News stories for Episode 196, January 23, 2021 show

News stories for Episode #196, January 23, 2021 show:

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1) Jim Brain of Retro Innovations (also current president of Glenside) announced the release of Version 2 of his Dual 6X09 switcher product, which has been will now work with all 2 MB RAM MMU/DAT board upgrades (Jim should be on the call to discuss details and take questions):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/1929079184021683/permalink/2782538318675761/

He also has a new "Coco 2 edition" (passive version, unlike his new one above), that will fit in Coco 2's with Revision F motherboards, and even with CocoVGA's installed.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/1929079184021683/permalink/2782537892009137/

He also is trying to get minimum orders for the CocoNIC card (Network card), and Bruce Gordon has already added some preliminary support to Fuzix to use the card:

 https://sites.google.com/site/cocoboot2/fuzix/fuzixworkingthecoconiccard

And Brett's video:

 https://youtu.be/yBuQoY5Kc1U

2) Allen Huffman has posted part 7 of his blog series, "Benchmarking the Coco keyboard". This includes his followup to the mistake he noted in the previous installment, and then further optimizations suggested by commenters:

 https://subethasoftware.com/2021/01/18/benchmarking-the-coco-keyboard-part-7/

3) For those interested in learning some of "quirks" of C under Nitr(OS-9), JoAnn Donaldson has had many threads going the last while in the NitrOS-9 group on Facebook, and getting answers from various experienced Coco C programmers:

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

4) Terry Trapp has a small update on his using the P2EVAL board we covered recently - thanks to help from Greg Miller, he has it peeking the Coco bus:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158917812952641/

5) Chad Edward has a call out to all Australian Coco users to join their Australian Coco Facebook group, in an effort to get enough people to make an Australian CocoFest/Tandy Assembly worthwhile:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158916422047641/

The link to the Australian page is in the above post.

6) John Whitworth posted a video showing how he got around an issue with booting OS9 on a Dragon 64 with a DragonPlus board installed with a CocoSDC. He had to install a CPU adaptor board to get it to boot properly, which he plans to make available for sale soon. Facebook post explaining a bit about the problem:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158907982377641/

Video showing booting without the board, and with the board (which adds pull-up resistors to the address & read/write line, like a Coco 3):

 https://youtu.be/gYpFQ0iMR1Q

John just put up a blog explaining what his fix does:

 https://www.dragonplus-electronics.co.uk/6809-pull-up-resistors

7) Simon Jonassen posted a picture of a Mandelbrot set picture that he is coding into assembly, and did a slight coding error with colors on the outside of the picture... but it actually looks pretty good anyways:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158906925417641/

8) Robert Sieg posted in the MC-10 group that he has made a text reader for the MC-10 that uses the full capabilities of the MCX-32 SD card reader add-on - and his test was the complete Bible (over 700 files of 6K each)!

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/permalink/3567467633380033/

9) Robert also posted a BASIC program for the MC-10 that will give you information on any BMP format file of 6K and under, and will even display it if it is 2 color 128x96 resolution, allowing one to create graphics on a modern computer to view directly on the MC-10:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/permalink/3565572400236223/

It's not fast, but it works. He did a sped-up "shaky-cam" video showing it loading such a picture:

 https://www.facebook.com/robert.sieg.94/videos/4062953403723486/

10) Jim McClellan has uploaded yet another update to McDraw for the MC-10 - it now allows you to erase the Alphatype (semigraphic color) letters as well as draw them, and allows the user to pick the BASIC program it generates to draw the picture (if you choose the BASIC output option). Requires the MDX32-SD.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/permalink/3564704683656328/

11) Mark Dusko published a short BASIC program for the MC-19 to draw circles on the 64x32x8 low res screen. This started a discussion and multiple other BASIC programs to do similar, using some different

techniques:
 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/permalink/3561995093927287/

12) Greg Dionne put his Microcolor BASIC cross-compiler for the MC-10 up for download on GitHub. This doesn't cover the newer MCX-BASIC extensions (and doesn't quite cover every possible normal BASIC command), but looks fairly complete, from a first glance:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/permalink/3552532511540212/
 https://github.com/gregdionne/mcbasic

In the comments, James Ross gave it a try with a quick program to POKE the entire viewable character set (including semi-graphics) onto the full 512 character screen. His result: BASIC took 4.5 seconds, the compiled version took 0.1 to 0.2 seconds.

 A pre-built version of it for Windows 10 is available here:

http://coco3.org/download/mcbasic-1.0_2021-01-17.zip Please note that this is still a work in progress, so check for updates!

13) An interesting post from Jim Fuller on the Dragon Facebook group, on some of the dangers of using hydrogen peroxide to retrobite (from the viewpoint of a former "Museum Artifact Conservator", and very technical. Ironically, this original author is from Saskatoon, where I am):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/permalink/2826602784266039/

14) Unum Lapis in the Dragon group posted a question about an RGB to HDMI adaptor, which supports a variety of older 8 bit computers (some require some modifications, including the Dragon and Coco), but gets really good output (see text screen shots in the comments). There was some speculation that it would work for NTSC artifact colors in the comments, but I don't see examples or that:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/permalink/2826193430973641/

15) Craig Chapman posted a video on YouTube (which he linked to from the "All Things Tandy Radio Shack" Facebook page, to teach binary arithmetic. He uses his Coco 2 for the lesson... including an animated one:

 https://youtu.be/-nhDhANRVTY

16) Alan at AC's 8-Bit Zone has a new video up, showing how to convert IBM PC Jr Kraft style joysticks to the Coco (and what the differences are), how he fixed a broken arm in his Tandy Deluxe joystick, and also some info on 6847-T1 (true lowercase VDG) and 64K RAM upgrades on a late model Coco 2. He also does a quick run through of the Diagnostic ROM Pak from Tandy:

 https://youtu.be/mzF2XzB-kEo

17) Retro Gaming Banter posted a video on YouTube this week doing a retro restore of a Dragon 32 - it had bad capacitors, corroded boards... He also tests loading a program using the TZXDuino hardware:

 https://youtu.be/fugr8l52DcY

18) Sloopy from our Discord put up a link to a new Facebook group that me be interesting to Coco owners: the Vintage Computer Programming for Beginners group:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/693602131273725

19) Ben Drakes, who was on our show last week to talk about the the mementos he got from his late neighbor Richard Wadman (former sales & marketing director at Dragon Data, and one of the designers of the original Dragon 32), has put photos up of some of the things he received in the Dragon Facebook group:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/permalink/2829587990634185/

20) As of this show, the new EOU 6.0.1 release is out, for GIME-X or regular Coco's, 6809 or 6309, emulators, and it should be available as an update for the Coco PI as well. This is mainly a bug fix release, but with some new documentation, features and program updates as well (see a partial list by the download link):

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

Game On news:

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1) Jim Gerrie has a video up of his version of Spacewar! on the MC-10, which features live gameplay and commentary from him and his son playing it:

 https://youtu.be/cRLeZT5K88o

You can download the WAV file to load it from the cassette port here:

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ptdgB83C1hfybXpp_M1RMQ_zQaYHnGk9/edit

2) The Amigos are doing a CocoShow live recording on Twitch (and their Atari 8 bit show as well) starting at 2:00 PM EST on Sunday, featuring Pegasus and the Phantom Riders. Show your support by showing up in their live show chatroom!

 https://www.twitch.tv/amigosretrogaming

3) Steve Norton showed off his Atari style joystick mod that he did on his own on the Coco Facebook group:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158917124547641/

4) Sheldon MacDonald now how has some simple sprite code also working with his semigraphics-8 engine that he has demoed before. This shows off tile mapping, screen scrolling and the semi-graphics sprites:

 https://www.facebook.com/sheldon.macdonald.733/videos/10164796202135361/

In the comments, he also has a picture of some of his sprite designs for it:

 https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10164797242865361

He also showed an interior room map scrolling earlier in the week, using a slightly older version of the engine (which still had some tearing):

 https://www.facebook.com/sheldon.macdonald.733/videos/10164776877395361/

5) Tor-Eirik Bakke Lunde put up a picture of a very compact joystick adaptor for the Dragon on the Dragon Facebook group:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/permalink/2829067284019589/

6) Rob's Retro Rambles does a game play of QuickBeam's Shaolin Master Plus game on the Dragon 32:

 https://youtu.be/s1xUwmRcoXA