News stories for Episode 199, February 13, 2021 show

News stories for Episode #199, February 13, 2021 show:

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Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform)

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1) Simon has an updated version of his Mandelbrot generating video, which now does the 320x225x16 Mandelbrott fractal screen in around 6 minutes, at stock Coco 3 1.78 Mhz. He still has some tweaks to go before releasing (note: the video shows about the first half):

 https://www.facebook.com/simon.jonassen1/videos/10164906972410506/

2) Retro Hack Shack (Aaron Newcomb) Put up a new video showing how he upgraded his Coco 3 with the CocoSDC, 6309 and 2 MB RAM Boomerang E2 upgrade board, and the RGB to HDMI circuit (that also supports NTSC artifact colors - even if you are running on a PAL based Coco 3):

 https://youtu.be/pJgq_Wc5DgI

3) Jerry Stratton put up a blog post about a technique he uses to aid in typing in listings from physical books and magazines. In his specific case, he uses his Mac with Quick Actions to read the text out loud, and has a brief video that demonstrates it:

 https://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/hacks/coco/readbasic/

He then did a followup to allow it to handle both decimal and hexadecimal listings:

   https://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/hacks/coco/coco-bin-files/color-computer-binaries-decimal-values/

4) Richard Kelly has released his program Memory Mirror (0.7 beta) on Facebook, which is a utility to view memory in 32 byte chunks (using semigraphics), so it looks like a good utility to go through ML adventure games looking for keywords, etc.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158978169497641/

5) Allen Huffman pointed to part 1 (of 8) of the BBS documentary that was done years ago, and is now on YouTube. He points to a specific mention of the Coco at 21:15 in. This is an excellent documentary series on the history of BBSing (it also shows the intense rivalry between the various platforms from the time - even more intense than it is now):

 https://youtu.be/Dddbe9OuJLU

6) Michael Furman has started an entirely new blog, and has two articles relating to NitrOS-9 EOU already, including how to set up some customization with the DriveWire Becker port in emulators, and another with some modifications to the SysGo module (which will be part of the upcoming 6.1 update, but you can skip the wait and get it now from Mikey) so that it works with the Coco3FPGA.

 http://www.ocs.net

7) The Glenside Color Computer Club is going to try something old... for new. One of things that the user group meetings in the 1980's had was product/project demo's for the club members. Since GCCC already has regularly scheduled Blue Jeans meetings (that any member can attend), they are going to take a stab at doing a 1 hour demo session before the official club meeting business starts. This way, those not interested in demos can join at the regular time for the club business meeting, and those who just want to see the demo(s) can attend 1 hour earlier than normal, and then leave before the business part starts. Of course, people are welcome to stay through both! One advantage to this format is that the people performing the demos can take live questions from those attending the call, for immediate feedback. Glenside also put a poll up on Facebook, asking what people would like to see demoed (or whether people are keen on the idea at all). GCCC post:

 https://www.glensideccc.com/club-meetings-just-like-the-old-days/

Facebook poll:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/290791956162/permalink/10159086678371163/

8) JoAnn Donaldson, who has been re-learning C under NitrOS-9 on the Coco, put up a text file tutorial on how to set up a MAKE file for you own C project:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/1929079184021683/permalink/2797252147204378/

9) The Retro Channel on YouTube released his video that shows how to add component video (not composite) to a Coco 1, and also does a brief explanation of video signals:

 https://youtu.be/rymjY1cT6DE

MC-10

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1) Robert Sieg has put up a program for the MC-10 on Facebook that extends his text reader program (that we have mentioned before), that can read large documents (divided into 6K or smaller chunks) with the MXC-32 board. It now supports things like bookmarking where you left off. It's still a work in progress, and in addition to his original porting of the Bible over, he plans on adding Thomas Paine, Edgar Allen Poe and other full sized books to it.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/permalink/3613493338777462/

2) Jamie Cho has added another utility to his MC-10 Tools package; the new experimental program BASTOC10 will create a .c10 cassette file from a BASIC program; no emulator required.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/permalink/3609028519223944/

Dragon 32/64

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1) DragonPlus Electronics has two game videos up demonstrating the MSX 2+ board (both updates to AGD games, updated further for the MSX 2+ graphics&sound by Pere Serrat). The first one, Diamond Geezer, is fully graphics and sound updated (still more levels to do, though, I believe):

 https://youtu.be/lavY2uXpXOQ

Foggy's Quest is still a work in progress (and now NTSC compatible), but has the graphics completely converted over now. Sound to be worked on:

 https://youtu.be/l-NcgSCECSI

He also posted a video going through some of the graphics modes (with the same images) available on the MSX2+ board, based on a demo program Pere Serrat wrote:

 https://youtu.be/cT3AIxM9Jj8

2) Steven Goodwin posted in the Dragon Facebook group the the online Dragon emulator (EMF) has been updated to allow you to 'click and drag any file with a .BAS extension onto the screen, and it will auto-type those characters into the emulated machine':

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/permalink/2842146439378340/

Online emulator itself:

 https://em.ulat.es/machines/Dragon32

Ron's Garage special:

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Not news per se, but Ron Delvaux asked if we could go through some comments that people made to a post about the original Rainbow magazine he put up. Some cool stories in there, that we can quickly go through:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158966947827641/

Game On news:

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1) Cuthbert Dragon did a long play video of Shock Trooper, showing ALL the levels to completion. Unfortunately, he dubbed some music over it that has nothing to do with the original music, but great gameplay:

 https://youtu.be/YhajyR8lwqs

He also did a non-gameplay video featuring the Cuthbert Chronicle magazine that came out in the UK for the Dragon & Coco's, showing each page in the issue, including the announcement for the 6809 Colour trade show & many game reviews and ads. He shows samples from issues 2-5 (this may be worth playing the whole thing (less than 2&1/2 minutes), and pausing for people to comment on?)

 https://youtu.be/Kf2PP7Fud5E

2) A quick follow up to our previous story about the very impressive, playable game demo Return of the Beast (written by Stewart Orchard, with the 3 voice music player by Ciaran Anscomb) that was written for the 50Hz Dragon - the source code is available (for anyone wanting to tackle making it work on NTSC) here:

 https://github.com/sorchard001/ROTB

3) Mike Powell posted in the Facebook Dragon group that he is looking for some help with logos, etc. to make the graphics for a front end for Dragon themes for the emulator front ends (like Coinops, RetroFE, Hyperspin, etc.). I know Aaron @ the Amigos has done one for the Coco... any takers on helping him design one for the Dragon.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/permalink/2842802609312723/

4) The YouTube channel "Contra Epic Corps" did a long play video of the Coco 3 Contras game, showing it right through to completion in just under 15 minutes:

 https://youtu.be/C7kGpRz6iK4

5) 1) Jim Gerrie has released an update to his MC-10 port of the original Pirate Adventure by Scott Adams of Adventure International. His original version had to be split into multiple files, now it is all one file:

 https://youtu.be/KDH-nV6ie9s

He also already has his entry for the 10 line BASIC programming contest going that we mentioned last week, with SpaceWar:

 https://youtu.be/yLvFR3G9Q70

And also a second 10 liner entry based on a text adventure game called The Explorer originally by Clive Gifford:

 https://youtu.be/UjeYV_MyR_8

And a 3rd 10 line entry (the man is a machine!) for a fooseball/table hockey type game called Slap Shot:

 https://youtu.be/ehSDoaUElEA