News stories for Episode 172, August 8, 2020 show

News stories for Episode #172, August 8, 2020 show:

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1) Keith (ChibiAkumas on YouTube) has lesson 4 of his 6809 series up now - covering the stacks:

 https://youtu.be/mW57Gy436OE

2) Carlos Martins Nabeto posted a cool link to some 1983-1987 news about Brazilian Coco clones (in Portuguese):

 https://computadoresbrasileiros.wordpress.com/category/noticias/

English translation:

 https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fcomputadoresbrasileiros.wordpress.com%2Fcategory%2Fnoticias%2F%3F

3) Jason Weber on Facebook is helping organize "SepTandy" for this year (a YouTube virtual fest of sorts), and he is looking suggestions for the Coco 3 video portion of the show. So far he has a Coco 3 with a 6309, 512k RAM and CocoSDC, and is looking for suggestions for games and programs to really show off the hardware he has gathered vs. a standard Coco. Please reply to his post with suggestions:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158503187087641/

4) Frederiic Griignon posted a Radio Shack catalog page for the Coco from Quebec from around the 1981 time frame showing the great deal of getting a 16K Coco for the price of last year's 4K model, for only $549 Canadian (I bought my original Coco 1 before this; it was $549 for 4K when I got mine):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158496708377641/

5) James Jones is still soliciting feedback on his Coco MS Basic to BASIC09, but has now also published what he has come up with so far. Please add your own feedback and suggestions to his Facebook post:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158492811687641/

Direct link to the Google Doc so far:

 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DFWC0XAv6NENnqXc3AZGy_Gl6TcZDfPcHGAB34woQwg/edit

6) Timothy Halloran gave an update on getting his Coco 3 running from purely USB power - it is now, as he puts it, "mostly working". He is using a Coco 3 with 2MB RAM upgrade from Boysontech & 6309 (the latter two both draw less power than original hardware did), and will even boot up OS9 fine:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158491484982641/

7) Soren Roug has been typing in Dragon 128 drivers for OS-9 based on physically printed source listings that he got from Richard Harding. This includes some never before seen stuff for this advanced Dragon that never made it to market:

 https://www.roug.org/retrocomputing/os/os9/dragon128

8) Carlos Camacho posted the covers from an OS-9 book called "The OS-9 Guru : 1 - The Facts" (for OSK, by the sounds of it) that I have not seen before:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/1929079184021683/permalink/2646468465616081/

9) Nigel Barnes posted in the Dragon Facebook group that MAME now has external character ROM support in it's Dragon 200-E emulation, and thus that it is fully emulated now:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/permalink/2688555014737484/

10) I have made some rather crappy "shaky-cam" videos showing a few graphical things under NitrOS-9/6309 while using the prototype GIME-X in both normal 1.78 Mhz, and in 2.86 Mhz: (Pre-load 4 .mov files from GIME-X folder. Kyum-Gai has sound enabled, to show what pitch changes are like if they are not adjusted for)

11) I have also put up two videos to show increased speeds of scrolling (this also affects the speed if get/put buffer loading, and wide get/put buffers in general) in the forthcoming EOU Beta 6, due out before the end of the year. These videos are all 6809 - 6309 versions are faster still. Also, these have the overhead of printing characters, etc. so it doesn't fully show the speed increase (which is around 14-15%). I could have printed 1 character per line to concentrate on scrolling, but I wanted a more "typical use case": 80x25 hardware text:

 https://youtu.be/SsHMkmKIFYo

640x200x4 graphics:

 https://youtu.be/vD_q7-z4Iqc

Game On news:

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1) Jim Gerrie posted a video of his port of Steve Wozniak's original Apple classic "Little Brick Out" (this was originally wrote in the Integer BASIC that Woz wrote. Microsoft wrote Applesoft Basic, which added some high res support and floating point numbers). Jim added some options for customizing the game colors:

 https://youtu.be/8HMK1Si8ADY

2) [REDACTED] has released the first public Beta of [REDACTED GAME] III. This does have some minor known bugs, and only has the first 10 levels (and has hard mode disabled), but will give people with 512K (or higher) Coco 3's a chance to try the game out. It supports keyboard or joystick controls, features 4-way hardware scrolling graphics and digitized sound effects, and is one of the most impressive Coco 3 games out. The final version will add hard mode support, and 40 levels.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158495328987641/

3) Paul Thayer now has Timber Man available for paid download at itch.io: Announcement:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158493670122641/

Download link ($5.00 USD) - includes the DSK image and full color PDF manual:

 https://pthayer100.itch.io/timber-man

4) Paul Shoemaker put up a short video teaser of some graphics he is fiddling with for a possible upcoming game:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158492892777641/

5) A YouTube channel called "The New Retro Show" has an episode released yesterday that talks about "new games" for the Coco and MC-10:

 https://youtu.be/_QR2PZXaPRQ

6) Canadian Retro Things shows one of the Micro Adventure Books (a series of books from the 1980's, where one had to type in small BASIC programs to progress further in the story, that worked on a variety of 8 bit micros, including the Coco). It's kind of a computer based "Choose your own Adventure" book:

 https://youtu.be/ymLrh9NuTEQ