News stories for Episode 210, May 1, 2021 show

News stories for Episode 210, May 1, 2021 show:

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

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1) Rocky Hill (who is a guest today!) has released a video showing his new Rev B main board Coco 2 main motherboard:

 https://youtu.be/tnUR2fmFK74

And he has completed it and installed it in the case (and replaced an incorrect capacitor so that color artifacting now works, and fixed the E and Q clocks):

 https://youtu.be/V18fohn3YzE

And a, as he describes it, "weird RF thing I made" to clean up some of the RF interference he was getting:

 https://youtu.be/DttwjeV-4Wo

2) Simon Jonassen has an updated video showing the smooth scrolling VDG text screen hardware trick:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159158264337641/

He also put up a video showing a demo sound program that uses both the 6 bit DAC and 1 bit sound output's simultaneously for two voice music in hardware:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159171323352641/

3) Barry Nelson has uploaded some "headless" NitrOS-9 Level 1 disk images to the Facebook Coco group. These are set up to boot with a shell onto the serial bit banger port (so that you can use a terminal, or another computer with a terminal program), and he has versions available for 300,600,1200 and 2400 baud. This was requested by some people who want to run 80 column (or higher) terminal programs to use their Coco 1's:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159163888672641/

He also put up a ROM image for ADOS 3 Extended, with will automatically execute the DOS command when the Coco 3 is turned on, unless you hold down the spacebar. You can either burn it into a 16K ROM, or install it in one of the extra ROM "slots" on the CocoSDC:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159172322447641/

4) Paul Fiscarelli put up a video showing his newly acquired SWTPC 6809 system, and how he got a 6 bit DAC Newtech Model 68 Music Card cloned for it (the original board was from 1977):

 https://youtu.be/OGsGSrdn-jE

5) April's Coco Crew episode has dropped, and includes a tech discussion on the TIMER function in Extended BASIC, and a discussion about the Coco hobby getting more expensive, and thus not as much fun, for some.

 http://cococrew.org

6) Tom Best put up a video on YouTube with his original Coco 2 (with Extended BASIC) - his first computer (he even upgraded the keyboard to the 57 key that was originally for the unreleased Deluxe, added a composite video out with inverse video, and mentions that he did dabble with ML enough to write his own ML subroutines):

 https://youtu.be/Ng3W66HAKTg

7) An interesting discussion on the Coco Facebook group - a program has been written for the Commodore 64 to mine bitcoins. PCGAMER had an article that it would take at least 50 trillion years to mind a single bitcoin... and the speculation is if the Coco could cut that in half, and *only* take 25 trillion years:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159170811942641/

8) John Laury did a quick little ML demo of a way to "fade" characters out (or in, if you wanted) on a screen, by bumping the ASCII values up by 1:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159169372687641/

9) Radio Shack seems to have the Coco badge shirts up for sale again (they disappeared for awhile):

 https://www.radioshack.com/products/retro-radioshack-tandy-trs-80-coco-badge-t-shirt

MC-10

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1) Robert Sieg posted a picture of a "graphics" dump he did with his MC-10 and TP-10 printer - which isn't supposed to be capable of graphics:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/permalink/3840833976043396/

Dragon 32/64

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1) John Whitworth (who has been making the DragonPlus boards that we have talked about in recent months - the +64K, 80 column screen upgrades based on the original Compusense designs from the 1980's) discovered a "tiny error" in the Compusense boards, which can cause some video problems on some of the original baords. He has a simple fix for it, involving adding just one wire to ground:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/permalink/2896573477268969/

2) John also posted a video explaining an issue he was having with his new DragonPlus boards, and how he fixed it (he thought it was the brand of PROM chips, but it turns out to be a bad 78HC04 chip, with a gate not behaving at high speed):

 https://youtu.be/q_rzbHtYV-0

3) The Digital Orphanage put up their final Dragon 32 repair/test/play videos (which we have covered before), where he finishes fixing up the last Dragons for the museum (and, as it happens, to sell some extra ones off). He goes into tracking RAM chip problems, and fixing some keyboard issues, as well as testing some Dragon games. Also, a rather interesting 64K RAM upgrade on the Dragon 32:

 https://youtu.be/fD29GliCFMI

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

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1) Jim Gerrie has released a compiled version of his MC-10 Berzerk game, with a newer method for handling diagonal movement from the arrow keys on the MC-10 (the latter suggested by the author of the MC-19 BASIC compiler, Greg Dionne). Normally, an INKEY$ will only read 1 key at a time; this has to read two:

 https://youtu.be/ozEII7O9n1g

He also released a new version of his Micro Checkers for the MC-10, that fixes a couple of bugs: the AI wouldn't always do double jumps against you, and you could jump in the wrong direction with un-kinged pieces after your first jump. He also added a cursor key select:

 https://youtu.be/oXxDZ9EPC2c

2) Paul Shoemaker posted some more updated screenshots for his special CocoVGA edition of his Poker Squares game, which uses the 128x96x16 color VG6 mode that the CocoVGA supports. It's coming along nicely!

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159157390427641/

... and then he finished the game this week, and has released it (should be on the archive soon). He also has a video showing it off. Remember, this is a Coco 1 or 2 playing it, with the CocoVGA upgrade:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159168689277641/

And if you want to get the game right away from Face book, he has it in the Coco group in the files section:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159168678772641/

Or from Brendan's CocoVGA page:

 http://www.cocovga.com/downloads/

3) Mike Ohearn Sr. on Facebook showed his "Franken Joystick" - a homemade hack that is almost 2 small paddle controllers to control each axis... as he says, until he can get a real one. This might actually make some games easier to play, like Popcorn, Catch 'Em, Warlords, Space Assault, etc.:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159162568897641/

4) Henry Reitveld uploaded a video showing him loading/playing Donkey Kong Remix the old fashioned way - from a precariously balanced real hard drive:

 https://youtu.be/Su4QB9oI3zw

5) A YouTube channel I have not seen before (called ROBOS) released a video of playing some Dragon games (those starting with the letter C). I believe that he is Polish and does various retro game videos)... and he plays some games not often seen (or I have never seen in action before). He is playing on an emulator, as evidenced by some NTSC Coco ports that are showing artifact colors:

 https://youtu.be/7Utb7ysMbxA