The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 324, August 5, 2023

Collected by L. Curtis Boyle and Mark Overholser

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.

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

1) TANDYCOM on YouTube released a video showing him running a 1983 BBS
program on the Javascript Mocha online Coco 2 emulator:
https://youtu.be/4hs7SeBh8S0

Javascript Mocha online Coco 2
https://www.haplessgenius.com/mocha/

2) TRS-80 Retro Programing on YouTube released a quick video showing a
gem with some color animation for the Coco 1/2:
https://youtu.be/hwD6SaLGRkk
He also did a deep dive in trying to figure out how the “Fast” GET/PUT
buffer works and how to use it, and gets most of
it by the end of the video, but still needs to learn a bit more:
https://youtu.be/zrGWzlaKxb4

3) Coco Town does yet another follow up on using the T1-VDG – this time
patching the print vector so that 1) you can keep the new modes staying
active in BASIC, and 2) without screwing up the print vector (like the
quick POKE 359,57 hack does… PRINTing to files on disk, etc. won’t work
with that POKE enabled). He also goes through and explains/demonstrates
how the RAM vectors change, and why:
https://youtu.be/ZZeA1W5NfmU

4) YARC (Yet Another Retro Channel) on YouTube released a video titled:
“Can we use the TZXDuino with a Tandy Color Computer?” (I think this is
Todd Horch’s channel?):
https://youtu.be/3beZ7EYS-2E

5) “Oh Brother!” on YouTube released a video that they did on Twitch using
a real Coco 2 with cassette to try some small physics simulations:
https://youtu.be/cMTfWBIEK0M

6) Bill Sexton posted a photo of his Coco 3 Analog RGB output to his Atari
ST RGB monitor, requiring just a cable change. In the comments he posts
the diagram showing how to do it:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160815422887641/

7) The Coco Crew has released an interview done with Colin J. Stearman
in 2023. Colin was the author of the Rainbow series “Cooking with Coco”,
a technical series on doing upgrades to Disk BASIC (I have the YouTube
link here, since that is where I happened to listen to it). The interview
is done by Boisy Pitre:
https://youtu.be/wxlH5HDaCjc

MC-10

Dragon 32/64

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

1) TRS-80 Retro Programing has a longer walkthrough of his kitchen scene
in his Tales of Suburbia Extended BASIC game:
https://youtu.be/s71FHO9Ro_k

2) Inufuto has their next game out, called Hopman (started coming out for
the various platforms on July 19, 2023). The player hops around between
platforms collecting flags, but unlike some previous Inufuto games along
the same line, this is a sidscrolling platformer. Coco 1/2 version requires
32K RAM, Coco 3 requires 128K, and the MC-10 version requires 20K. All 3
have videos as of July 29 and 30th.
http://inufuto.web.fc2.com/8bit/hopman/

3) XPerTek has released another spanish Coco game play video (on an amber
monitor) – this time for Moon Shuttle:
https://youtu.be/PTSd51NZChc

4) Our very own Ken of Canadian Retro Things released a gameplay comparison
of Protectors 2 – on the Coco 1/2 and the C64:
https://youtu.be/6KYY0y-Z-fQ

5) Jim Gerrie did some porting to the Coco for a change; Fox and Geese
originally from Marshall Cavendish’s INPUT magazine in 1984. As Jim says,
it demonstrates some simple AI techniques and uses high res graphics”. The
play board looks a lot like checkers or chess, but the gameplay is quite
different. I think it is based on the traditional game of the same name,
where the geese try to trap the fox so it can’t move, and the fox tries
to eliminate all of the geese before that can happen:
Video:
https://youtu.be/WkU1Ar2I3Ag
Entry for this game on Jim’s “Type-in Mania:” series:
http://faculty.cbu.ca/jgerrie/Home/foxgeese.html

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