Interview schedule:

April 5th we will have a special about the RiBBS BBS system – this enabled
Coco 3’s to join Fidonet back in the 1990’s. We will have it’s original
author Ron Bihler, the person who took it over from Ron – Charles “Chuck”
West, Marc Bosley (who helped test it), and Terry Trapp (who is working on
getting it running in modern times – both on real hardware and on emulators).

Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people:

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/

The same weekend, the Indy Classic Computer & Video Game Expo is going
on April 12-13, 2025 at the Crowne Plaza Indianapolis-Airport Hotel in
Indianapolis, Indiana. This is the show that has Randy Kindig (of the
Floppy Days podcast fame, amongst others) as one of the organizers, who
we interviewed on our show some time ago. Entry is $5/person or $10/family
https://indyclassic.org/

Saturday April 26 is the next Amigos hosted “International Computer Club”,
which has people talking about a variety of hardware, software, collecting,
etc. retro computer & gaming projects. Both Nick and I have been on this
show multiple times, and Nick may be on it to show his Pinball project.

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 is Sept 26 to Sep 28 at the Courtyard by Marriott
Springfield Downtown in Springfield, Ohio:
https://www.tandyassembly.com/
And they have some exhibitors already (click Exhibitors link)

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

It will be held at the Royal Military College outside of Montreal,
but I don’t have any more details (the venue, for example) yet:
https://vcfed.org/vcf-montreal/

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

0) First some sad news – Paul T Schreiber passed away. He was and engineer
at Tandy (and speaker at many retro events about Tandy history) and was
directly involved in a lot of projects getting off the ground – including
the Coco 2. He was also working on a book when he passed away:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162423200767641/
You can see his Tandy Assembly keynote presentation from 2019 here:
https://youtu.be/w2Tb8IOa5VQ?si=MFWY2SR5w_qZqUzZ

1) Coco Town goes back to his Game revolutions (cycle 23), where he talkx
about making “1982-style NPC’s”:
https://youtu.be/Ubl9JzrYHCw?si=gONE69U501yhvS6q

2) Allen Huffman made a blog post responding to a Coco Facebook group
question originally posted by Rob R., who was asking about which 2 character
variable names (the maximum allowed in Extended Color BASIC), due to them
being BASIC keywords (he gave an example of “TO”). Allen expands on this,
listing others, and also pointing out that some variable names that would
work in Color BASIC won’t work in Extended and/or Disk BASIC:
https://subethasoftware.com/2025/03/24/color-basic-supports-two-letter-variables-except-when-it-doesnt/

3) Erico Monteiro has been helping both ugBASIC and basic-to-6809 compilers
for handling high speed large sprites, and released some videos showing
them both running the same graphics:
(show 1 video for each from my desktop)

4) Jeff Noyle (of Oblique Triad fame, with games such as Those Darn Marbles,
Overlord, The Seventh Link) has been working on a new 512K Coco 3 RPG game,
but much more advanced than even The Seventh Link was, called Mythwalker. He
currently estimates it will take 4 disks, and he has a website with a
video and screenshots to show it’s current progress. It features a lot of
more modern RPG features than the Coco has ever seen before, including in
world game map, special quests, complex storyline & lore, weather, etc,
much more interactive in game characters, and more. He is making both a
Coco 3 and PC/Windows 10 version as well.
To quote Jeff’s own announcement in the Coco Discord:
“Hello everybody! I’ve been working on a new fantasy RPG for the coco3
(512k). It’s kinda my attempt to atone for The Seventh Link, from back
in the day, which was missing a lot of elements of what makes an RPG
so fun, like story, NPCs, items, magic systems. You know, richness in
general. There’s some deets on my website:
https://distantsystems.com/Mythwalker/Mythwalker.html
…and the “contact” tab has a link to my discord to which you’re all very
welcome if you’d like to follow the development in detail, and a link to
my Steam page for it (it actually runs on PC and coco, cuz it’s written
(mostly) in a custom VM for which I’ve made PC and Coco3 implementations-
even the save files are cross-compatible!) so you can wishlist it if you
like and get notified if/when it releases. (Planning to charge just a very
small nominal price for it.)
Kinda hoping to finish in a year or two…”

Main page:
https://distantsystems.com/Mythwalker/Mythwalker.html
steampage with video/screenshots:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3577880/Mythwalker/

5) Abraham Moller posted a 13+ minute video showing his turning on his
$30 Facebook Marketplace Coco 2 system for the first time in years. He
also talks a little bit about his Videotex cartridge and what it was for:
https://youtu.be/-UjJHYGZnQ0?si=6wdU1phU5KLqjF65

6) NMI on YouTube, who usually covers gameplay videos, did a different kind
of video this week, an almost hour long video on fixing a CP-400 Color 2 –
a Coco 2 clone from Brazil:
https://youtu.be/y4dPkqGgUkw?si=3aRz0Ze_NrDw3bG4

7) XperTek, the Spanish YouTube channel, did a different kind of video
than he normally does on his amber monitor equipped Coco 2 – he covered
a utility called Sprite Master (with mostly spanish prompts, etc.) used
to create PMODE 3 style sprites, including showing them animated. He also
showed Lurkley Manor (a Rainbow published adventure game):
https://youtu.be/sE203imOS9Y?si=emdpp6v-TZinNHMi

8) Terry Trapp got a copy of RiBBS 2.10 up and running via Telnet (you
can try it yourself at Ribbs.griswoldfx.com:6809 with a Telnet client),
and he will be with the original authors Ron Bihler & Charles West, as
well as an early tester (our very own Marc Bosley) on next weeks show to
talk about BBSing, RiBBS and Fidonet on the Coco, next week!
His original post (see screenshots in the comments):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162438293712641/
This screenshot he posted (from the Sysops point of view) shows that Terry
had 31 calls and 13 unique users give it a try the first day he had it up:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162441950937641/
He also posted a response to Allen Huffman’s question about how Terry got
RiBBs onto the internet (this includes a hardware hack to an RS-232 pak to
get around a bug in the 6551 serial chip that I always hated – it can’t
receive data if no carrier is detected… like trying to talk to a modem
to do modem set up):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162440108262641/
For those who want to give RiBBS a try themselves, Terry also released a
“RiBBS to Go” disk image (he labelled it as “Ease of Use” set up to run
from VCC, that you can download from the Coco gropu on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162431192677641/

9) David Chesak announced that he has Coco WiFi all in one boards now
available, and showed some pictures including options for with or w/o RS232
ROM’s, and switching between Modem Pak and RS-232 Pak addressing. Currently
you have to DM him to inquire about getting one:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162417245662641/

10) David Collins released firmware updates for his 6309 based Single
Board Computer, including:
Systick timer defaulting to 100 hz
register facilities to identify/clear an interrupt & adjust the delay
Sector size toggling (256/512 bytes) – this will allow the future FLEX
boot to work properly – which is already being worked on)
CUBIX port being worked on:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/flexoperatingsystem/posts/1201457491343700/
His github:
https://github.com/lindoran/HB63C09

MC-10

1) Spriteworx on YouTube (the channel for the author of the MC-10 recently
released game, T.H.E.M.) did a reaction video to one of TJ Ferrara’s older
videos about some of his favourite Retro computers (including the MC-10):
https://youtu.be/c5_Gk9bF_48?si=fTwKiQnAVEh3496x

Dragon 32/64

1) Ciaran shows an update of getting Fuzix (and a version of the 2048
game) running on his Dragon 64 with the SAMx8 chip (and 512K of RAM) and
the CocoSDC, including a nicely rendered true lowercase font at 32×24
characters on the screen. We just showed his photos and manual for the
hardware last week:
https://youtu.be/WGGKEBfRt3I?si=5emufFaxURDcrfHQ
2) Robcfg announced an update to his DragonDOS disk image utility, which
now adds the ability to render text based screens that you can find in a
disk image (he includes some screenshot samples). Free download from the
world of Dragon archives:
https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11145&start=20

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

1) Ellimist on YouTube made a speedrun video of Computerware/Scott Cabit’s
graphic adventure game Adventures in Mythology:
https://youtu.be/kThBCQCErQI
He also did one with Sands of Egypt in 95 turns:
https://youtu.be/9z29h3-HYUM?si=9ZhRjFxZ8zrnzMmD
And this morning he dropped a few more Coco adventure game speedruns:
Hall of King by Glen Dahlgren/Sundog Systems:
https://youtu.be/hzwl0_cS6NQ?si=el6JvmmnfvzHVutX
In Quest of the Starlord (also by Glen & Sundog – one of the earliest Coco 3
graphic adventure games & a large one – taking multiple double sided disks):
https://youtu.be/6h-NsL8lymI?si=b3bg6mQxYDEvmanE

2) Retro Rick has uploaded a beta update to Mike Snyder’s T&D game “Tiler Tex
Two” to the Programming and Development -> BASIC channel on Discord. This is
a first public beta; he has more changes to come. The main things in this
upload is to fix some bugs that showed up in the original if you played
for too long – it could eventually bomb out with OS and OM errors. He
has not tested all of the levels yet, but once that is complete he is
planning on some enhancements, including speeding up the level drawing,
some improved graphics, and more:
(Show screenshot of announcement)

3) Pere Serrat has two AGD game related updates this week to the Uploads
section of the World of Dragon Forums:
AGD Games Pack 67. Adds 4 more games for all Coco/Dragons:
Andrexoid
Dangerous Davie
Savage Princess
The Slasher
https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11267
NP13 Pack #13 (these are the Supersprite FM+ board versions, with full
color and sound, and updated with palettes much closer to the original
Spectrum versions):
Funkey Fungus Reloaded World 4
Funky Fungus Reloaded Final Boss
Dan Terrifick III
Toofy’s Winter Nuts
https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11268

4) NMI on YouTube released a video short showing Kingpede on his Coco
3 system:
https://youtube.com/shorts/1nFHSdLckqA?si=YQavYF819b64BW-o

5) Attempts: A gaming channel (by LRU) on YouTube did another gameplay
video for submitting for high scores, this time playing Steve Bjork’s
Stellar Lifeline on Easy setting:
https://youtu.be/e4bUCO6_K3U?si=_s2HsYEJViljWsDC

6) Spanish speaking site XperTek did another gameplay / real hardware
on an amber monitor video this week on his YouTube channel – this time
playing Ninja Warrior by Charles Forsythe / The Programmer’s Guild:
https://youtu.be/ow84HDbOPyU?si=z6lFvewiwcZQ2BC_

7) TGP Highscore runs on YouTube did an Alcatraz II (originally bye Spectral
on the Coco, although was on the Dragon 32) speedrun video. This is the
second Alcatraz II video in two weeks:
https://youtu.be/yj2emRvFduU?si=tW8N4KdeVt5RP5TP

8) Jim Jewett released yet another update to his Spacewar game this past
week on the Coco Facebook group. This expands the game to have 5 levels
of difficulity, and it also includes a companion program “SPOOFWAR” which
contains some easter eggs related to various Sci-Fi movies & programs:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162442267667641/

9) Not quite ready yet, but darned close is Floyd Resler’s Gem Quest 2
(we recently played the original Gem Quest on our Game On Challenge)
Screenshot samples of new levels & added elements:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1929079184021683/posts/3893818724214376/
New features:
Can now climb off a ladder if a monster is at the top of it.
Can shoot a monster one step below you.
Can shoot past ladders.
Can save a game at any point. There are five save slots.
The timer is used as a level-end bonus.
Added more levels.
Fixed problems on several levels that either caused errors or floor
elements to vanish.
The original game had 50 icons. This one has nearly 120!
There are more monsters and more game elements to interact with!
NOTE: there are more additions – but you will have to find them when you
play once the final release is out!

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