News stories for Episode 214, May 29, 2021 show

News stories for Episode 214, May 29, 2021 show:

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

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1) The 16th VCF MidWest in the the Chicago area is now open for hotel bookings (an in person show!). September 11-12, 202, some info here:

 (show my local 'vcf_midwest_16.png)

2) One of our newest members of the Coco Discord, Jani, has a blog devoted to their retro computers, and since Jani recently acquired a Coco 3, there is a now a Tandy/Coco section on the site, which includes a capacitor list for recapping the motherboard, if needed:

 http://blog.worldofjani.com/?cat=53

3) A bit of sad news: Terry Steege has had to resign as Vice President of the Glenside Color Computer Club due to health reasons. We wish Terry the best, and thank John Mark Mobley for stepping up to take over for the remainder of the current term:

 https://www.glensideccc.com/vice-president-changes

4) Chris Burke posted pictures of the modification he did to the old 12 Volt floppy disk controller, to get it to run on a Coco 3 (which only supplies 5V):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159237324102641/

5) Ken @ Canadian Retro Things does an updated review of his CocoSDC, almost a year after receiving it (which even has surprise guests including his cat Tig, and his offscreen twin brother):

 https://youtu.be/fTKHLXRL9JU

6) John Laury put up an interesting posts showing how to use Semigraphics-24 to simulate an underline cursor on a Coco 1/2. I remember the Hoyt Stearns Electronics Coco version of the Forth programming language using this technique in it's built in editor, although it used Semigraphics-12 to save RAM (and at the time of it's release, the T1 VDG wasn't out yet so they didn't have to worry about descenders):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159240689027641/

He also put up a short video on YouTube to demonstrate it:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfd-bZcf3D0

7) Michael Pittsley put up some videos of some rarer Coco educational software on YouTube. The Basic Spanish package from Dorsett Educational Systems Inc. (1986), is divided in multiple program modules, 16 in all and each with their own theme, and includes audio cassette multi-media like we have shown before, as well as monochrome graphics. Michael has put up 20 to 30 minute videos of all 16 modules on his YouTube page:

 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzSHCNWCsSDVsZEUDvDgE0g/videos

8) Pedro (Rocky Hill on YouTube) put up a couple of quick videos of possible ways to replace the SC77526 chip for making sound, etc. on a Coco 1/2 that he has been working on: Using a hex buffer and R2R ladder:

 https://youtu.be/95e4dyMtPtY 

Using an Arduino uno:

 https://youtu.be/ubZIh8Xj3ZQ

MC-10

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1) Robert Sieg has been experimenting with sample code for the later Alice's (when they went beyond MC-10 compatibility), and has been comparing various emulators for accuracy. From his testing so far, James Host's emulator is the most accurate covering the newer improved text modes and colors. Links are in the comments:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/permalink/3922052744588185/

Dragon 32/64

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1) Richard Harding has posted a video showing phase 1 of his Dragon 64 USB keyboard in action, which will have many more features than just using a USB keyboard on a Dragon in future phases. He shows it currently running with XRoar, but the future plan is that it will work (with all of the extensions he mentions) on a real, modded Dragon 64 in the future:

 https://www.facebook.com/richard.harding.7169/videos/10158298736941453/

2) Pere Serrat is working on getting the Mega-Mini MPI working on the Dragon, and with help from Ed, says that v0.25.13 of Dragon DOS Plus, that will support it with the CocoSDC in Dragon mode, should be out next week (a lot of this is from the comments in the original post):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159240131677641/

3) Dragon Data Archive on YouTube released a video on how to replace the Alps SKCC switches on a Dragon 64:

 https://youtu.be/sssFxU2w09E

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

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1) Cuthbert Dragon has put up more Dragon gaming videos, including a few more I don't recall seeing before: 3D OXO (3D Tic Tac Toe, but with a bit of a Space Invaders theme:

 https://youtu.be/2y_ZSd8ORxg

Misers Dream:

 https://youtu.be/P_1LowS8JJI

Galactic Gus (not a fan of the sound, but looks like a good maze explore/collect treasure game):

 https://youtu.be/h3umfTlLAq0

2) Jim Gerrie has ported the color strategy game Coloric from the Alice machines to the MC-10, based on the original by J. Dirani/Free Game Blot in 1984:

 https://youtu.be/qodzmA-aDG4

He also did a slight update to an earlier Demo port from the Alice to the MC-10:

 https://youtu.be/E6HaLtgapkM

3) Nick Marentes has released Chapter 6 of his Zero Hour game development blog, this time going into sprite animation, compiled sprites, and animated elevators and fire:

 https://nickmarentes.com/ZeroHour/06.html

4) Richard Kelly uploaded an updated version of the game Power Sword, originally from T&D Software #34 (April 1985), which itself was based on Sword of Fargoal from the Commodore-16 & 64. This one has had typographical errors fixed, optimized code, bugfixes and improved game save/load. Available on the Files section of the main Coco group on Facebook:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159240505407641/

5) Daniel Scherer put up a 4 minute video of a graphical adventure game he did for the Brazilian Coco clone, the Codimex CD6809, which includes a nice artifact colors (and is called "The Rescue" in English, I think):

 https://youtu.be/64xLuR2IF-8

6) La Quete des RPG on YouTube (who did a Daggorath video a couple of months back) has returned with a long play video of the Dragon 32 role playing game, The Ring of Darkness, done in his native French. The game itself reminds me a lot of the original BASIC version of Ultima 1 on the Apple 2, with the separate, distinct graphics for the main world map, the city/town maps, and 3D wireframe dungeons:

 https://youtu.be/QgdJ-UXiYRE