The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 403, March 8, 2025

Collected by L. Curtis Boyle

Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people:

The Interim Computer Festival is happening at Intraspace in Seattle
Washington from March 21-23. This is the Pacific Northwest Show that is
hoping to get back to VCF status in the near future:
https://sdf.org/icf/

VCF East is April 4-6, 2025 – same facility as this year. Info Age Science
Museum, Wall, NJ.
https://vcfed.org/events/vintage-computer-festival-east/

The next Manitoba Retro Computer & Gaming club meetup is at the Fort Rouge
Leisure Center in Winnipeg, Manitoba on April 12. This is the same one I
attended last weekend, along with D. Bruce Moore and David Kroeker. This
next one is more themed around the Commodore 128, but I expect a wide
variety of machines like they had this past one, which was TRS-80 themed
https://www.facebook.com/groups/mbretro/posts/1830196931063991/

CocoFest is May 2-3, 2025 (with takedown on the morning of May 4/Sunday) at
the Holiday Inn & Suites in Carol Stream (Wheaton), Illinois. Hotel rooms
at the special Fest rate are available now ($122/night for two queens or
1 king bed), and apply for May 2-5. You will need to use the Group Rate
code of G30 to get this rate, and getting the special rate ends April

Bookings for tables will be going up in January.
https://www.glensideccc.com/cocofest/

Retrofest 2025, organized by Tony Jewell, is a retro computer festival
happening in Swindon, England May 31-June 1, 2025. Some Dragon people (like
Richard Harding and Chris Poacher) have already committed to attending
the show, being held at STEAM (the Great Western Railway museum):
Retrofest website:
https://retrofest.uk/
They even have a promo video:
https://youtu.be/UCZ-BtFW9Ok?si=B441wLvpDI2iekLN

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/

BoatFest (now International Retro Computer Expo) will be July 11-13 in
Hurricane, WV. There is now a promo video for it:
https://www.ticketsource.us/ircexpo2025/t-eanjyje

VCF-Midwest (the largest retro show in North America, I believe) is September
13-14 at the Schaumburg Convention Center in Schaumburg, Illinois. This year
is the 20th anniversary of this show, and there is a lot of collaboration
between CocoFest and VCF-MW, so expect a large number of Coco and Glenside
people at the show! Still free admission, and hotel booking is open already.
https://www.vcfmw.org/

That same weekend, Retro World Expo will be held September 12-14 at the
Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford, Connecticut. Tickets and vendor
applications aren’t quite ready yet but will be soon. This is a gaming
oriented retro show (including tournaments) but also includes things
like wrestling:
https://retroworldexpo.com/

Tandy Assembly for 2025 dates have been announced – it will be Sept 26 to Sep
28 at the Courtyard by Marriott Springfield Downtown in Springfield, Ohio:
https://www.tandyassembly.com/

This 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/

Canada is getting it’s own official VCF – Montreal, January 25-26 of

I don’t see any more details (the venue, for example) yet:
https://vcfed.org/vcf-montreal/

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

1) Coco Town released a video about doing virtual memory in the 80’s –
the MMU on the Coco 3, essentially0:
https://youtu.be/LljWOL6WSfg?si=VJaBqo8CJF4u4EYP

2) Steven Evens ported Auto Run from Dragon User July 1984 issue, originally
for the Dragon 32, to both the Dragon 64 and the Coco, and it is available
for download in the World of Dragon forums:
I think this is the disk versions:
https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=10955
And (I believe) the cassette versions:
https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11223

3) As he has been the last couple of weeks, Allen Huffman has been very
busy on his blog & Facebook Sub-Etha Software pages:
Based on a Facebook post by Youngstown Ken in the Coco Group, Allen decided
to see what online AI could do to generate a BASIC program to do Two-Level
Markov Chain Prediction (to predict the next word in a sequence – hopefully
someone knows a lot more about this stuff than I):
https://subethasoftware.com/2025/03/06/could-the-coco-run-a-tiny-large-language-model-ai-thing/
He also published an old “very simple” BBS networking protocol he was
devising back in the day, that could even run off of a floppy based system
(no hard drive required):
https://subethasoftware.com/2025/03/03/sub-etha-net-bbs-protocol-proposal/
He also posted about his Delta BBS – an OS-9 BBS he ran in the 1989-1996
time frame. One thing that made it special was that the “theme” could be
easily changed, and he recently found some of them while going through his
disk archives, so he posted what they looked like (DeltaBoard, Castle Delta,
Delta Hotel… and he mentions multiple others at the end from after his
move from Texas to Iowa):
https://subethasoftware.com/2025/03/01/deltaboard-my-theme-changing-bbs-part-1/

4) Henry Gernhardt III released his 2nd video about the new cartridge
version of Coco Fujinet that does not need the bitbanger on his The Break
Key YouTube channel. It is sub-titled “State Machine Madness”:
https://youtu.be/skSv0nOTstk?si=KOgUMTLyr3ZI7Xzg

5) Buzzsaw Gaming on YouTube posted a video showing his Color Computer
collection, including original hardware, software, manuals, etc. Oh… and
his pet Buzzsaw:
https://youtu.be/FTANDSfV4ek?si=gynq67nx9w05x9tv

6) Erico Monteiro wrote a demo using some of the sprite commands in ugBASIC
with PMODE 4 artifacted color balls bouncing on the screen:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162361121282641/

7) David Ladd posted a video in the Coco Facebook group showing him getting
his MM/1 to boot OSK using DE-9 to DE-15 adatpor with a ViewSonic VS447M
monitor. Apparently some modern monitors that support FreeSync actually
work with 15.75 KHz source video (which includes the Coco 3 and MM/1,
amongst others), making adaptors much easier and not requiring FPGA’s:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162355400807641/

8) Terry Trapp mentioned on the Coco Facebook group that he has some of
his CSync boards in, and was asking how many more that he should make. We
talked about this recently on the show:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162355315977641/

9) Michael Pittsley in the Coco Facebook group has a request – can anyone
help him by duplicating the cassettes from both Dracula and The Hound of the
Baskervilles entries from the “reading is fun” series (early Coco educational
software). He has done the rest of the series (plus Disney ones, etc.):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162350211282641/

10) ugBASIC 1.17.1 has been released:
https://ugbasic.iwashere.eu/?news=news

MC-10

1) Alex Macomber showed a photo from his MC-10 display from the Wisconsin
Computer Club Show last night, including multiple hardware upgrades:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162362727972641/

2) Paul Shoemaker, who is working on a new high res Star Trek game for the
MC-10, posted a picture of the loading screen that he has designed thus far
(this will show on the screen while the program is loading):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/9129086200551454/

Dragon 32/64

1) Capo’s Tech on YouTube followed up with his photos from the Dragon
Facebook group last week of him running serial terminal from his Dragon
64 and OS-9 Level 1, to a full video:
https://youtu.be/9tkzJjSweK8?si=-_DZnmUz5qEQha7i

2) Matt Kaye posted on the Dragon Facebook group that he has a new batch
of replacement stickers for the Dragon 32 label available, but these are
improved from his last batch, being a bit thicker and now including an
anti-scratch coating:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3958793737713599/

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

1) Tim & AJ released episode 169 of Sibling Rivalry over at their My Drunk
Sibling YouTube channel, where they play Nick Marentes Pipes:
https://youtu.be/z2rZYL2nM7I?si=x7A6vDVwmVJsHRwI

2) Renga in Blue did part 1 of their gameplay review of the real
time/partially randomzied text adventure, Keys of the Wizard:
https://bluerenga.blog/2025/03/01/keys-of-the-wizard-1982
There is an earlier ad for Keys of the Wizard then the August 1982
Rainbow. Page 341 of the June/July issue of 80 Micro. The Color Computer
Archive also has a copy of the original manual (Spectral’s manuals were
very primitive back that early in time).
They followed up with Part 2 later in the week:
https://bluerenga.blog/2025/03/06/keys-of-the-wizard-gaps/

3) Jim Gerrie ported Potholes, originally by Joe W. Rocke on the Vic-20
from the September 1983 issue of Compute’s! Gazette magazine to the MC-10:
https://youtu.be/TjyN_v3gd14?si=F_dZDyP4WvInVFeT

4) Brent and Aaron over at the Amigos’ The Coco Show’ review Paul & Tim
Thayers “Get Me Outta Here!” escape room game for the Coco 3:
https://youtu.be/z31wGwpZ2cU?si=A4mZhxF3iqzhvDij

5) Chronologically Gaming covered some more Coco/Dragon games from November
1982 this past week:
Space Trek / Reversi for the Dragon 32:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wxOeJbq8EM&t=530s
Squeeze:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZa03j58EvY&t=763s

6) Pere Serrat has released the 10th games port pack of AGD games to the
SuperSprite FM+ board, which includes:
Funky Fungus Reloaded World 1
Kyd Cadet
Sophia II Part 1
Zukinox
https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11258

He also released the 64th pack of AGD games ported to the regular Coco’s
and Dragons. This includes the more recent games:
The 8 Bit Wars
Bubble Bobble 2023 v1
Escape from Alien’s Maze
Frankie Lost His Body
https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11257

7) pw_32x in the Coco Discord (see the Coco Lobby -> general channel)
has been working on a C port of Downland, based on the original assembly
source code. It’s coming along pretty good now, with mostly just sound
left to do… which he mentions that he is planning to use samples rather
than trying to emulate the 6 bit DAC itself:
(show local file on my desktop “Downland_C_hang.mp4”

8) Erico Monteiro posted an update video to his ugBASIC game that
we showed last week that he is entering in this years 10 Liner BASIC
programming contest. He now has some sound effects and a bit of music
in the background. Last I heard the program is still slightly too long,
but he is close, even with the sound additions:
https://youtu.be/Odx3HJeOSSc?si=V-u6v4rgVzQ3zYbf

9) XperTek on YouTube played Trapfall on his real coco on an amber monitor:
https://youtu.be/036Qc7GDh-U?si=hcS72gqLcg7eyvOl

10) Attempts: A Gaming Channel (by LRU) on YouTube posted a video of
him playing the Dragon game, Star Defence, which is a PMODE 1 game based
on Defender:
https://youtu.be/ctAwc86Y_FQ?si=3IjcR4oeTvrVk7Zr

11) YouTube channel Ellimist did a speed run of the DOS version of Mark
Data Products Calixto Island adventure (the graphical version, not the
original text version), finishing the game in 4 minutes, 27 seconds. This
of course was based on the graphical Coco/Dragon version:
https://youtu.be/I9zK1IyMQQ4?si=RKdpQYeOVQtpySft

12) theMANSTA Gaming channel on YouTube posted a few Coco gameplay videos
(I think they are originally from his live Twitch stream), including a 2
parter playing Zaxxon (I will mention that XRoar for his machine has the
same weird clicking noises I get on my Mac version as well):
https://youtu.be/x4QHKCJKGKI?si=4k234R6oRIwaXHxk
https://youtu.be/Ig5eiJ5lB3w?si=DOyuuvTKNKMY2nj-
He also attempted a self portrait in the Extended BASIC program IDENTIKIT:
https://youtu.be/yPbI7rV-DKU?si=_c9c3SMe6Ec2b6yN
He also played Sea Dragon:
https://youtu.be/V8TbG3vzXwU?si=e81owQbYnzsh75QD

13) jeo papas on YouTube also played a few Coco games:
Space Zapper (the Extended BASIC one by Aardvark):
https://youtu.be/6JG97DbLJQY?si=LoTDYB7xo6ikza_B
Space Shuttle (also Extended BASIC by Aardvark). This is one Tim and
AJ played not too long ago – it’s a 2 player simultaneous Lunar Lander
style game:
https://youtu.be/eBCB113X2Wg?si=bntssq6hsG3kHxnE

14) NMI posted some quick gameplay videos as well shot from his phone but
using his real Coco 3 with CM-8 monitor:
Predator (in honour of David Ladd, of course):
https://youtube.com/shorts/jLpv_InmN60?si=C02J3aKDacBaChv8
Mega-Bug:
https://youtube.com/shorts/mMMSEwKDknY?si=BhIqrHsgXRyYpFzV

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