News stories for Episode 209, April 24, 2021 show

News stories for Episode 209, April 24, 2021 show:

==========================================

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

---

1) Henry Rietveld put up a video showing his Coco 3 surfing the web through Action Retro's "Frog Find" search engine (made for vintage computers). I believe he is logging the Coco onto a host PC via VT-52 or VT-100 emulation, and going through that way (similar to Lynx):

 https://youtu.be/3QXs0Rk16d4

2) Simon Jonassen has posted his next version of VDG hardware scrolling tricks, this time with a screen split text screen. Precise timing is still being worked on, so it's got a few visual glitches, but it's working:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159143282597641/

3) John Laury posted a Coco 3 only response video to Simon's, doing a similar trick but using the much easier to use GIME registers on the Coco 3:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159148836767641/

4) For any UK or European listeners who may have managed to pick up a 128k Coco 3 over the years, Ciaran Anscomb (author of XRoar, Dunjunz and other things) has made some prototype 512k upgrade boards. He has one installed and tested and working, so he doesn't need the other prototype, so he is selling a few extras, which should mean much cheaper shipping than ordering from the USA. The board is £17.50, plus shipping (which varies depending on options):

 https://www.6809.org.uk/shop/

5) Carlos Camacho found an interesting ad from a 1981 6809 magazine (before any Coco dedicated magazines came out, and within a year of the Coco being released), of a hardware adapter called the "Color Connection". This was an SS-50 bus adapter card, and could optionally allow RAM expansion of up to 48K (this was back when Radio Shack only offered 4 or 16K), as well as allowing hooking up of various SS-50 cards. (SS-50 was a common expansion bus on early 8 bits' from around the mid-1970's to mid-1980's). Some other cards that were available were 80 column cards, disks drives (a full year before Tandy offered them), and a 7 slot expansion interface.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159151401947641/

6) Riz Thomas on Facebook did a composite upgrade to his Coco 2, based on AC's 8 Bit Zone (Alan) video that we highlighted a few months back. He has before and after results posted... big improvement!

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159150637017641/

7) Catherine Trudel posted photos of her unboxing a DMP-105 dot matrix printer, which is in very good shape:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159149743387641/

She also unboxed a later generation MultiPak:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159149584902641/

8) 8 Bits in the Basement put up a video of what he is doing with Mark J. Blair's cartridge PCB (which he designed back in 2013). He shows to set one up, and shows some demos (including mounting the board inside the Coco, freeing the cartridge port itself:

 https://youtu.be/BWr6GbQZIfQ

9) Rocky Hill, whom we are planning on having on next week to talk about his Coco duplicated motherboard he designed that we showed last week, put up a couple of followup videos showing his testing of the serial and cassette ports on his motherboard: Cassette (also tests the joystick). It did I/O error, but loaded enough to run. It plays, but loses the artifact colors (maybe a colorburst issue, he speculates). Joystick works well, though:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iLEE3Uvddc

Serial:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JZ7AA1oiKc

X) And of course, tonight is the Virtual Spring Fest for the Glenside Color Computer Club, starting at 7:00 PM Eastern. No official club business; it is just a get together for Coco minded people. Use Blue Jeans software to join by audio or video from a computer or smart phone, or you can call in a regular phone line as well. Details on the Glenside site:

 https://www.glensideccc.com/glenside-virtual-spring-fest-saturday-april-24-2021-700-pm/

Somewhat related: Jim Gerrie (who unfortunately might not be able to make the meeting) is having his coffee mug giveaway based on people submitting scores for his MC-10 compiled BASIC game, Galaxy Jailbreak. If he can make the gathering, he will announce the winner tonight. If not, he will announce it tomorrow.

MC-10

---

1) Darren Atkinson has released an update to the MCX-32 BASIC (now to version 3.1), which fixes a variety of bugs in the new enhanced BASIC for the MC-10, and some specific to the Alice 32 and Alice 90 machines as well (including fixing the tone values for the PLAY command, since these later Alice's run at 1.00 MHz, not 0.895MHz like the original Alice and MC-10 did). It also enhances the RENUM utility. (Link to download is in the right column):

 https://mcxwares.blogspot.com/2021/04/mcx-basic-31-update.html

2) Jim McClellan has released version of his Itty Bitty Banner Maker for an MC-10 with a TP-10 (and it requires an MCX32-SD). Currently it allows a 64 character banner with alphanumerics and an exclamation point (more to come). He has the download available, and also shows a sample in the MC-19 Facebook group:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/permalink/3816018745191586/

Download link:

 https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1qtxFgolqukILnEcQI1req-YMg5Q7dLb-

Dragon 32/64

---

1) Felipe (Coco Demus) has released a special NitrOS-9 Level 1 for the Dragon Plus board (for either Dragon 32 or Dragon 64 computers). It supports native 80x24 hardware text screens (and saves RAM for level 1, since that 2K of text is from outside NitrOS-9's 64K), and also supports the extra 64K RAM on the Dragon Plus as a 64K RAM drive. Details and screenshots of it in action:

 https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=10923

Download link:

 https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/download/file.php?id=4639&sid=d68826ff51f1aba2c1a90cd04d847bfa

2) Ciaran has an update to XRoar that allows some tapes to load properly now (if they had some faint ghosting/echoing in the background, as he found on a commercial Galagon tape).

 https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=10922

Download link (version 0.36.6448) for Windows 32 and 64 versions with this update:

 http://www.6809.org.uk/tmp/xroar/

3) Philippe Hennebert posted some pictures of Dragon/Coco related stuff he has found while digging out his old stuff, and came across a couple of hardware bits that he doesn't remember:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/permalink/2893827980876852/

4) David F. Gisbert posted a picture of his dog - who is obviously a huge Dragon fan:

 https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=2095057597300907&set=gm.2893576657568651

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

==============================

1) Robert Allen Murphy has released his next blog on his port of the Nostromo game to the Coco, mainly covering sound support for the YMF-262 sound chip that comes in the MegaMini MPI from zippsterzone.com (Ed Snider - also make of the GIME-X):

 https://exileinparadise.com/nostromo:sounds_of_silence

2) Paul Shoemaker has put up a video showing his early efforts on his upcoming CocoVGA version of Poker Squares. For this version, he is working on some animated cards, which are shown in the video:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159143398312641/

3) Eric Monteiro posted a live dev video on YouTube showing some actual test game play for his upcoming SG4 fighting game in BASIC, using his amazing animations:

 https://youtu.be/u2A1pfNH31w?t=110

4) Cuthbert Dragon has started putting up Dragon game videos again (on real hardware). Most we have seen before, but a few are new to me: Guardian Angel, Mission Attack, Laser Run

 https://www.youtube.com/user/MaryWinstead32/videos

5) Jim Gerrie has released a slightly updated version of his MC-19 Mahjong game, and has a question for viewers/players - he has the tone of the select & match sounds go up as the number of tiles left in play goes down; he is wondering if that works, or should it just be fixed tones?

 https://youtu.be/Y1Ha8nkwYEM

6) Brendan Donahe has received his cartridge of Treasure Island Defence from Sheldon MacDonald, which is the first game cartridge for the Coco ever that supports the Coco 1/2 16 color mode with the CocoVGA (that Brendan designed and sells), and also uses a GMC board with built in sound chip. Brendan has some pictures and comments on the package:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159154988322641/

7) Tim Lindner, who is the most active Coco contributor to the MAME Coco cores, apparently took a bit of a break to record a couple of gameplay videos, playing the official Arkanoid and showing it in both Coco 1/2 and Coco 3 modes: Coco 3:

 https://youtu.be/1eexgL5b4lo

Coco 1/2:

 https://youtu.be/PFRBrOb4qNw

8) Watercooler Films (a rather large YouTube page with over 18,000 subscribers), put up some raw footage of Poltergeist gameplay, which was recorded for "the review series Take Me To Your Leaderboard", which is a podcast about B movies. I think this is a branch show about playing video games based on movies (their main podcast is Bad Movie Fiends):

 https://youtu.be/1tFtJW1PTl8

Their podcast page:

 http://bmfcast.com

Their Patreon page:

 https://www.patreon.com/bmfcast