News stories for Episode 223, July 31, 2021 show

News stories for Episode 223, July 31, 2021 show:

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

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1) Dave Veary (MrDave6309 on our Discord) has an updated Coco 3 scrolling demo. It now works smoothly, with a ship able to move and fire under player control, with and without palette animation for the nebula. At the end of his demo video, he teases us with 3 player ships at once:

 https://youtu.be/lWsrQoOrKZw

2) Pere Serrat Posted both on the World of Dragon Archive forums & the Facebook Dragon page that his latest DOSPlus Extender Beta for Drivewire & the CocoSDC is available. This involves both patching DOSPlus to handle Drivewire (like HDB-DOS for the Coco) AND also, with the help of Darren Atkinson, to be able to flash the ROM banks from the Dragon itself (This is DOSPlusExt v.24.E6, and allows the use of standard DOS commands on any VDK file on a Drivewire server) There are some caveats mentioned in some of the later messages from Pere when dealing with a multipak and both real floppies and the CocoSDC on the Dragon, and special instructions for running Drivewire only, etc.):

 https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5363

The file is available for download both in the World of Dragon archive forum themselves (see the "Dragon General Board -> "A DOSPlus Extender for Drivewire & the Coco-SDC" and in a link from the Dragon group on Facebook.

3) I missed this last week, but Brenda Make, on the Facebook NitrOS9 group, posted a photo of an internal serial port card she made back in the day (based on the 6551A), which started a robust discussion on other various hardware hacks, like the A-Bus from back in the day, and using Arduinos in modern times:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/1929079184021683/posts/2911629922433266/

4) Brenda also posted up a start for a case to hold/adapt a SCART adaptor, that would screw into the bottom of a Coco 3 case, but look more elegant and not strain the RGB connector as much as it currently does:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/1929079184021683/posts/2913095552286703/

5) Glenn Sogge, author of Handyman, Super Bustout and other Coco programs from the very beginning of the Coco (he was on a group interview with some of his fellow Image Producers members a few years ago here on CocoTalk), has found the old line printed original source code listings for both Super Bustout and Handyman. He posted a couple of scans of the commented sourcecode for Bustout on the Coco Facebook page (note: this was written months before the Coco 1 was released, using a Coco 1 prototype mounted on a plywood base, kept in a secure room):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159374618552641/

6) Antonio Carlos Jimenez Ely, for whom we featured last week his dad's computer desk design with the promotional literature that included Coco's on them, has released a new updated one that is colorized, and thus the Coco stands out even more:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159373641107641/

7) Simon Jonassen released the ASM source code for a 3D drawing routine (based on points and lines in 3D space (which you can get on the Facebook Coco group), of which John Laury provided a video showing it in action. I have seen a similar program in Hot Coco back in the day that I know Erik Gavriluk did an optimization for as well.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159373484677641/

8) Dannielle O'Connor put out a quick video showing her 2 Coco 3's running Sock's Matrix program (you can see a modded Coco 3 on the left, and one of Zippster's keyboards on the right, as well). I don't believe the sound is from the Coco. :) :

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159373332352641/

9) Ron Delvaux noticed something interesting in the manual for the Electronic Book - that it also supported the Acorn BBC Model B computer as well as the Coco. Not having had one of these myself, I did not realize that it was multi-platform (see 2nd image):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159372595042641/

10) Patrick Pelletier has put the "Thor BBS" online, which is dedicated to the Coco, and supports the ANSI standard (which should look fantastic on Sock's Twilight Terminal or Roger Taylor's NetMate terminal programs, and should be usable with older ANSI capable terminal programs like OSTerm or Ultimaterm). It also allows plain ASCII, which should allow it to be connected to with other terminal programs (including those for a Coco 1/2):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159371702332641/

11) Cyberhug Technologies did their second Coco 2 video, showing his doing a 64K RAM upgrade and a Do It Yourself cartridge build:

 https://youtu.be/_hwVSI1owZw

MC-10

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1) Stevie Strow has been helping Ron Klein testing the upcoming unified Pi3/Pi4/Pi400 Coco/MC-10/Dragon emulation update, and he released a video with some speculation and questions for how to improve the MC-10 part of the experience:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/4095486833911441/

He posted an updated video, with some changes already by Ron Klein & Jim Gerrie, a step towards what Steve proposed (including updating the Jim Gerrie collection automatically, and tying it with the MC-10/MCX-128 so that you can DIR straight out the gate:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/4101550586638399/

(Just play second video)

Dragon 32/64

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1) Steven Goodwin has posted in the Dragon Facebook group about an upcoming book called "20 GOTO 10 : Retro Computing by the Numbers", that will be available in both physical and digital formats. From it's "About the Book": "20 GOTO 10 is a book of numbers that describes the many facets of computing history, focusing on the golden age of retro computers of the 1980s and 90s. It covers the hardware, software, and social history of the era showing how they're linked through numbers, such as 48K, C90, and 35899." It will include some Dragon material, as Steven mentions on the Facebook post.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/2961101380816178/

Book page:

 https://unbound.com/books/20goto10/

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

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1) Jim Gerrie has been very busy this week, having released Space Bar Bandit, a slot machine game for the MC-10, converted from the original Coco version that appeared in Australian Coco magazine Vol 1, Number 4 from 1984 by Tom Lehane:

 https://youtu.be/lIwFU4Sxgz8

He also released AUSMAP, a capital cities geography quiz about Australia that was originally made by Alan Bridges in September of 1984:

 https://youtu.be/Gy63wAmtjGg

And then Hockey, a text based hockey game originally from David Ahl's BASIC game collection from Creative Computing in 1978. Jim did have to do some corrections to the original source code:

 https://youtu.be/DjGQiADA0xw

Followed by an MC-10 port of the a 1 line BASIC program based on the original Commodore 64 source code, that was featured on the "8-Bit Show And Tell" YouTube page. This uses the 64x48 semi-graphics mode to draw a maze in 1 line of code:

 https://youtu.be/h99jU_szJu4

He later did another maze generator in 1 line that is even smaller (32 bytes) (note he did a typo (forgetting a semicolon) on his first attempt, so I am showing the proper one here), although it is in the normal 64x32:

 https://youtu.be/CzS9Svu6uRk?t=52

And also a port of the card game Euchre from "The Best of Creative Computing Volume 3" (1980), originally written by Victor J. Raybaud:

 https://youtu.be/hE2fUgOE6jU

2) Paul Shoemaker has taken Erico Patricio Monteiro's designs for a new Joust/Pegasus type game (Which he purposely made color palette friendly for the Coco 3; it's designed for PC's as well), and has a quick video demo of a terrain background with a stationary sprite flapping it's wings (video demo is in the comments):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159366943202641/

Paul has also been experimenting with using the VSYNC interrupt to draw animated sprites with no flicker on a single high res screen, vs. double buffering, and has a video showing that. (This is getting back to old school programming like was done with limited RAM machines in the late 1970's. The Atari 2600 went one further, having to draw during HSYNC as well, to parts of the screen just after the raster beam went past them):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159379324332641/

3) Cuthbert Dragon has put up more Dragon gameplay videos, including some more new-to-me ones: Starship Destiny (a 3D graphical adventure game written in BASIC with an ML font driver), Quazimodo (which we have shown before, but he actually gets far enough to rescue the girl), Tennis (which is much higher res than the Tandy one), Fingers (original platformer?), Balldozer (Arkanoid by Stew Orchard, who will be on our Dragon Special), Mission Attack (where he shows alternate color sets not shown last time) , Do-Do (Pengo clone), Barmy Burgers (Burgertime clone), Catalyst

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

4) The Amigos have released FrodoNL's video of the first year of the Tandy Color Computer 3 on YouTube, which features almost 4 hours of long plays of games from 1986-1987:

 https://youtu.be/YXLYKwetO4A

5) Speaking of the Amigos... for the first time this year, Stevie and I (along with sarcastic guest, Nick Marentes) participated in the Amigathon fundraiser, which raises money every year for the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals. We did an hour of Coco game play as our part of the show, showing some brand new games for the Coco, and then a few classics. The whole 24 hour gaming marathon raised over $7000, and you can still donate at: http://amigathon.com. Stevie has also put up the video of our part of the show at:

 https://youtu.be/l67yDMv2bgM

6) TKM's Retro Gaming Nook on YouTube has started doing playthrough/demo videos of Coco games on real hardware. I haven't had time to check them all out fully yet, but this week they released: Sailor Man (the Dragon version). He also plugged our interview with Chris Latham in the comments, so a big shoutout to him from all of us at CocoTalk! (He also got a great score):

 https://youtu.be/b5RhF8wJfQA

Return of Junior's Revenge:

 https://youtu.be/524eqe0CBBo

Canyon Climber:

 https://youtu.be/IQKZNGDVEEs

Downland:

 https://youtu.be/Gtpa2OA1TKo

Marble Maze:

 https://youtu.be/XkZH5mkWA_0

7) Rob's Retro Rambles does a review of the Dragon 32 game 3D Seiddab Attack:

 https://youtu.be/axLu11GADJE

8) Nick Marentes has Chapter 9 of his Zero Hour development blog up now:

 https://nickmarentes.com/ZeroHour/09.html