News stories for Episode 175, August 29, 2020 show

News stories for Episode #175, August 29, 2020 show:

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We have Brian Schubring, Rob Inman and Darren Ottery on today to talk about using using Jim Brain/Retro Innovation's new Coco MIDI Maestro card (a modernized equivalent of the older Glenside and Speech Systems MIDI cards), with some demos on both Coco 1/2 (Lyra) and Coco 3 (Ultimuse III, MPlay/MFPlay, etc.

(Rob's multitasking video is here: https://youtu.be/uQFBhsmneGs)

Retro Innovations / Jim Brain is now fully shipping MIDI Maestro cards, which allow MIDI synth programming (and recording, depending on the software used) directly from the Coco to any MIDI synthesizer.

 http://www.go4retro.com/products/midi-maestro/
 https://store.go4retro.com/tandy/midi-maestro/

We will be having (or have had) demo's from both Brian Schubring and Rob Inman showing use of these cards both from a Coco 1 or 2 (Lyra) and Coco 3 specific (Coco MIDI Pro, Ultimuse III), showing up to 8 voices at once on the Coco 1/2, and 16 on the Coco 3.

Along the same lines, Brian Schubring has started posting his video series on using MIDI with the Coco, and has 2 episodes out already on Facebook:

1. 1: General introduction to MIDI on the Coco, some programs that use it, and what is needed:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/?post_id=10158549311617641

1. 2: Playing Compacted Midi Files under NitrOS-9 (both regular EOU editions) using MFPlay:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/1929079184021683/?post_id=2662900273972900

CoCo News

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1) Bill Pierce has released version 2.0.1f of VCC. This fixes the composite artifact colors to be much closer to what a real Coco displays:

 https://github.com/VCCE/VCC/releases

And James Ross put up a comparison of the new composite colors from the older versions and the new one:

 https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10221468934546889&set=p.10221468934546889

2) Bill Nobel has released his new SDC2 utility, which is a more user friendly utility for accessing SDC disk images from NitrOS-9, using full word english commands, built in help and also works with ANY device descriptor name (it checks to make sure it is an SDC based device), which allows naming descriptors whatever you want. This will be included in EOU Beta 6, but you can get it now for standard NitrOS-9 and EOU Beta 5:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/1929079184021683/permalink/2661221124140815/

He also has uploaded a short video showing it in action:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/?post_id=10158552162027641

3) Phil Harvey-Smith has put some photos up in the Dragon group on Facebook for the custom cases he is doing for his customer debugging hardware (I think I have that right) that we showed a month or two ago:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/?post_id=2705235663069419

4) Also from the Dragon Facebook group, "The Digital Orphanage" YouTube page has him getting 11(!) Dragon 32 computers from the Museum of Computing in Swindon, UK that he is going to try and reburbish - starting with the power supplies:

 https://youtu.be/YY56UpN37Bo

5) Robert Sieg has been experimenting with a program to dither colors on the MC-10, with some pretty good results:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/?post_id=3152145568245577

6) Ken (CanadianRetroThings) go his Coco 3 up and running, and tested some peripherals to make sure the ports are working:

 https://youtu.be/VjfPeRMJSeU

7) Keith (ChibiAkumas on YouTube) has his next Tandy Coco/Dragon assembly language tutorial up - this time on using bitmap graphics:

 https://youtu.be/_AzD_hPkW4g

8) Sheldon MacDonald has released his first beta release of his RSDOS Windows utility. It has some known bugs, but he wants people to test it and report any bugs to him so that he can fix them:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/?post_id=10158561425997641

Game On news:

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1) Neil Blanchard has announced availability of his new "The Gamester" - a customizable, real arcade hardware based joystick for the Coco (featuring a real red ball arcade joystick, and two real arcade firebuttons in a custom wood case). You can even get an adaptor to use it as a single button stick on a Dragon 32/64:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/?post_id=10158549499767641

2) A guy named Denis Bisson put up a gameplay video of Pooyan under MAME. Good to see more and more people getting into try the Coco, in any form. :)

 https://youtu.be/1gqj4ZquvFU

3) A reminder from Ian Mavric that the 2020 Trash Talk game programming competition for 2020 has a deadline of November 30. This is for any TRS-80 or Tandy computer, in any language (BASIC, ML, etc.). You are allowed to use peripheral hardware as well (like the Sound/Speech pak). Prizes include a Coco floppy controller, Orchestra-90 card, and cards for other Tandy computer products.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/?post_id=10158559930527641

Contest page:

 http://trs-80.org.uk/2020competition.html

4) John "Boatofcar" Shawler of the Amigos did a live Coco stream this past Thursday evening, including a mix of Coco 1/2 and Coco 3 games (and gets to use his "new" Deluxe joystick) which lasted almost 1.5 hours:

 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/723506294

5) Following Brett Gordon's progress on his networkable Coco 3 game, he has the Coco engine side doing 4 way scrolling, a text window, etc., which he showed on Discord with a brief animated gif:

 (load 'bretts_latest_test.gif" from my desktop).

6) [REDACTED] made an announcement (with his typical humour) of the official release date for the much anticipated [REDACTED GAME] III on Facebook (make sure to read the caption under the title):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/?post_id=10158560817427641

7) Jim Gerrie has yet another update to his port of the 3D graphical adventure game Akalabeth (originally on the Apple II), with yet more improvements to the font, and handling the double speed POKE on the Dragon 32 and Coco:

 https://youtu.be/8YFDIOdLBG4

8) User Hloberg on the Atari Age forums has released a Mille Bornes card game (written in BASIC). I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, but he said that it is non-graphic, but uses a 51x24 high res screen driver. It's converted over from an Atari 8 bit version, and should be on the color computer archive soon, if it isn't already:

 https://atariage.com/forums/topic/310676-mille-borne-in-basic-for-the-coco/