News stories for Episode 227, August 28, 2021 show

News stories for Episode 227, August 28, 2021 show

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

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1) Tim Lindner has release "Squanchy-BASIC", which takes Color BASIC 1.3, but patches it to run at the very top of RAM in a 64K machine. This will give 55,334 free bytes for BASIC (vs. the normal 31015 one would normally see). This should work with pure BASIC programs (that don't try to call ROM routines), allowing much larger, sophisticated low res games,etc. He does duplicate the 7 indirect ROM calls, although one would still have to patch their programs to find those at their new addresses.

 https://github.com/tlindner/Squanchy-BASIC

Tim is planning on adding Extended and Disk BASIC as well, but because of where he has moved it, you should still get 8K extra for BASIC programs compared to what they have now. There was a commercial product that did this back in the day too, whose name escapes me at the moment. But Tim plans to take it a little further to also fix some known bugs, compress the BASIC code, and optimize it where possible (actually, this is already started, with some RAM check routines removed; since this requires 64K, no point in checking for less, eh?

2) Pedro Pana (Rocky Hill on YouTube) has released a video showing him playing Glen Hewlett's new Joust transcode... but with a twist: This is running on the Coco 3 duplicate board Pedro made based on Coco 3 schematics, not an original Tandy board (He still has to finish putting connectors, etc. on - but it boots a full 512K Coco 3 game):

 https://youtu.be/vjpey5T-lSU

Pedro also posted a video on YouTube of him testing running NitrOS-9 EOU/6309 on his new Coco 3 board (which is working fine, so i would say that his board design seems to be pretty well ready):

 https://youtu.be/wSlYcxvCpys

He also did a video showing RGB output from his own Coco 3 board to an RGB2HDMI adaptor (he hasn't got the sound hooked up in this video):

 https://youtu.be/EB2sbTMWF-Q

3) Allen Huffman posted a blog post entry with him revisiting his "PRINT RACER" BASIC program (itself converted from the C64) and working on optimizing the INKEY routine he is using, based on a suggestion by MiaM:

 https://subethasoftware.com/2021/08/25/revisiting-10-print-racer/

4) Ron Klein has released the new community image for the CocoPi: CoCoPi-16GB-Unified-CommunityEdition-X-20210826 is available for download at:

  https://coco-pi.com/

5) Henry Strickland was kind enough to share photos from the VDF-SE (Southeast) in Atlanta that took place on August 20-22 in Atlanta Georgia. He reports that a fair number of Coco people attended the show, and that there were two Coco displays sharing a table (including his Coco 1 with MOOH 512K RAM expansion, and varmfskii showing NitrOS-9/EOU).

 https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipMJS9RQ217iv-K6_Vg0wg5YHafLWYnVZnBxsfOGG-VA-qzKo9kEemf48NUtKt6ENA?pli=1&key=bm15Q0dNdmllQUt3VEhhbzdOWlVSOHJsc3Z5aEF3

6) Mike Rojas posted on the Coco group on Facebook that he is getting a small batch of his adapter board he designed to take the Coco 3 RGB output into an AppleColor RGB monitor, and is wondering how much interest there would be in such a board. Please respond on his Facebook post if interested:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159428588317641/

7) Brian Wieseler posted some photos of his maxed out Coco 3 (now with GIME-X, 8 MB RAM, CocoMech keyboard and MegaMini MPI. This in itself is cool but not really news; what is news to me is the new speckled look of the background of Ed Snider's CocoMech keyboard (both of mine are solid black). When did these start getting sold?

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159428553322641/

8) Lee Davey opened up his Coco 3 for the first time in 30 years and discovered a couple of things: 1) He has an official Tandy 512K upgrade installed, and 2) he has some special custom mods that he has no idea what they are for. Do any of the hardware people recognize the wire, etc. mods?

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159427589822641/

9) John Kowalski (Sock Master) has furthered his composite color experiments, this time picking 4 actual colors, and managing to use artifacting to produce grey scale (including an artifact black):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159426794242641/

10) There was in interesting topic in the Coco group on Facebook posted by Keith Reynolds: If the Coco had continued, what would it look like today? More Apple like, or more PC-like? It has had over 100 responses so far:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159425214782641/

11) Rodney Hamilton posted some really cool photos from the Chicago RainbowFest in 1983 - which means that the photos are from the very first one ever held:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159422527727641/

12) Mike Rojas has been doing a blog like series in the Coco group on Facebook of his repairing of a dead Coco 3 (up to part 10 as of this writing). There are a lot of hardware topics covered, the latest being keyboard trace repair:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159431054492641/

MC-10

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1)

Dragon 32/64

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1) XRoar has been updated to version 0.37.1. This features improved reading of sampled audio tapes and also now allows emulation of an MPI type device made by the RACE company back in the day (for the Dragon).

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

2) Nigel Barnes has a small update to SuperSprite+ board support in MAME:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/2985145181745131/

3) Stewart Orchard, our guest last week, actually had his sister Kirsten leave a YouTube comment on his episode of CocoTalk:

 "Hi guys, I'm Stewart's sister. This brought back so many memories. I am 4 years younger so I remember him doing all this stuff but never saw how special it was at the time. Stew always had his head in a computer or some other random project that would confuse the parents lol. It makes me very proud of him to hear how you all talk about his games."

4) Tom Erik Gunderson released a photo of an introduction to Python programming for 12 year olds class, where he used online XRoar (by Ciaran Anscomb) and BASIC to show the students the differences between INTEGER and STRING data types. (He mentions that they even snuck in a little Donkey King):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/2984266515166331/

5) David Gisbert has designed some colour Dragon stickers that he is going to sell for 3 Euros (plus shipping):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/2982634821996167/

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

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1) The Joust transcode released by Glen Hewlett last week has had a small version 1.1 update - it will now automatically shut off the floppy drive motor (if you load from real floppy) after it starts up, rather than run incessantly.

 https://nowhereman999.wordpress.com/2021/08/17/joust-is-now-available-for-the-coco-3/

Our own Stevie Strow posted a video about it, showing some of the features and gameplay:

 https://youtu.be/9FifV1aOFEU

2) Jim Gerrie has ported an old Atari 8 bit card game from 1984 (originally by L.M. Schreiber) called Old Maid, to the MC-10:

 https://youtu.be/QlMRoybPYXQ

He also posted a screenshot on the MC-10 group on Facebook of a work in progress, Freecell:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/4184779921648798/

3) Glen Hewlett has a blog entry update on his going back to attempting the transcode of Defender for the Coco 3:

 https://nowhereman999.wordpress.com/2021/08/25/back-to-defender-copy-protection-progress/

4) I have fixed Star Trek III (by Lance Micklus for Adventure International) to work properly on a disk system based Coco 1/2/3. It should be on the Color Computer archive shortly. This fixes multiple ML graphics subroutines that were not working on disk systems before now.

 http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/startrek3.html

Ciaran has also patched that further so that there is now Dragon version available, and you can also play the fixed version in XRoar online:

 http://www.6809.org.uk/xroar/online/?machine=cocous&cart=rsdos&autorun=trekiii.dsk

Dragon version:

 https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=10959

5) Old School Games and Stories has posted another long play Coco game video - Demolition Derby from Spectral / Tandy:

 https://youtu.be/oeCTMlBrS54?t=47

6) NML32 on YouTube posted some test gameplay footage of Fahrfall, playing on the free Coco 2 core for the MiSTer (one of that core's authors, Dave Shadoff, is active in our Discord). It still has some graphical glitches, but is basically playing correctly, including background sound:

 https://youtu.be/c1fNP2quDqo

7) Stewart Orchard (our guest last week) has uploaded the "full" versions of Balldozer to the World of Dragon forums. This includes the tape loader that actually tells the game story scrolling while the game is still loading from cassette. He even managed to find a small chunk of the original assembly source code (from tape), which he has uploaded as well:

 https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=10958