The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 358, April 6, 2024

Collected by L. Curtis Boyle

Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people:

The Indy Classic Computer & Gaming Expo is April 13-14 in Indianapolis.
Crowne Plaza
Randy Kindig of the Floppy Days podcast helps with this one – and he was
our guest not too far back.
https://indyclassic.org/

VCF-East: InfoAge Science and History Museums in Wall, New Jersey
April 12-14
https://vcfed.org/events/vintage-computer-festival-east/

CocoFest: May 4-5, 2024 in Carol Stream, Illinois (near Chicago)
Holiday Inn & Suites
https://www.glensideccc.com/cocofest/
Table bookings (the main hall is completely taken up now, and 5 of the
extra overflow tables have now been sold):
https://www.tandylist.com/

The Festival of Portable Computing: May 18-19, 2024
Centre for Computing History, Cambridge, England
This show is dedicated to portable computers. With Frank Swygert, Taylor
& Amy, and now portacoco.com, we actually have portable Coco’s and
MC-10’s… we should qualify for this show, right? 🙂
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/72231/The-Festival-of-Portable-Computing-18th-19th-May-2024/

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)
Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center at University of Texas – Dallas
Dallas, Texas
https://www.vcfsw.org/
UPDATES:
Also this year they are doing “Shows within the Show”, and one of those
is a Tandy Assembly meetup, which includes a separate hall for just Tandy
machines. The main hall is already sold out for tables, and as of March 6,
only 2 of 21 tables in the Tandy hall were still available:
(scroll down on the main page)
Jeff Wires (the host of Chronologically Gaming) and Boisy Pitre are both
speakers this year.
Speakers list:
https://www.vcfsw.org/speakers

VCF-West looks to be happening August 2-3 (Fri-Sat) at the Computer History
Museum in Mountain View, California. This year they are a full partner with
the museum, so that admission for both the museum and VCF can be done with
one purchase, and the are taking people booking to be speakers/presenters
now as well.
CHM (Computer History Museum)
1401 N. Shoreline Blvd.
Mountain View, CA
https://vcfed.org/2024/03/14/vcf-west/

VCF-Midwest has finally announced their new, larger venue for this year
(#19) – the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center in Schaumburg,
IL. Sept 7-8, 2024 (Sept 6 evening (Friday) is reserved for vendors, et.c
to set up). Unfortunately, their original block of rooms already sold out
in 3 hours after they announced yesterday. VCF is working with the hotel
to get more, but that won’t happen until Monday)
https://vcfmw.org/

Tandy Assembly for 2024 has been announced for Sep 27-29, 2024. UPDATE:
THEY HAVE STARTED POSTING EXHIBITORS ON THEIR WEBSITE
Courtyard by Marriott Springfield
Springfield, Ohio
http://www.tandyassembly.com/

Retro Computer Festival 2024: November 9-10, 2024
Centre for Computing History, Cambridge, England
In the early stages of planning for this year, this is (I believe) the
largest general retro computing show in the UK (it’s their VCF style show),
covering all retro machines. I am not sure if it 1 or 2 days; the header &
ordering part of the site says November 9th only, but just below that it
says November 9-10.
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/72253/Retro-Computer-Festival-2024-Saturday-9th-November/

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

A) (If David Ladd is on, have him give an update on getting the BlueSCSI
and hard drive images working, and some of the quirks found). It looks
like David Graham also uploaded the March 1992 MM/1 ROM images.
0) Necroware on YouTube put up a video on making your own 5.25″ floppy
cleaning disk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nIQv4FpoFk&t=275s

1) Ron Klein posted an updated for the Coco-Pi project, including an
installer version that is available for the first time to the public:
https://coco-pi.com/coco-pi-project-update-2024-03-27/

2) Ciaran Anscomb posted a short but deep dive into how the NTSC Coco 3’s
composite signal works (note – this is from the 1987 edition of the GIME;
there may be small differences compared to the 1986 GIME, but hasn’t got
one of those to test):
https://www.6809.org.uk/dragon/coco3-cmp.shtml

3) TRS-80 Retro Programing on YouTube put up a video going back to his
Tales of Suburbia game, showing him debugging the Hobby shop scene:
https://youtu.be/rW_21pBT6bo?si=HttKQKj6bsw5zPjA
He also put up a little “side project” program for rotating globes in
BASIC. Warning – he has neighbor rant early in the video, and the project
isn’t completed yet:
https://youtu.be/jaLX0kaZ_w0?si=Ow2e7KsVaXD2aQjv
He also put up a “PCOPY” challenge for Extended BASIC programmers:
https://youtu.be/yQ–C23oeN0?si=y6h7OIjzxy30LdnY
As a bit of side project he did a program called “Dimensional Analyzer”,
which does some metric conversions:
https://youtu.be/LKzhm1vhZ7E?si=WBOHJuwjT3p5OefL

4) Todd Wallace posted some screenshots in the Coco group on Facebook
showing further progress on his Apple II emulator for the 6309 Coco 3 –
this time he has high res graphics (with artifacting) and floppy drive
emulation (currently read only). It is quite slow, but it works to the
point that it can boot DOS 3.3. No new release yet – but he is hoping by
sometime in April (so before the Fest!):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161228127392641/

5) Carlos Camacho put a post up asking (in a hypothetical world) what
some of other color sets would have been best for making games on the VDG,
given the restriction of 4 colors on the screen at once. In the comments,
Paul Shoemaker put up the raw RGB values (8 bits per), and shows that
orange was an odd one, and suggests that black would have been better (and
I mentioned that would basically match one the IBM PC CGA color sets). But
Paul mentioned something I didn’t know – the “pastel” color set actually
looks quite good on a monochrome monitor (show image in the comments of
his Ghost Rush example:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161226144482641/

6) For those on Facebook, Jack Chadwick started a new public group devoted
to Tom Mix Software – both on the Coco and the Dragon:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/773263327604888/

7) Thomas Cherryhomes put up a video showing him using an 8 bit Atari
terminal program that emulates Videotex / VidTex, based on a demo server
for Videotex written by Tim Lindner (based on the Coco terminal program
and actual console):
https://youtu.be/HpeaYuWS94o?si=CwkBhavu9Uw8Iy-D
He also notified us on Discord on Friday evening that he is now able to
view Mastodon posts from his Fujinet Coco client – on his Coco 2. And he
has provided a link to the sourcecode so that others can see how to do it
as well:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161242515977641/
https://github.com/FujiNetWIFI/fujinet-apps/tree/master/mastodon/coco

8) Neil Cherry is working on porting Peter Stark’s HUMBUG debugging tool
for the 6800 (he later ported it to the Coco and 6809, I believe). On the
same Github that he has for HUMBUG is a copy of other utilities, and also
Microware’s very first OS – RT/68MX – a real time OS for the 6800 that came
out in 1977 while Ken Kaplan was still in University (and it was because
of this OS that Motorola worked directly with Microware on making the 6809
and the BASIC09 programming language for it):
Post about HUMBUG:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/6809assembly/posts/3337406853219340/
Github readme:
https://github.com/linuxha/RT68mx/blob/main/README.md

9) Ciaran Anscomb released version 1.5.5 of XRoar, which when tied with
a bugfix to SDL 2.29.3 for Windows, should hopefully smooth out some of
the audio glitches that Windows (and Mac) users have reported:
Announcement on worldofdragon forums:
https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11152
Ciaran’s site with download link:
https://www.6809.org.uk/xroar/

10) Allen Huffman delved into Steve Bjork’s TRS-80 Model 1 software in
his blog, including 2 videos we showed last week (Space Ball and Soft
Music Editor), both from 1980. He mentions in the blog that there is a
Space Ball 2, which was basically the same Circus type game, but with an
added countdown timer before the next ball drops. He also found a screen
shot of Galactic Fighter. Allen notes that in an interview that Steve
game in 1997, Steve said that his game came out about 3 months before
the arcade smash Galaxian (which played similarly and came out in the
U.S. in November of 1979), but Roger hasn’t transferred that one over yet
(and it sounds like he has to be extra careful with that one). Also found
were 2 Model 1 BASIC programs (one of which we will talk about shortly,
as Jim Gerrie ported it to the MC-10): Perpetual Calendar and Bio-Rhythm,
as well as his light pen software extensions for BASIC:
https://subethasoftware.com/2024/03/26/steve-bjorks-trs-80-model-1-days/
Allen also posted about April Fools programs on the Coco – including one
that Steve Bjork did that faked a disk being formatted (I had seen similar
a year or two earlier on the Apple II+ at my high school – it just stepped
the motor at the right speed to simulate formatting). He asked about what
other programs had been done as a prank/joke back in the day. Does anyone
here remember any others?
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161235369912641/

11) Marco Spedaletti has released a new version of ugBASIC (microBASIC)

• version 1.16. This update affects all the computers it runs on, but
  particular attention was made to the Ccoo 1/2 and Coco 3:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161232434407641/

12) YouTube channel “Nerdery and Murdery”, which seems to do a computer
segment followed by a real crime segment for their show (an odd combo,
eh?) cover a bit of the history of the Coco as their computer segment on
episode 138:
https://youtu.be/QhgYLAcEY44?si=OhVf8tpWWb3AkM1M

13) Jim Mullis continues to explore ways to help speed up his GrafEXpress
driven games “Super Powers” with a short video showing 256x192x16 scrolling
in 16 pixel increments, double buffered:
https://youtu.be/2yMb9E_oxKA?si=NHBvDoYCHMGs6opV

14) Henry of The Break Key fame released a video of a side project he
worked on – putting together one of Thom Cherryhomes’ Fujinet boards. With
bonus mistakes!
https://youtu.be/WMVpyVoKB_Y?si=L0_7JmnIVk8srJO6

15) Bruneau & Co Auctioneers actually released a special video called
“Steve Bjork Archives Auction Highlights” (dated from February 24):
https://youtu.be/VEvlxkft7bQ?si=3N78PRf-EXbuF30K

16) Brazilian YouTube channel Tropical Retro posted a video about the
CP-400 in Portugese, but there is a note in the description that an English
version of the video is coming soon. It appears to show some of the history,
and some sample games running on it as well:
https://youtu.be/iGtBux13Abc?si=loks-dyvFH_wFfFt

17) Tech Guy Life on YouTube did video #2 of getting a Coco 1 up and running
(the previous episode he replace the power supply) – this time he tackles
RAM and the chiclet keyboard:
https://youtu.be/Hh6rNFoHRGA?si=RjlumBdRwDmd5_q1

18) Jim Brain posted an update about CocoFest to the Glenside site,
including the reminder that 102 rooms have already been booked and the
special room rate expires April 17:
https://www.glensideccc.com/calling-all-coco-connoisseurs/

19) Craig Iannello posted an update to his “Pugputer” – a 6309 based homebrew
project – which is now reading files from an SD card. He is currently
getting 17.1K / second, but that is including a pause every 512 bytes read
to calculate a 16 bit CRC before getting the next block. Changing it window
like ZModem (he mistakenly said XModem in his post) and calculating the CRC
on the fly rather than all at once at the end should speed things up, too:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/6809assembly/posts/3342468346046524/

20) NitrOS9/EOU version 1.0.1 has been released at long last, and is
available for download now for 6809 and 6309 based Coco 3’s with a CocoSDC
and at least 512K of RAM, and for emulators as well:
http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/nitros9.html

MC-10

1) Jim Gerrie ported “Planets” originally by Gordon Speer for Computronics
magzine issue #28 (1980) to the MC-10, adding some color to the original
TRS-80 Model 1/3 program. This shows the relative locations of the Earth,
Mars, Jupiter and Saturn around the sun, showing their different speeds
in orbit:
https://youtu.be/g3nLz-M2dDE?si=Rc10IMaC9K5QA_ct

2) Jim also ported an early Calendar program originally written by Steve
Bjork to the MC-10:
https://youtu.be/Fo_O0Jb0Yyo?si=I39z2-UJpZAmRVvG

3) He also pored “Testamour” which is a program to test the users knowledge
of BASIC, originally published by the editorial team in the April 1985
issue of the french Micro 7 Magazine. Looks a bit buggy at the moment:
https://youtu.be/LSDfcshWD1k?si=1s-00NQkOwTU7391

Dragon 32/64

1) Phil Harvey-Smith in the Dragon Facebook group, has also been playing
with his 3D printer – And posted some photos:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3674562179470091/

2) Julian Brown has started working on little sound chip daughterboards
for his Dragon 32 repro project, and posted a photo of one he started 2
years ago, and a very recent one:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3674434182816224/
In an update yesterday, he has assembled board #1, but can’t test it yet
since he doesn’t have a main board to plug it into:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3680669768859332/
He also has ordered rev 3 of his PAL daughterboards for testing before he
commits to a CPLD version to greatly cut down the size & number of chips:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3680051018921207/
He also showed a screenshot after bodging some transistors. While it has
really visible interference wave (messing up the signal), but he says the
image is rock solid now so he is getting close:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3679900362269606/
He also posted a short video of his possible new contender for an
alternative power supply board for either the Dragon 32 or 64… with some
added features:
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1366595000719344

3) John Whitworth of DragonPlus Electronics has posted a PDF document that
compares his replacement power supply board for the Dragon, with a Spanish
made one based on an MP1584 made by Ant Goffart. There is also comments
between Ant and John on the original Facebook post:
Facebook post:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3673993559526953/
PDF direct download:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iOR5R4TVqRTpUlpOZOgE_RQ0JS-tueJo/view
He also posted a short video playing with the “elusive MODE 1” on the Dragon
128, including a demo of colour cycling (there are some sync problems,
I believe because the OS9 drivers aren’t totally finished):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3680297865563189/

4) Richard Harding (thanks to original scans by Elias Rokka of Finland)
has posted the FINLUX Dragon 32 BASIC handbook (in Finnish) for download
to the Dragon group on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3678157849110524/
Richard also posted a photo of his new retro ride:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3677815012478141/
(note: posted April 1)

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

1) Jim Gerrie ported “Castle Adventure” original written by Dave Trapasso
in July of 1981 and published in the April 1982 of Computronics magazine,
originally for the TRS-80 Model 1/3. The video shows Jim’s new color
graphic title screen, and SPOILER ALERT! it includes a complete playthrough:
https://youtu.be/fkEHMpR9NbA?si=r2NvoPEI7HGuozHP
He also ported Video Poker by D. Scott Williams, who had entered it in
the 10 line BASIC programming contest for the Atari 8 bits:
https://youtu.be/L7p6oU834cw?si=Q45w6Fh05f8krMIv
Download the WAV from the MC-10 Facebook group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/7255459367914156/

2) Russian site by Segey Makeev continues to cover Coco Star Wars games,
this time trying Return of the Jeti by Thundervision, Laser Run on the
Dragon, Syzygy from Spectral Associates, Zector Adventures for both the
Coco & MC-10, and Space Raider from T&D:
https://dtf-ru.translate.goog/retro/2595551-igry-po-star-wars-s-drevnih-vremen-do-nashih-dnei-chast-51-trs-80-coco?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp
And on Friday he added a few more, including Star Wars by Mike Moore in
BASIC (this might have been a type in?), Star Wars (text adventure included
in NitrOS9/EOU), Vader on the MC-10 by Jim Gerrie
https://dtf-ru.translate.goog/retro/2597525-igry-po-star-wars-s-drevnih-vremen-do-nashih-dnei-chast-52-trs-80-coco?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

3) Japanese cross platform game developer Inufuto has released their next
game – and MC-10, Coco 1/2 & Coco 3 versions are available now in WAV
format. It’s called Anti Air, and while it looks like a Space Invaders
clone, it has some extras like things dropped from above that will block
your horizontal movement on the ground, etc.:
List of all he release versions with videos:
http://inufuto.web.fc2.com/8bit/antiair/#coco

4) Hot on the heels of last weeks release from Pere Serrat, comes Game Pack

11 for the Supersprite FM+ board of AGD games. As well as a bug fix for 3

of the games from Pack #10 (the 3 parts to “Doom Pit”). The new pack has
a 4 part series of games with versions for both the Coco and the Dragon
(with the Supersprite board):
Funky Fungus Level 1
Funky Fungus Level 2
Funky Fungus Level 3
Funky Fungus Level 4
https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11164

5) Spanish YouTube channel DR .GRIFA did a video of gameplays on the Dragon,
including BackTrack, Chuckie Egg, Cyrus Chess, Ugh!, Donkey King, Frogger,
and many others (over 3/4 hour worth) :
https://youtu.be/na9Lj9SKsgI?si=BwUMkOXUZpxxo8_V

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