The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 335, October 21, 2023
The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 335, October 21, 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 on YouTube has another video related to his
Tales of Suburbia project – This time with a new scene for the backyard:
https://youtu.be/MbtjSiy_eos?si=WHF9zaUbHwzIAdQ8
He also did a side exploration of the DRAW commands scaling and how
accurate/inaccurate it is:
https://youtu.be/Zb3BpjZHnzE?si=78hdIUWtkkFYb7iD
2) Coco Town returns to rewriting his old Moon Patrol style game – this
time delving into stack blasting for the very first time:
https://youtu.be/UzT6zypeC8Y?si=FVZZf8CwMGh70hh8
3) Ken of Canadian Retro Things takes another shot of getting his composite
video board on his 64K Coco 2. Let’s just say… Ken, did you record this
on Friday the 13th?
https://youtu.be/TFHnfcbktYQ?si=mb2vigfCmiTxHgBc
He also released a video about working on getting his 256K RAM upgrade
for a Coco 2 working:
https://youtu.be/S6jJJlj-mek?si=snyLAs6wGt7heKhN
4) Justin D. Morgan received the composite board from Alan of AC’s 8
Bit Zone and his Coco 2 that he has recently been working on (and has
been disappointing with an older design composite board he tried) and
installs it to see if it will improved the picture quality. It also adds
a Monochrome/Color switch. He even gave The Coco Nation Show a shoutout:
Coco 2 composite board update and test part of the stream starts at:
https://www.youtube.com/live/cMUIAJkrh8Q?si=8JSFCZDuS0s58pYP&t=760
5) VCC has had an update to 2.1.8.1 that you can download from the project’s
github. This is the first version to implement their new version numbering
system, and includes bug fixes. The readme explains the new versioning
system, but unfortunately it just says “Minor Bug Fixes” with no mention
of what was fixed.
https://github.com/VCCE/VCC/releases/tag/vcc2.1.8.1
6) There are far too many things to go into here about all the bug
reports/fixes for ugBASIC and it’s Coco 3 support, but if you are interested
in using this version of BASIC that you use on modern platforms to compile
for actual Coco 1,2,3’s (and many other systems), please join the Coco
Discord and read the #ugBASIC channel. There is a ton of stuff happening
in there every day. (Ask panelists to mention some of them, since I didn’t
have time to drill down)
The 1.15 post on Facebook (but a lot has happened since then). There is
brief video in the comments:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160966755622641/
7) Boisy Pitre posted a quick video showing the OS-9 Level 2 is now booting
on the F256 Junior platform, which runs equivalent as a 6.29MHz 6809,
and now supports an MMU and extended memory in OS9:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/334403350011917/posts/6710787139040141/
The F256 website:
https://c256foenix.com/product/f256-junior-mini-itx/?v=3e8d115eb4b3
8) MicroHobbyist did his first live video stream for his channel, with
a bunch of guests from the retro community, including sloopy, who then
managed to rope me in as well. By the end of the show, I think we managed
to convince the host into try a 6809 or 6309 in an upcoming project,
maybe even with OS9/NitrOS9 Level 1:
https://www.youtube.com/live/iF4eTUwie2w?si=QcbEre_niuHSMj0D
9) George Janssen (who did an assembly language series for us awhile back
and also ported the 2048 game to the Coco 3 within the last 2 months)
is starting his own YouTube 6809 assembly tutorial channel, and has his
first teaser video up this week (no audio, it’s all visual):
https://youtu.be/3jS3a-Fqvd0?si=fjmFHkEiftRnqBMz
10) RetroComputo did an almost half hour video on the history of TRS-80 and
Coco computers in Columbia, where the TRS-80 and the Coco was the second
most popular brand of home computers (CC and translate Spanish to English):
https://youtu.be/6kYY4pUGROs?si=_C7W-qg42bfGl6B5
11) Portugeuese Youtube channel Retrópolis on their episode 146 (part 2)
mentions that they plan on delving into the Coco 1/2 and Dragon in a future
episode – I will keep an eye out for it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1COOxzyMpg&t=2402s
12) Jeff of the Hey Birt! YouTube channel posted a 16+ minute walkthrough
of the displays at this years Tandy Assembly:
https://youtu.be/lgVsHN2DmKo?si=bChQcpfDIexb3t-4
MC-10
1) Jim Gerrie converted the January 5, 1978 TRS-80 Model 1 graphics demo
program “Snoopy Curses the Red Baron” (from May 1978 Kilobaud magazine
(and altered by D.A. Goldman in April of 1978) to the MC-10:
https://youtu.be/HcWJQSE95KA?si=ifQUfGmXPuiyn86v
2) Robert Sieg posted some photos of the output on his TP-10 thermal
printer from his Funny Reader program. He added an option that he calls
“heavy printing” which basically means printing each line twice (burning
in the text twice in the same spot) which greatly increases the readability
and quality of the print:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/6608880899238676/
Dragon 32/64
1) Julian Brown has an update on the poll he posted a couple of weeks ago
about what sound chip to install on his Dragon motherboard (which is now
going beyond the original spec). He has a couple of options that he is
thinking about:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3571198379806472/
He also showed pics of Rev 3 boards, and samples of both the PAL and NTSC
daughterboards:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3570020029924307/
He also showed a concept video board – this would go directly to HDMI
output and incorporates the PAL video board into it as well:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3569462773313366/
Game On news (all Coco related platforms):
1) The Wargaming Scribe has covered (I believe) his first war game that
originated on the Dragon – Empire from SHARDS Software:
https://zeitgame.net/archives/11211
2) Chronologically Gaming finished July 1982 and started into August,
both covering some Coco games:
July 1982 – Warrior and Yahtzee:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxgFkiJyBnk&t=1010s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxgFkiJyBnk&t=1829s
August 1982 – Color Zap:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FJI-hP712I&t=2521s
Teaser – Monday’s live show will introduce the Dragon 32
3) Tim & AJ of My Drunk Sibling put out episode 105 of Sibling Rivalry,
a Halloween themed one featuring… Poltergeist on the Coco:
https://youtu.be/vl2dA5ioaIU?si=qtwshKcurax3amM8
4) ExperTek did another of his Spanish language / amber monitor gameplay
videos on a real Coco – this time covering Quix by Tom Mix Software:
https://youtu.be/zyRSlmnq6mY?si=Bbsa0BD1BgLmhJPU
5) Tealgamemaster on YouTube posted a video about the first 100 games from
Disney (expand the description to see the list) – and the Coco is prominent
in this list. Although some of the later ones he doesn’t mention the Coco
ports of:
https://youtu.be/cdKXQYZulNo?si=9w4tAlv2P9V4SgI0
6) Nostalgiavault on YouTube covered a couple of educational games on the
Coco 2 this past week as well: Facemaker and Kids on Keys:
https://youtu.be/NlUJF8QKCgU?si=fvZ8M3dNY31pKfR5
https://youtu.be/6SX-sqCv7_0?si=cT51JmAPgToY5jRo
7) RetroTrailer-2 on YouTube did a video on Steve Bjork’s early Coco 3
game, Warp Fighter 3-D (the one we had demoing a bit at both CocoFest and
BoatFest earlier this year with 3-D glasses):
https://youtu.be/G75LZnLJzyM?si=OhurMEcJkb6CvPR7
8) RetroLoser on YouTube posted a video of Frogger on the MC-10 with 4K RAM
(written by J. Krah):
https://youtu.be/f1mFOAk-K18?si=B6rzHl0vF54saGQk
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