News stories for Episode 165, June 20, 2020 show

News stories for Episode #165, June 20, 2020 show:

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1) Canadian Retro Things has a video of how to fix some screen glitches he had in his MC-10 with the 8K RAM mod. It now works properly even with the 16K RAM expansion.

 https://youtu.be/NYdWeXxZGzw

2) Phil Harvey-Smith has some photos of the first factory manufactured circuit boards for the DragonSM. Needs some tweaks, for these should be fixable. This is a replacement switchable power supply board for the Dragon 32/64 computers.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/permalink/2645282975731355/

3) Jim Gerrie basically has Sword of Fargoal (originally a Vic 20 & Commodore 64 commercial game from Epyx) working on the MC-10, but he needs some bug-testers. If you are on the MC-10 group on Facebook, you can contact him for a WAV file to load onto the MC-10. (He also has a demo video of it in it's current state):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/permalink/2939712129488923/

4) Allen Huffman's new blog post is a bit different this week - he found an old handwritten disassembly that he had written decades ago, and then decides to try and figure out what it was doing:

 https://subethasoftware.com/2020/06/04/coco-notebook-mystery-6809-assembly/

5) Ed Snider has a test CocoMECH keyboard using black keys:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158358030137641/

6) Bart van den Akker of the Home Computer Museum in the Netherlands had his original Coco 2 (which would be the white Coco 1 to North Americans) as the Computer of the Day for June 16:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158354120977641/

7) Todd Wallace has released his new DIR utility for NitrOS-9 that works similar to DIR in MS-DOS (his screenshot is even using his CGA PC font), and you can download it from his site:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158353911262641/

8) Boysentech has announced availability of their version of the CocoSDC (currently board only on June 22 - ones with cases will be available by mid-July):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158362863532641/

9) Mini discussion topic - Michael Pittsley put up a question on Facebook Friday evening about what is the best "Demo" program on the Coco 3? The two main Radio Shack ones (the original Coco 3 announcement, and the Coco 3 Christmas one), as well as the Sierra one, the Ray-traced bouncing ball demo, the waterfall demo (ported from the Atari ST). I would add some of the bouncing ball demos (Sock Master, Vaughan Cato, Kevin Darling), Sock's two other demo's & his Moon demo, Simon Jonassen's CocoFest demo (and his Rotosanta), RemTube's 3d texture map demo, Wolfenstein 3D style demo & his sprite/map scrolling demo, John Linville's video player demo, amongst others. Any others from the panel?

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158364749812641/

10) Boisy Pitre has released The Coco Collector Episode 3 - which shows a Coco 3 that used to belong to Marty Goodman, so of course it has mods:

 https://youtu.be/4_v9WPeUvvw

Game On news:

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1) Marlin Lee has put up a video of a rare Moon Patrol style game (Butterfly Patrol), that I had just put on my games site recently myself. Not one of the better clones. https://youtu.be/IQ97Xr1SCaQ

2) Brian Palmer has been hunting through his disks looking for later versions of Spectral Associates games, after they enabled speech (for the Sound Speech Pak), and has been successful in finding quite a few of them. They are uploaded to FaceBook, and some are already on the Color Computer Archive (the rest should be shortly). So far, he has found Space Wrek, Qix, Galagon, Cubix, Ms. Gobbler and Froggie.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/files/

3) Jim Gerrie has (possibly final) video showing The Sword of Fargoal (after doing multiple changes over the course of the past week). Bug testing might be done now?

 https://youtu.be/GF2uxtnkeGM

4) Cuthbert Dragon has been busy again:

 https://www.youtube.com/user/MaryWinstead32/videos

Ones of note (some totally new, some where he/she actually knows how to play):

 North Sea Action (which appears to be a clone of Anteater from the arcade, or at least a derivative).
 Impossiball
 Rola Ball
 6809 Express
 Super Nova
 Darts
 Perilous Pit
 Castle Attack
 River of Fire (it changes color sets as you play, which is different for a graphic adventure game)
 Death Valley
 Droids
 Cosmic Crusader (which I just added to my website recently)
 Return of the Ring (make sure to scrub through - there are several display types as one plays)
 Juxtaposition (skip to 5:30, when he leaves the dome, too - some of the walking has a 3D type effect)
 Sword and the Sourcerer
 Starman Jones
 Kung Fu the Master
 Sky-Joust (which at first glance it looks like Joust, but... you can shoot?
 Star Defense