News stories for Episode 212, May 15, 2021 show

News stories for Episode 212, May 15, 2021 show:

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

First up, a big congratulations to "Amigo" Aaron, John "BoatofCar" Shawler and "The" Brent on the 300th episode of their Amigos podcast that they just recorded last night. They mention the other shows (including the Coco Show) that are now part of their vast podcast empire as well. The episode does a humoress look back from the beginning until now.

 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1022781034

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

---

1) John Laury put up a 20 minute tutorial video on programming a Coco 3 to go into the 80 column mode (including setting palettes, the MMU, and GIME), as we discussed on the last show. It's a good "starter" program for people to use to learn how the Coco 3 works, and how it is different to program compared to the Coco 1/2 using the VDG / SAM combination:

 https://youtu.be/e7AU_EyLb-0

He also revisited his screen clearing routine (that shifted characters), and now makes it a kind of cross-desolve:

 https://youtu.be/jCyq-17eFOU

John also put up a video demo (done in pure BASIC), with a challenge for people to figure out what he did. Cathe Cite figured it out (changing the BASIC character to CLS a screen with), and in the comments Cathe explained how the CLS hook was also used to crack the autostart protection used by Tandy Germany Microdeal tapes:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159196698372641/

2) Sheldon MacDonald has a video showing his progress on his Flash ROM boot loader for the PSG cartridge from Ed Snider over at zippsterzone.com. It will eventually support icon data, long filenames, and booting types of programs other than just ROM images:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159193565657641/

3) Retro Computing Roundtable episode 234 talked about about the CocoMax hardware interface and the two versions of the Color Mice, based on an eBay listing:

 https://youtu.be/elSlpHglKC4

4) Tim Lindner has another blog post up that happened because of fixing an issue in MAME; this time with specific settings on the Coco 3's GIME IRQ timer:

 http://tlindner.macmess.org/?p=762

5) chibiakumas (Keith) on YouTube has released his next Dragon 32 assembly language episode (applicable to the Coco 1/2 as well), now working on software sprites (using the XOR technique in this case).

 https://youtu.be/5so817sb130

6) Ken at Canadian Retro Things shows some of Mr Dave 6309's prototype cartridge boards (it also includes some Atari prototype boards, a 3D printed battery cover for an old electronic games Ken has):

 https://youtu.be/O9Fh4H6Sj9M

7) Jerry Stratton has posted a blog (and code) for a BASIC program to explore through the BASIC ROM's, and how tokenization works:

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

8) Barry Nelson uploaded a utility to Facebook that can reverse the red/blue artifact colors on a Coco 3, without affecting any other default colors in the system (the F1/RESET trick resets ALL colors, including semigraphics, and PMODE 3 colors). If you have a program that uses multiple graphics or text modes, plus an artifacting color mode, this should be much closer to what you would expect for colors, like a Coco 1/2 (he includes ASM sourcecode as well:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159210081327641

9) Richard Kelly also uploaded a utility to Facebook for Coco 1/2's with 64K. If tests to see if the Coco is already in 64K RAM mode (ie the BASIC ROM's are copied to RAM, and thus you can modify BASIC), and if not, does it for you:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159206442047641/

10) Raymond Jett picked up around 60 of the old 12 volt floppy controllers (designed for the Coco 1) that are 1) untested), and 2) only have the bottom half of the cartridge shell. Good for parts if you have one of these controllers, and this is one of the controllers that can be modded to handle high density (1.2 / 1.44 MB floppies). Since they are untested, they are going for only $8.00 USD, and he has sold a little over half of them by yesterday (I don't normally mention for sale items (except lately, apparently), but since this is a limited quantity, am mentioning it today):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159198756582641/

11) The Digital Soup Podcast (kind of a tech related variety/comedy show, covering computers, music, cameras, gadgets, etc.) leads in episode 208 talking about Jason (one of the 3 hosts) digging his old Coco 3 out, and getting it working with some modern equipment from the current community :

 https://www.digitalsouppodcast.com

12) A question from Frank of Retro Rewind: They are thinking of getting into the Coco market, possibly with a very fast 6809 replacement as one of the projects. What is the interest in the community, and on the panel, for something like this? If there is interest, we would like to invite Frank onto the show, and he should be in chat today for any questions.

13) Bill Nobel and I (along with contributors like Frank Provenchko, Todd Wallace, Jeff Teunissen, Walter Zambotti, etc.) are proud to release NitrOS-9/EOU Beta 6.1. This includes an updated Control Panel, updated Calendar app, a new Sierra game demo, a text adventure game done with graphic window panes (I will speed this up sometime in the future; Shawn Driscoll, the author, was just learning when he wrote it), a new version of the DCC C compiler with better optimization and unsigned long support, Musica song play support from GShell, and ports of various Unix power utilities, plus more. I worked on it until 5 AM Monday morning, so I screwed up the initial upload. If you grabbed in the first day or two, please re-download it to make sure that you have the current one. The 6809/6309, and GIME-X 6809/6309 versions are up now; Bill is working on the Matchbox/MiSTer versions which should be done soon.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159197210852641/

(Demo on VCC - show Shawns game, maybe Control and the new look Calendar, a Musica song)

MC-10

---

1) Robert Sieg put up a photo and video to show a 32x32x9 color screen. Not sure what exactly he is doing - colorset switching, maybe? Done on real hardware:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/permalink/3870037103123083/

Dragon 32/64

---

1) Stewart Orchard put up a cool memory testing utility for the Dragon a few weeks ago; rather than "just" testing the memory contents, it actually figures out how long the DRAM can retain the test data before a RAM refresh is needed.

 https://gitlab.com/sorchard001/dragon-refresh-test

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

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

1) This weeks Amigos Retro Gaming presents had the subject of "Manager games - Non Sports". One of the two games they reviewed is the Coco 1/2 game Franchise! by Computerware:

 https://youtu.be/8mx5F-URaYY

2) Jamie Cho has released an updated version of his Coco 3 (or Mac) space shooter game, Space Bandits. The Facebook post has links for the 6809 Coco 3 and Mac versions in the main message, and the comments section has a link to the 6309 optimized version as well. The game is now labelled "Level 1", with a Level 2 sequel planned, and while first wave is basically the same as the previous release, waves 2 to 5 are quite different:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159195046202641/

3) Jim Gerrie has ported a game originally from the Commodore PET called Maxit (that was published in Cursor magazine in 1981). He based his version on an IBM PC port of the game:

 https://youtu.be/gbZYjuRXEnI

He also did some further updates to the Poker game he showed last week, and was taking color suggestions on:

 https://youtu.be/FaeUL9jTb7g

4) Cuthbert Dragon has been busy again this week. New games to me are Home Base:

 https://youtu.be/v7YfbO4sXUY

River of Fire:

 https://youtu.be/nHgeOBs1VlQ

Dungeon Destiny:

 https://youtu.be/Qez6vWaOITs

5) Rob's Retro Rambles covers the official Frogger for the Dragon 32:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGd-mmgL0Vs

6) Robos (From Poland) did a video of Dragon games starting with "S": (Show Jump, Sky Joust, Sporting Decathlon are the new ones to me. Don't do Strip Poker for obvious reasons),

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75XMpQiH5WE

And W,Z (new: White Crystal. Zax's Son):

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZY-SaegQYs

And R:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnfWRf5FYAU