The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 327, August 26, 2023

Collected by L. Curtis Boyle

• 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.
• 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.

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

1) Shuford14 (Eddie Malphrus) on the TRS-80 Discord met up with Jerry
Heep (one of the engineers at Tandy from the 1970’s onwards) and got some
documentation related to VERY early Coco related things, and is scanning
and uploading them to the Internet Archive. The archive copies are ZIP’s
so I will show them locally here; you can grab your own copies by using
the links in the news show notes on our Discord:
Block diagram for Videotex II (which was never released) – using a 6805 CPU:
https://archive.org/details/videotex-ii-block-diagram
Photos submitted to the FCC as part of the certification for Videotex:
https://archive.org/details/trs-80-26-5000-videotex
Videotex Service Manual:
https://archive.org/details/trs-80-videotex-service-manual-26-5000_20230822

2) CocoTown did a video that shows (through visualizations) how Quick
Sort works:
https://youtu.be/MmpiUm_IGEQ?si=ML_HOvj5eE_x_hMr
He then did a follow up video showing how the Quick Sort he wrote in
assembly works:
https://youtu.be/EW1-zfIbEXE?si=e0sSL60DrSx88bis
And then he did was he called a “dumb one” – getting each sort… to
sort itself:
https://youtu.be/P_AMR-7ZIBs?si=YeNm0CndAuj3axcT

3) TRS-80 Retro Programing did another update to his picking up of the
Kung Fu game I started way back in 1986:
https://youtu.be/L3tDX39G4uI?si=nzfbZvvcZSu2qrhL

4) Ars Technica posted an article about a retro computer collector & use
named Brian Green (originally published March 11 of this year, but they
posted a link to it on Facebook this week). Looking through the photos,
he has several Coco’s, including a Coco 3 with an Zippsterzone keyboard,
MegaMiniMPI, Coco SDC, Orch-90, floppy drives with controller, RS-232 Pak,
and more:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/apple-atari-and-commodore-oh-my-explore-a-deluxe-home-vintage-computer-den/

5) Fred Provoncha has put up Control Panel for NitrOS9/EOU version 3.1b on
Facebook (and it should on the archive soon). Please feel free to test it
and report and bugs. We will be including this on the next version of EOU
(1.0.1), but that won’t be for a bit until work dies down for me):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1929079184021683/posts/3463992663863653/

6) ChibiAkumuas in YouTube has released part 2 of his 6309 programming
series on YouTube. This time he talks about 6309 extensions of shifts,
compares and logical operations:
https://youtu.be/9mlrxDdU2HY?si=U8cC_WGN_yxXtOSy
I should mention – he has text summaries of the lessons, and that is ahead
of the video releases (part 3 is already there):
https://www.chibiakumas.com/6809/6309.php

7) Eric Canales announced another update to his 6Dev09 assembler; build
18 is now available to people who have purchased it at:
https://www.playpi.net/software-portal/
Updates are:
Small bugfixes
Fixed some activation issues
Added splash screen
Added MAME 0.257 support
Added new machines, carts, and roms in line with MAME 0.257.
Added rs232 support
Fixed window sizing on start
Install fonts when using installer

8) The Vintage Geek museum (that Ken and I visited this past spring) did
a video on the Robie robot that Radio Shack sold, that had the capability
of getting tapes made on a Coco to program it somewhat. They don’t have
the tape deck working properly to do that in the video, but the Coco and
a Coco game make appearances:
https://youtu.be/17huNzvFYys?si=ednUFNIMPsfPWvyJ

9) Spanish YouTube channel RetroComputo did an episode about using the
Multi-Pak interface:
https://youtu.be/PYZhKQTPPjM?si=PIx7eARkBsD74RbN

MC-10

1) Johan Koelman posted some early screenshots of his ZX Spectrum based
MC-10 emulator, and the VDG character set he is using (set up to be 8×8
unlike the VDG’s 8×12 since that works better for the Spectrum):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/6408133815980053/

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) Julian Brown showed his new Dragon keyboard PCB’s – now two different
boards rather than using 2 identical boards twice:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3531902170402760/
He has another update to his replacement keyboard circuit boards for Dragon
keyboards (like Rick Ulland’s KeyFix for the Coco), with pictures. He is
really close to having it ready for the public:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3533739470219030/

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

1) The Coco Show episode 47 is up on YouTube – covering a game originally
on the Dragon, Lucifer’s Kingdom. This is also Boat’s last regular schedule
show, as “Real Life (TM)” has cut his spare time down. Next month Aaron
will be co-hosting with his brother, “The Brent”… which should work well
since they both used their family’s Coco 2 when they were young:
https://youtu.be/z36GS3pSLbk?si=_AK1_5kwSdAi0aWc

2) Last week we mentioned some gameplay videos from paulisthebest3uk
on YouTube, including Monkey Kong “+ bonus game” (that had just out the
morning of the show). I decide to check the video itself out this past week
(since I didn’t have time to watch it before the show) and I am glad I did

• the bonus game is one I have never seen before, called “Revenge of Pac
  Man” by Tom F.A. Fiers in 1983 – from Belgium! It looks fairly decent and
  features either joystick or keyboard controls. From what I saw, it looks
  to be for cassette only, and crashes. He does Galactic Raiders after that.
  https://youtu.be/Pg8Saw-NDFE?si=WJAY0ByTkdHwKPwm&t=254
  And he did other games during the week as well:
  https://www.youtube.com/@paulisthebest3uk/videos

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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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