV on in the background). I don’t know if this is their favorites
for each letter, or just what they had on hand. They also cut off at W:
https://youtu.be/gJlNuAUI5E0

5) A Gaming Channel by LR on YouTube has been doing a bunch of retro games
this past week, including multiple Dragon 32/64 ones. This past week he
played Boris the Bold, Breakout, Caverns of Chaos, Copta Snatch, Chambers,
and plenty of others (and these are longer play – 20-30 minutes/video):
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNrXEtRb7LhpnEWcnhYNxa8WNlO0QK2T9

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