Interview schedule:

Next week (October 26) – A follow-up to WORC (World of Retro Computing)
with showrunner Justus, Trina of Trina’s Technobabble and Stacey (who
actually had a Coco exhibit, but couldn’t make our preview show) are going
to come on to tell us how the show went, and Stacey will finally get to
talk about her booth and the Coco’s she was showing.

Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people:

Retro Computer Festival 2024: November 9-10, 2024
Centre for Computing History, Cambridge, England
The largest general retro computing show in the UK (it’s their VCF style
show), covering all retro machines. Tickets can be ordered online for
individual days or both days.
** NOTE: AS OF OCTOBER 9, THE SATURDAY SHOW IS COMPLETELY BOOKED AND SOLD
OUT. THERE IS STILL SOME SPACE ON SUNDAY. **
All of their events (including separate entries for both days) at the
bottom of this page:
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/pages/30677/What-s-On/
The Saturday event specifically now has a partial list of exhibitors:
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/72253/Retro-Computer-Festival-2024-Saturday-9th-November/

Retro SC, the retro show in Brazil, is having their 2024 event on November

This always has a strong Coco/CP-400/etc. contingent, including multiple
people who have been guests on our show.It is happening at 1670 Haroldo
Soares Glavan road, Cacupé, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina.
https://retrosc.org/

The World of Commodore 2024 is November 30-Dec 1 at the Admiral Inn in
Mississauga, Ontario. Why am I mentioning this? Well, it’s sponsored by TPUG,
and they created the SuperPET (a special PET with a 6809 CPU added… and
they help port OS-9 Level 1 to it. So it’s a sister computer to the Coco
after those improvements.
https://www.tpug.ca/world-of-commodore/world-of-commodore-2024/

VCF-SoCal – Feb 15-16 (Hotel Fera in Orange, California.
https://www.vcfsocal.com/

VCF East has had a date change for next years show due to a scheduling
conflict. It is now April 4-6, 2025 – same facility as this year. Info
Age Science Museum, Wall, NJ.
https://vcfed.org/events/vintage-computer-festival-east/

VCF-SW in Texas has been booked with dates: June 20-22, 2025 at the Davidson
Gundy Alumni Center, University of Texas, Dallas, Texas.
Tables & Tickets will go on sale January 2025. $20/adult ($25 if bought
at the door), $10/student ($15 at the door). 17 and under are free (with
accompanying adult). Tables are $50.
https://www.vcfsw.org/

Tim Lindner let me know that next year’s Portland Retro Gaming Expo runs
from October 17-19 in 2025 (they just had this years Sept 27-29).
https://www.retrogamingexpo.com/

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

0) First, a quick announcement. For those who have been trying to get a
hold of Frank & Retro Rewind the last little while and have not been getting
timely responses or seeing products in stock – I just found yesterday that
he has been on jury duty, and they aren’t even allowed their phones most
of the time. He is not sure how much longer the case he is on will last
(although it is apparently a pretty major one); I will keep you posted as
I hear updates.

1) CocoTown released part 2 of “Crashing Car, Crashing Coco”. Where he
learns more about crashes. Of all kinds.
https://youtu.be/PuO4klQEldE?si=fbozem9z0HhTBIyv

2) Sheldon MacDonald put up a quick video showing the first SID based tune
on his new Coco SID board (rather than just tones and sound effects):
https://youtu.be/MjuQsSQK4eQ?si=QqigQOeodJVCYQJS

3) Glen Hewlett has released version 2.13 of his BASIC to 6809 compiler,
which now adds a new command specifically for the CocoSDC: SDCPLAY. He
also has a demo video up, which shows it streaming 6 bit sound at 44.75 KHz
(this command is meant to play sound un-interrupted):
Video/audio demo:
https://youtu.be/dvVs_6RkLV0?si=x20h4HOtRMRPhBY6
Github with the latest release including SDCPLAY:
https://github.com/nowhereman999/BASIC-To-6809/tree/main

5) Sean Connor found a 3rd floating point library for the 6809 (in addition
to the one built into Microsoft BASIC, and the IEEE-754 library), written
by Lennart Benschop, and he did some benchmark comparisons taking into
consideration both code size and speed:
https://boston.conman.org/2024/10/13.1

6) TRS-80 Retro Programing did a video update on his Tales of Suburbia –
which now supports saving and loading a game in progress to disk, his first
game to do so, since he never had a disk drive on his real Coco back in
the day:
https://youtu.be/gNcxAiPw22I?si=R7IK0LgcvaciJnJA

7) 8=Bit Relics released a short advertisement for their Coco 2/3 dust
cover, on sale at vitnoshop.com:
https://youtu.be/AV2vqULidh0?si=avVbvmrZ_hpoIlsn

8) RetroAndGaming from Norway returns with a YouTube video showing using
a VCR to get his Coco 1 running on a modern TV – using SCART in Europe. It
kind of works, sometimes:
https://youtu.be/WYZEpqSQ7vs?si=3iCRw4beOaIWDVBF

9) Ctrl-Alt-Rees on YouTube, a UK YouTuber (who has been a guest host on
RMC while Neil was away on Paternity leave) picked up a Japanese machine
(Cefucom-21) that is a dual Z80 based machine, but uses the 6847 video chip
that the Coco, MC-10, Dragon, Acorn Atom and some other machines used. It’s
not working at this point, but he shows the 3 main boards that are inside:
https://youtu.be/11sqTJXXSQo?si=L0tUn1bR0fipE5eV

10) Joel Rees (currently living in Japan) did a series of long blog
entries that is the start of an assembly language tutorial for the 6800,
6801, 6809 and 68000 to demonstrate the split stack paradigm/discipline
(using U as an actual second stack vs. as a frame (or data memory in OS9)
pointer. This is a still ongoing series:
https://joels-programming-fun.blogspot.com/2024/03/alpp-assembly-language-programming.html

11) Tony Jewell shared some photos from his planned theme for this years
Retro Computer Festival (Nov 9-10 at the Centre for Computing History in
Cambridge, England), which is 6847 based machines. He shows some screenshots
from the Japanese PC-6001 which used the VDG, but shows a completely
different character set, and the greens aren’t the same as we are used to:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/173737063356725/posts/1632687604128323/
(One cool thing linked in the comments is about some machines like the
Samsung SPC-1000 that really pushed the VDG with mixed color sets,etc.),
as shown in an article by Emerson Costa. Basically it uses 2 bytes per
character, with the “attributes” byte controlling the control pins for
internal/external character sets, semigraphics 4/6 changes, text inversion
and the color palette select. Unfortunately the blog front end he is using
doesn’t seem to work properly with Google Translate – it just spins gears
and never completes. I could copy/paste chunks of text directly, though):
Portuguese page with graphics examples):
https://ensjo.blogspot.com/2015/07/um-display-rico-com-mc6847.html

MC-10

1) Retro Recycling has started a video (series, I presume) going through
the Color BASIC manual on an emulated MC-10:
https://youtu.be/VGxnFr3JNq4?si=_7aBI_yKUWoMury0
Retro Recycling did another MC-10 video (and apparently now owns a physical
one as well!), this time doing a grass simulator (he did a couple of new
videos actually, although some are more just fooling around with random
numbers):
https://youtu.be/TFt3kuVPrps?si=uA2_ZrT67zXHQKsQ

2) Spriteworx has boxed copies of his new MC-10 game T.H.E.M. in stock again:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/8381638028629612/

Dragon 32/64

1) Richard Atkinson has uploaded a VDK disk image to the Dragon Facebook
gropu for testing colour mix test patterns designed for use on the French
SECAM based Dragons (he posted a screeshot of some of the color blends he
got in the comments, which in some cases look smooth enough to be additional
colors to the standard 4 at a time that the VDG can produce):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3841468396112801/
And screenshots taken from the Dragon Meetup on the SECAM Dragons they
had at the show, showing even more of the colour mixing:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3837338476525793/
And finally, pictures of the insides of Richard Harding’s SECAM Dragon:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3837328376526803/

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

1) Jim Gerrie posted first and alpha, and then a beta, and then finally
a release candidate of his MC-10/Coco port of Nick Marentes first ever
commercial game for the TRS-80 Model 1/3 that he did way back in October
of 1982, Stellar Odyssey:
Beta (this is a long play video with some spoilers – be warned):
https://youtu.be/rGnYhRbw-Z4?si=RVsJS7xQ2tzbnZGh
Release Candidate (where you discover your mission):
https://youtu.be/VO3VYwLQHes?si=T_smsgcmB6LFT_GU
And download link:
https://github.com/jggames/trs80mc10/tree/master/quicktype/Latest_Jim_G_MC-10_Compilation/Text%20Adventures
(Search for “STLODSSY.C10”)

2) Tim and AJ cover Robotack on the Coco on their latest episode of Sibling
Rivalry… and played cooperatively! (Same way I did back in the day):
https://youtu.be/DQHq8OtL_a0?si=nnby6htBJv1QJHRI

3) Chronologically Gaming hit the first Coco game for November of 1982 –
3-D Brickaway by Britt Monk (sold a few months later through Avalon Hill
as Breakthrough):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa1-7nmggV4&t=442s
(I will mention for general 6809 fans – he covered the launch of the
Vectrex earlier this past week as well)

4) Brandon Tetrau did a short video showing how he has his Launchbox set
up for his Coco emulators, which includes short video with audio clips
for each game in it’s menu selection system:
https://youtu.be/D952m6Dzsus?si=jCrsKHJ5_9R6ei48

5) Jostive fivezer on YouTube continued his playing of Coco games (mixed
with many other platforms) this past week, continuing on with 3 more PacMan
derivatives after playing Nick’s PacMan Tribute last week. This week he
posted longplay videos covering:
Scarfman by The Cornsoft Group – the only ML 4K Pacman for the Coco:
https://youtu.be/W4TbNN5alWg?si=6tEg2WoNTPWWKyQS
Ghost Gobbler by Spectral Associates:
https://youtu.be/hZ4CmTiba70?si=Fl3qea2uM908vDQI
Jaws (Pac Jaws) by Michael Freeman (a highly customizable PacMan clone,
with multiple mazes and even intermissions):
https://youtu.be/NG9Gtp-H1UQ?si=LJYgDK48jHw3Kujs

6) Non-Maskable Interrupt also joined in the PacMan fun, doing a YouTube
short of Glen Hewlett’s PacMan transcode:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XTaUMji3S6E

7) Dan Norder posted about a “Roguelike Celebration” this weekend (an
online conference), and his contribution to this even is the game Hobbit
by David Sweet from Rainbow magazine, January 1983:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/colorcomputer/posts/1064463788502686/

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