The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 326, August 19, 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.
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) ChibiAkumis Has started a new 6309 assembly language tutorial (and
more parts are coming). In this episode he covers the extra registers,
and some of the new 16 bit math:
https://youtu.be/4PCKd4gJRlc

2) Coco Town released a video this week expanding on doing sorts in machine
language. He tackles 3 different sort algorithms: Bubble, Insertion and
QuickSort. He also shows how to access Extended BASIC’s TIMER:
https://youtu.be/8JL9dlRmxKg
Sourcecode for the sorts:
https://cocotownretro.wordpress.com/2023/08/14/bubble-sort-insertion-sort-quick-sort-assembly-code/
He also did an episode called “Unravelled Gems”, which shows some programming
tricks he found in the Spectral Associates BASIC Unravelled series. These are
ones that we use in NitrOS9 too – like putting in a useless CMPX immediate
opcode to skip the next two bytes, rather than a BRA which would take 1
more byte and still be the same speed:
https://youtu.be/n-e1GBr9gtg

3) TRS-80 Retro Programing posted another update to his Tales of Suburbia
game:
https://youtu.be/547aX66TkLs
He also took an old game I had barely started way back in 1986 (and then I
got distracted with my new Coco 3 so I never took it further) and is working
on making it into an actual game. I am not sure why he has such an aversion
to the high speed POKE, but it does run a fair bit faster with it on:
https://youtu.be/yEP_jDTkieM
And he did a follow up as well:
https://youtu.be/Fto963TV-M0?si=JhJQDYWHMB4vNnvs

4) Glen Hewlett put up a blog post about his 4 way scrolling ML subroutine
that one can use from BASIC – and has now added an 80 column Coco 3 version
as well.
Blog Post:
https://nowhereman999.wordpress.com/2023/08/15/introducing-advanced-text-screen-scrolling-solutions-for-coco-basic-programmers/
32×16 version on his Github:
https://github.com/nowhereman999/CoCo_Scroll
80×24 version on his Github:
https://github.com/nowhereman999/CoCo3_Scroll80

5) Bill Pierce announced that VCC 2.1.0.8 has now been released. This
includes bug fixes, RS-232 pak emulation, a pause function, execution trace
feature artifact color fixing and improved windows mouse cursor position
when show, all contributed by various authors:
https://github.com/VCCE/VCC/releases

6) Thomas Cherryholmes (of the cross-platform Fujinet project) is looking
for some help for maintainers for the Coco side of the project. I personally
don’t have time myself, but would anyone else in the community like to
help? Details as to what it involves are in his Facebook post:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160841095127641/

7) Jamie Cho posted on the Coco Facebook group an update to his BASIC to
BASIC09 converter program that he is working on, this time covering on sound
frequencies are translated from BASIC’s 256 tones to BASIC09’s 4096 tones:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160840514812641/

8) Allen Huffman did a blog post that is based on a behaviour that Robin
of 8-Bit Show and Tell found on the Commodore PET, Vic20 and Commodore 64
versions of BASIC (also a Microsoft BASIC). If one tries to use scientific
exponentiation with a number too long, it produces an Overflow error
(which is expected). What is not expected is that it will corrupt some
of the BASIC program itself. Since Coco BASIC is also made by Microsoft,
Allen decided to try this on the Coco. Spoiler alert – the Coco suffers
from the same problem. (NOTE: William Astle explains what is causing the
bug in the comments):
https://subethasoftware.com/2023/08/17/color-basic-overflow-bug-same-as-commodores/

9) Boisy Pitre announced on Facebook that he has ported CoreMark (an
industry standard benchmark program) to the Coco. It is built using the
CMOC C-like compiler:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160848877567641/
Github link:
https://github.com/boisy/coremark

10) Retro Relix did a video on YouTube going through using an Orch 90,
Speech Sound Pak and CocoSDC on his Coco, does some serial connections to
his PC, and then throws in some games as well:
https://youtu.be/cid1fQViI7M?si=JQ7FhzlG13ebXYY6

11) Pierre Sarrazin has released version 0.1.84 of CMOC. This fixes some
bugs and allows verbatim assembly language blocks in your sourcecode:
http://perso.b2b2c.ca/~sarrazip/dev/cmoc.html

MC-10

Dragon 32/64

1) A reminder: This year’s Dragon Meetup (the 6th one) is October 7 & 8 at
the Center for Computing History in Cambridge. This years theme is software,
including a lot of games and competing for high scores. Details here:
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/71156/dragon-meetup—-7th-8th-october-2023/

2) Wisteela (Paul Ryan) on YouTube put up a 2 part video about his Dragon 32:
part 1 is asking for help in fixing it, and part 2 shows that it is alive
(basically some loose connections seems to have been the culprit):
Part 1:
https://youtu.be/nj7FOBUeOjE?si=YWaZhRybsL92F_EB
Part 2:
https://youtu.be/vBm86GZ34y0?si=vsDBTIYtfae7XIMt

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

First up – an update from Nick on the 5,000th version of Neutroid:

1) The YouTube channel “Brown Robin Bird !!!” is planning a live stream
at 6:15 pm Eastern time, August 22 of playing Sock Master’s Donkey Kong
Remixed from VCC. He has over 6,000 subscribers so it will be interesting
to monitor the chat during the live stream:
https://www.youtube.com/live/9QDM-wEY20o?feature=share

2) Chronologically Gaming covered Aardvark’s Venturer on Monday’s show
(May 1982)
https://youtu.be/V2ee9uKixC8?t=3241
And in closing out May of 1982, he also covered Viking (both Vic20 &
Coco versions) and War Kings by Tom Mix:
https://youtu.be/y0nlzdBdw7g
For June (and I think this is early, but there were conflicting release
dates) is Canyon Climber:
https://youtu.be/vHFPs1eLVdE?si=M3UV6bmMwZjLCWzC&t=1229

3) Our very own Ken of Canadian Retro Things did another comparison video –
part of his “One Game, Two Computers” series – comparing the Coco and C64
versions of Shamus. Shamus is one of the few games that was sold directly
for the Coco by it’s creating company (Synapse Software) and then Tandy
later sold exclusively in their own stores (Zaxxon and Pooyan by Datasoft
are two others):
https://youtu.be/RLmIbAgQo0w

4) Paul Thayer posted a video update to his Shmup You Up project on Facebook,
which includes his showing various rapid fire parameter changes to show
their effect on the game engine:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160843951322641/

5) Christopher Lee has announced on Facebook that his Kickstarter for
funding the development of his Infocom engine based adventure game “The
Forgotten Pyramid” has started, which will be available on a variety of
machines including the Coco and the Dragon:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160843571357641/

6) Paulisthebest3uk on YouTube released a bunch more Dragon gameplay
videos this week, including Leggit, Bubble Buster, Moon Cresta, Dark Star,
Tanglewood, Chambers and Kamacarzy:
https://www.youtube.com/@paulisthebest3uk/videos

7) David Mitchell posted a Dragon 32 game he wrote from scratch based on a
game from rosettacode.org, called Flipping Bits. Basically, you can flip
(invert) a row or column of bits at a time, and the object is match the
pattern on the right side:
https://youtu.be/KMLwFkYOSlQ?si=9sW3ge5eK9m2Bu5K
Github source code:
https://github.com/daftspaniel/RetroCornerRedux/tree/main/Dragon/Originals/FlipBits

8) La fondateur did a quick gameplay video of Time Bandit on a real Coco 3,
although unfortunately with the artifact colors reversed:
https://youtu.be/61Wy4gja8-M?si=NnCRYli6GTq3PFge

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