The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 342, December 9, 2023

Collected by L. Curtis Boyle

Keeping this handy from now on as it keeps coming up and I never
remember. lol
The Coco Nation Show website:
https://thecoconation.com/
Coco Discord:
https://discord.gg/vkR7QKuc

Special Guests today:

Mike Snyder, who authored many games/programs for all 3 Coco’s for T&D
magnazine and SPORTSware (Gnome, Firespire/Gnome Quest II):
https://www.cocoquest.com/

Interviews schedule:

January 6 we have a double interview with Doug Masten
& Glen Dahlgren, covering the Coco 3 game The Contras.
http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/contras.html
January 20 Glen Dahlgren comes back – he has the final book in his Chaos
series coming out, and possibly some further Coco stuff as well.
https://mysteriumstoryworks.substack.com/p/want-a-free-copy-of-the-realm-of?r=2hpgl3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people:

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

Interim Computer Festival: March 23-24.
This is a pre-announcement for a retro computer show in the Pacific
Northwest Area. Details (specifically where, etc.) will be coming later,
and registration will open in January.
(No website yet)

CocoFest: May 4-5, 2024 in Carol Stream, Illinois (near Chicago)
Holiday Inn & Suites
https://www.glensideccc.com/cocofest/

BoatFest 3: June 14-16, 2024
Social Event Space
Hurricane, WV
https://www.ticketsource.us/boatfest2024/boatfest-retro-computer-expo-2024/e-raedpb

VCF SouthWest: June 14-16, 2024 (same weekend as BoatFest, and usually
has a lot of Tandy people hanging out since that is Tandy’s hometown).
Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center at University of Texas – Dallas
Dallas, Texas
https://www.vcfsw.org/

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

1) Bob Emery (La Coco Strangiato on YouTube) did a livestream video showing
his Turbo-X LED board now fully working, showing it with regular (.895 MHz),
double speed (1.78 MHz) and GIME-X turbo (2.86 MHz):
https://www.youtube.com/live/jbzrnT2B2QU?si=hJFXfKl_ogmkdQI5

2) David Wiens has made the MSDOS disk file manager (MSF) and it’s manual
available for download on his website. Bill Nobel and I used this at work
to read double density MSDOS/PCDOS disks (both 360K and 720K). It requires
the replacement SDisk3 disk driver (also available on his site), which is
a much enhanced driver than the stock OS9 or NitrOS9 ones. Since the file
manager is native, it also reads and writes to MSDOS disks much faster than
utilities like PCDOS, and even includes special commands that handle MSDOS
or both MSDOS and OS9 disks at once. The only caveat is that it takes a
lot of System RAM (you still need RBF to handle the OS9 side of things,
although the old wd1773 driver can be removed:
https://www.sardis-technologies.com/csg/csg-msf.htm

3) The Coco Crew has posted an audio interview that Boisy did with Kathy
Paur (formerly of Tandy subsidiary A&A Electronics, who were in charge of
parts for Tandy computers and other products):
https://youtu.be/byuOv81pkvE?si=eVWTO9yQ_uy8E8v4

4) George Janssen has upload Lesson 3 for his new Beginners 6809 assembly
course to his YouTube channel, this time covering the MMU in the Coco

Part 1 covers how it works:
https://youtu.be/LoCF6j6OK-0?si=mlObya6XDZpPkoEt
And part 2 covers some actual code using them:
https://youtu.be/XE_mq9Pb8vk?si=WWC-IRCx_fYrsHlo

5) The next live Trash Talk show (on YouTube) will be December 16 at 7 pm
Eastern. This covers all TRS-80’s, usually concentrating on the Z80 models,
but it involves the Coco at times, too:
https://www.youtube.com/@TRS80TrashTalk

6) Henry of the new YouTube channel “The Break Key” has another cable
build video this week – this time for Drivewire. He also shows installing
and using pyDrivewire:
https://youtu.be/9BhHCVumkGc?si=go1-tYj-aIyOcaJE

7) I was a fish out of water on the Retro Repair Roundup live this past week:
https://www.youtube.com/live/6LCo51U_9EQ?si=JW9fQnM4LjL_w1Qm

8) A new Flex Facebook page was created late this past week, for those
interested on probably the 3rd most popular OS for the Coco 1/2 (after
DECB and OS-9 Level I, and it was the second most popular until OS9 was
released alongside the Coco 2):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/flexoperatingsystem

9) Thomas Cherryholmes posted an update to his porting Fujinet to the Coco –
the cassette based bootstrap is now working:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161064018992641/
And booting Canyon Climber from Oracle Cloud after loading HDBDOS from
cassette:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161065946677641/

10) Simon Jonassen posted an update video to his online Coco 1/2 graphics
editor:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161063257282641/
And this morning a screenshot showing color selection using both mouse
buttons:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161065638322641/

11) Joel Ewy has gotten his MM/1 SCSI drive backed up onto to solid state
with the BlueSCSI device (which works on multiple older machines), so his
MM/1 is back in action. He posted two short videos about the transfer:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/3194643584094250/posts/4340014536223810/

MC-10

Dragon 32/64

1) Robcfg (who recently joined our Discord – Welcome Rob!) posted a new
tool for accessing DragonDOS images. Not only does this let you look at
the what files are on a VDK files, but also lets you view BASIC listings,
saved picture files, etc. all from within this GUI based programs. Details
and screenshots on the World of Dragon forums (I missed this before):
https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11145

2) Richard Harding himself posted the 3rd video about the history of Dragon
Data from Brian Moore’s personal recordings (Brian worked at Dragon Data
at the end). This is from when they were in receivership:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3601475996778710/

3) Julian Brown posted some updates to his Revision 3 Alpha 2 Dragon
32 boards. This once incorporates the new SAM that Ciaran has designed
(which can include 256K RAM support). Julians is also planning to try and
support full 1.8 MHz with video (like the SAM Doubler does on a Coco 1/2):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3600035413589435/

4) Retronaut on YouTube is making a series about going through his tech
history. Last night’s episode (Chapter 4) is about the Dragon 32, and it
sounds like the next episode will be as well:
https://youtu.be/5EL-T6iHMts?si=7sMSxGwbzjHUZM9w

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

1) The Coco Show’s final episode for this year will be recorded live on
Twitch and YouTube on Sunday, December 10 at 10 AM EST. You can watch it
live here:
Twitch:
https://www.twitch.tv/amigosretrogaming
YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@AmigosRetroGaming/streams

I should note that on Twitch you get to watch and interact with Aaron and
Brent during the pre and post show; on YouTube live it’s just the regular
show (I think).

2) Retro365 continued playing the PC ports of the Mark Data Products
graphic adventure games, adding in Sea Search, Shenanigans, Trekboer and
The Vortex Factor.
https://www.youtube.com/@Retro365/videos

3) Chris Presley announced on the Coco Facebook group that his Star Trek
Trivia game is now available on the Color Computer Archive (both to download
and play, or play through online XRoar). This is for all 3 Coco’s:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161063951117641/
Direct link to DSK image:
https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Disks/Games/Star%20Trek%20Trivia%20(Chris%20Presley).zip

4) Tim and AJ on Sibling Rivalry played a very early type in game for the
Coco (Laser Star, originally published in Rainbow by Jarb Software). It had
bugs still (which I speculated when I first uploaded it – in fact I think I
had fixed a few myself, but obviously not all of them). So this is actually
2 parts combined – Tim went through the code before the second segment
comparing it to the magazine, and then made a few of his own improvements:
https://youtu.be/pHyXLjAl5XQ?si=30BR3wZQm_V9U43_

5) Jim Gerrie snuck in an MC-10 game last night – Checkers originally by John
Krutch in 1981 from the book “Experiments in AI For Small Computers”. It’s
a bit limited – it can’t do multiple jumps or king itself on it’s own. I
am not sure, but I think it runs in 4K RAM?:
https://youtu.be/Xtyygk6qM1Y?si=faCoYEcrijRevUBT

=======================================
Get connected with more of the CoCo, Dragon and MC-10 community here:
https://thecoconation.com/community/

Please trim any replies to just the specific item replied to.