News stories for Episode 184, October 31, 2020 show

News stories for Episode #184, October 31, 2020 show:

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Ron Delvaux can go through his new Facebook Coco group related header designs, which look really good! Also, the pictures of the moon he did using Robert Sieg's new program.

Erico has a cool SG4 Halloween themed graphic up on the coco-art-gallery channel on Discord

For Nick Marotta for the tail end of Game On Challenge: Main order/info site for pipes:

 https://nickmarentes.com/ProjectArchive/pipes.html

Video demo link:

 https://youtu.be/kBi1Q3TPR3g

1) Robert Sieg has uploaded a disk image with 3 sample 160x192x16 color pictures, designed for use on composite to simulate almost 256 colors on the screen at once:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158704925642641/

He also later (on Wednesday) improved his "256 color composite mode", which he shows an example of using the same photo of a leopard, showing both his old and new algorithms:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158709000022641/

And a picture of model that has gone through several conversion algorithms over the week:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158714908667641/

2) Simon Jonassen (with some help from Paul Fiscarelli) released some details and sample song using a 4 voice music player that they came up with, that allows separate waverforms for each voice. He has been updating it during the week, so here is his latest video:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158710255617641/

3) Neil Blanchard has a last call for his special run of 40th anniversary Coco masks on Facebook:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158702605037641/

4) Sheldon MacDonald posted a video on the Coco group on Facebook showing what his upcoming RSDOS tool program is getting added; namely directly integrating William Astle's cross assembler, LWASM, and editing source files directly in the utility, right on the DSK images:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158702113502641/

5) Philippe Trottier posted on Facebook about replacing a 6551 chip (the serial chip in the RS-232 pack, and built into the Dragon 64) with another chip. David Ladd can explain the details:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158701752637641/

6) Laurence Byers posted some scans of a review of BASIC-09 from the April 1984 issue of BYTE magazine, that I don't think I had seen before:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158699910317641/

7) Ciaran Anscomb (Sixxie) has posted a link to a work in progress on his gitlab account - indexing Dragon User magazine articles (like we have for Rainbow magazine already):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/permalink/2760427364216915/

8) Keith (ChibiAkumas) on YouTube has his first assembly language tutorial specifically for the Coco 3 up, concentrating on 16 color bitmap drawing in this episode:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk8jS4XAMKo

9) Paul Shoemaker put up a cool video demo on Facebook showing his "Pixels" program, which shows randomly moving pixels (that look like an ant or termite). He first runs it in BASIC (at double speed), and then shows how his new ML version runs (where he was also learning how to do pseudo random numbers in assembly). Please note he did a further update later, that you can find on the Coco group on Facebook:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158706384052641/

He also uploaded the binary file to try it on your own machine:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158708834057641/

10) Carlos Camacho is reminding people on Facebook that he has ROM chip upgrades for Coco 1/2's available (so you can add Extended BASIC to a Color BASIC only Coco you found on ebay, etc.):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158708744987641/

11) Steve Norton has released a utility on Facebook (for Windows) that will help automate renaming long DSK filenames to the 8.3 format required for the CocoSDC. This is still considered to be beta, so make sure to back up files first. He also has some notes of some problems to be aware of in the post:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158709171842641/

12) Peter Cetinski uploaded to github an archive of the Tandy Coco Tech bulletins:

 https://github.com/pski/model2archive/blob/master/Other/CoCo/Color_Computer_Technical_Bulletins.pdf

13) Darren Ottery put up a video demo on Facebook of his simple Drum machine program called 'Beatbox'. It is based on an ML routine that Craig Stewart (author of Pursuit, Space Marauder and other Coco game titles):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158712179067641/

14) Bill Pierce has put up a list of known bugs, and of feature requests, for VCC on Facebook and is asking for people to update the lists for future updates. There is an update coming out soon with better composite and artifacting colors, and cut/paste features:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/366791731040411/permalink/367817117604539/

15) Episode 65 of the Coco Crew podcast is out - reviewing two games (Cosmic Aliens and [REDACTED GAME] III), covering stack blasting on the Tech segment, and a discussion on whether the combined flavours of the Coco's Microsoft/Microware BASIC ROM's constitute an OS:

 http://cococrew.org

16) Robert Gault has uploaded a utility called MLFINDER to the Facebook Coco group, which allows you to find start,end,exec addresses on ML programs, and other information. Includes source code.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158712858292641/

17) I released the first public release of the new Technical Reference manual for NitrOS-9. This includes a lot of previously undocumented system calls, 3rd party driver calls, corrections to the original manual, and highlights which ones are new to NitrOS-9 (vs. the original OS-9 Level II), and new to EOU. This is the 2nd section of the original Tandy/Microware OS-9 Level II manual that has been updated, and is about 100 pages longer than the original with all the new stuff. (The other is the Windows section). Work has already started on the 3rd part, but this is an even bigger one, and will take awhile).

 http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/nitros9_docs.html

18) AC's 8-Bit Zone has posted a video up to you his YouTube channel - where a channel viewer has a Coco 2 that won't start up properly - and AC sees if he can fix it (part 1):

 https://youtu.be/tChs-TzTAJ0

19) John Whitworth announced that a 2nd order for the MSX 2+ boards has been ordered, and that it will be compatible with Oojamaflip (not sure what that is?) so that it will work with disk based software like the Dragon MMC and CocoSDC:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158715637652641/

Game On news:

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1) Avram Berman put up an interesting question in the Coco Facebook group: What Coco game would you most like to have a sequel of?

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158704853567641/

2) Neil Blanchard posted in the Coco page on Facebook that he has a last call going out for 3D Monster Maze and Bomb Threat cartridges - order while you can.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158702614802641/

3) [REDACTED] has released the first info files for eventual disassembled source code for 4 programs on his GitHub. These are not the full disassemblies yet. This includes his [REDACTED GAME] game (which he had lost the sourcecode for), and Audio Spectrum Analyzer, Buzzard Bait and Color Baseball:

 https://github.com/[REDACTED][REDACTED]/CoCo.Disassemblies

4) Paul Thayer has a video update on his progress with his Coco 3 game, Sokoban (please note that Facebook is compressing the video a bit too much and is showing some visual glitches that don't happen in the emulators or the real Coco):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158709160322641/

5) Nick Marentes did a tongue in cheek "teaser" image for his upcoming dual game pack (Rally-SG, now with a track editor, and his new Pipes game), which has stirred some controversy. Nick has a comment on this.

6) Rick Adams put some scans up on Discord and Facebook showing some of his original notes and sketches for his original, more complicated design for the OmniStar game he released this year. These date back decades.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158708785587641/

7) Henry Reitveld did a quick video showing him using the CocoSDC with Brett Gordon's YA DOS (and disk image by Ron Klein) that can have up to 3500 floppy disk images (550 MB worth):

 https://youtu.be/i6tTHwkuv30

8) Vintage is the New Old did a review of [REDACTED GAME] III: The [REDACTED]'s Ascension, including a gameplay video:

 https://vintageisthenewold.com/[REDACTED GAME]-iii-the-[REDACTED]s-ascension-the-lode-runner-that-the-trs-80-coco-3-never-had-until-now/

Video of gameplay:

 https://youtu.be/vREsHnbXGH4