News stories for Episode 182, October 17, 2020 show

News stories for Episode #182, October 17, 2020 show:

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0) If Terry Steege isn't able to be on, his Darth Vader Coco pictures are up:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/imacoconut/permalink/758570748327199/

1) 8-bit Show and Tell has released his 2nd TRS-80 Easter eggs (including MC-10, and Coco 2&3):

 https://youtu.be/7CMvXGYHyT4

2) Sheldon MacDonald has updated is PSG player that we showed last week, to now include percussion:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158666084422641/

3) AC's 8-Bit Zone has another new Coco video up - where he fixes up his older (melted keyboard) Coco 2 that we have seen before, with the missing spacebar. In this episode he works on 3D printing a replacement space bar key (and gives a shout out to CocoTalk!) - and it involves a coat hanger:

 https://youtu.be/6KrBYymqeAY

4) Keith @ ChibiAkumas has his next Dragon/Coco assembly language tutorial up - this time, covering sound (and he mentions at the end that he is planning on doing Coco 3 specific episodes in the future):

 https://youtu.be/Ef51PYT2VbM

5) Denis Bisson has a cool hardware project that he posted about on Facebook (and made a video for): A ROM based testing card that plugs into the Color BASIC ROM socket, and requires NO RAM to actually run (so it will work even on Coco's that do have ROM problems and can't boot properly). It tests RAM completely based on it's ROM code, and the 6809 and it's internal registers only, and sends results out at 600 baud through the bit banger port (which you can monitor from a PC, Mac, another Coco, etc. through a terminal program). Facebook page and photo:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158670118757641/

YouTube Video:

 https://youtu.be/zJWWcZIZkBM

6) Darren Atkinson has a new blog entry on his page showing his brand new MCX32-SD expansion module for the MC-10 and Alice. This adds 32K of static RAM, 128K flash RAM (16 8K banks) and an SD Card slot. The Flash RAM includes MCX BASIC version 3, which supports high res graphics & other Extended BASIC niceties. It has also been updated to fully support PMODE 3 and 4 (6K graphics pages) if one has done the internal MC-10 hardware RAM upgrade modification. As usual, Ed Snider at Zippsterone will be doing the actual manufacturing, and it is expected to be on sale by the end of 2020:

 https://mcxwares.blogspot.com/2020/10/mcx32-sd.html

7) Jim Brain of RETRO Innovations now has the raw PCB for his Philarmonic-12 (a clone of the original Symphony-12 from Speech Systems from the 1980's - capable of up to 4 percussion and 12 music voices simultaneously). The board is only $6.00, and you supply the chips (4 AY-3-8910's and support logic) and solder them yourself:

 https://store.go4retro.com/tandy/philharmonic-12-pcb/

8) Allen Huffman put up a blog post on the "alternate" color sets that can be done on the 32x16 hardware text screen on all Coco's:

 https://subethasoftware.com/2020/10/14/coco-text-screen-can-be-changed-in-basic/

9) Darren Ottery shared a couple of short videos showing a cool visual trick that you can do in BASIC (both on the MC-10 with MCX and on the Coco 1/2/3, and I assume the Dragon 32/64 as well), by switching the graphics mode resolution with the same scene drawn. I believe this is the same technique that Steve Bjork used for the dynamite explosion in Canyon Climber: MC-10/MCX-128 version:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158681961587641/

Coco version is in the comments (It won't give me a direct link, unfortunately. Click on it, and set to HD)

10) Paul Barton put up a historic picture from back around 1990, showing his first version of his 2 MB RAM board, and other mods, to his completely hacked up Coco 3 (these eventually became the NoCan board series, which were much shrunk down, and handled 8+ MB of RAM, high speed serial ports, etc.):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158679736827641/

11) Kevin Ray posted a picture of his July 1983 Rainbow magazine on Facebook, which still has it's flex record intact (mine is long lost). This was a cool 2nd anniversary special that Rainbow did, where they had 3 programs on the record, and if you hooked up a record player you had to the headphone (Black) plug on your Coco cassette cable, you could CLOAD the programs from the record:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158675461402641/

Game On news:

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1) Jim Gerrie has a new Beta game for the MC-19: Decoy. It's based on a Dick Smith VZ200 original.

 https://youtu.be/Of-Y7k_DyL0

He also has released "Kingdom of Euphoria", a simulation game along the lines of Viking, Erland and Castle Greymoon. This is a port to the MC-10 from "The First Book of Tiny BASIC programs" by Tom Pittman in 1981:

 https://youtu.be/HYagCLlyu1w

2) Somewhat Coco related - The "Complete BBC Micro Games Archive" page has several Falsoft adventure games listed - these are BASIC adventure games that were ported to the BBC from Rainbow magazine:

 http://bbcmicro.co.uk//index.php?search=Falsoft&on_P=on%3Chttp://bbcmicro.co.uk/index.php?search=Falsoft&on_P=on%3E

3) Paul Shoemaker has put up an updated video (and DSK image download) showing updates to his isometric graphical adventure game he is working on: Download:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158670876022641/

Video:

 https://www.facebook.com/paul.shoemaker.169/videos/1041908529569815/

And a further update with a screenshot of 4 monsters (Based on the the Beginner/Expert Dungeons & Dragons manual):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158675257987641/

4) Chad Edward started an interesting discussion on the Facebook Coco group: What was the first game you ever owned (or maybe played) on your Coco?:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158674774277641/

5) Carl Daugherty posted about pitting the Burke&Burke port of Cyrus Chess to OS-9 playing against a Chess Challenger Voice electronic chess game. Cyrus won the first game.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158673927652641/

6) Ken Reichhart has put up a video of gameplay for his BASIC game "Inter-Planetary Trash Collector", which he has available for download:

 https://youtu.be/RKbPMRy_wp8

Download site:

 https://kenscococorner.itch.io/interplanetary-trash-collector

7) Simon Jonassen has an update video for his game work in progress, now doing vertical movement while still enabling horizontal hardware scrolling (a 56K screen):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158677273872641/

8) [REDACTED] has started to reverse engineer source code for some of his earlier projects (like [REDACTED GAME] 1 and [REDACTED]). He has an interesting tale on Facebook of how, when working on [REDACTED GAME] I, he had gotten lazy and saved more RAM than was needed for the game itself - and in this way, he got lucky and it saved some of his original sourcecode from the EDT/ASM 3 assembler (by CerComp) that he was using at the time:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158678251322641/

And he completed the [REDACTED GAME] 1 disassembly on Friday:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158681330327641/

9) Erico Patricio Monteiro has a lively discussion going on in Facebook on how to get BASIC programs to "self-modify" the code, so that the logic in a game can change by level (not just the data itself). A very interesting discussion that is still ongoing, with various tricks and techniques mentioned by multiple people:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158680930042641/

10) Erico also posted some semi-graphics design work he has been doing with Jim Gerrie for his Aliens game (he has further updates in the comments):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158676724037641/

11) And, Jim Gerrie put up a test program of an engine for Erico's Aliens, from his MC-10, which shows the 3D view in the upper right corner, and the map/player position on the left. Unlike a lot of earlier 3D style engines, Jim's is properly handling things like rooms and wider hallways:

 https://youtu.be/rr2kedrJp7w

12) Simonwgb did another live Dragon 32 game playing stream on Twitch, which I finally got to watch live, and we chatted during the stream, including gameplay suggestions. He has now joined our Discord, and hopefully we can eventually get him on for an interview about his experiences with a real Dragon back in the day, and his playing games on XRoar nowadays. He streams a lot of retro platforms live on Twitch, and then posts the videos to YouTube later as well:

 https://youtu.be/1Q9kMzIxf_E

13) Richard Kelly has released version 1.00 of Super Ladderman (aka Ladderman 2), a well done platformer in BASIC with dozens of levels. It is available on Facebook for download, for free, and as Open Source (screenshots in comments):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158680867197641