News stories for Episode 228, September 4, 2021 show

News stories for Episode 228, September 4, 2021 show

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

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0) First, I will mention that SepTandy for 2021 officially started on September 1st on YouTube, and I have seen multiple Tandy 1000 style videos out already. If you put up any videos for the Coco, include #SepTandy in your search words and the title of the video so that it gets findable in this years SepTandy.

0.5) A cool thing happened the day after our interview with Glen Dahlgren last week, when he announced that his first book (The Child of Chaos) would be free for a limited time: It quickly shot to the top of several charts on the Amazon Kindle store, and won a gold medal in the Young Adult Fantasy Epic category:

 https://www.facebook.com/glen.dahlgren/posts/10226729772011266

1) The latest CocoPi released last week already has multiple updates - an experimental version of Coco 3 support in XRoar, Squanchy Basic by Tim Lindner, more tutorial videos, etc:

 https://coco-pi.com/2021/09/

Stevie has also been putting put up a set of tutorial videos on setting up the new CocoPi. Each video covers a specific sub-topic to help keep them short. Here is a list so far (you can also get to the them from main CocoPi page):

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ui6TQsmCP0&list=PLpy5fe6Zd8ceCEPyybgNi7afLV7hFPVNf

2) And speaking of XRoar - Ciaran, as I mentioned earlier, has been adding more and more Coco 3 support lately, and you can try his early builds (which are working with some software now, but not quite everything yet): Announcement:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159435219602641/

Download links:

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

He also has his experimental XRoar Coco 3 support in the online version of XRoar, and the recently released Joust is one of the test programs to try:

 http://www.6809.org.uk/xroar/test/?machine=coco3&cart=rsdos&disk0=joust.dsk&basic=RUN%22JOUST%5Cr

3) Roberto Fernandez (one of our guests on DragonTalk) posted the link to his Dragon tools projects so that you grab them to try:

 https://bitbucket.org/robcfg/

4) Tim Lindner released a video demo using the DRAW command which he calls a Jackson Pollack creator. The unique thing is that it is running under his Squanchy Basic project, and is one of his earlier tests off adding Extended BASIC to the earlier Color BASIC version we showed before. This should still allow over 40K RAM free, even with graphics screens allocated.

 https://youtu.be/l3oJ8jWg6qM

Tim added a chart to help explain how he is reorganizing RAM to get the extra room for BASIC programs on his main github site for Squaunchy Basic as well. Also, late in the week, he added support for Extended and Disk BASIC:

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

5) The CocoCrew released their latest episode (#75) of the Coco Crew podcast. This episode includes a discussion on "What is considered the state of art in the community" (with differing, and even evolving positions during the discussion, which was cool), a tech segment on the difficulties of using the CocoSDC and a real floppy drive simultaneously on a Dragon, and Neil reviewed the new Joust game by Glen Hewlett:

 http://cococrew.org

6) John Whitworth announced in both the Dragon and Coco groups that a limited run of the SuperSprite FM+ boards are available for order, and hopes to make more, but one of the key chips (V9958) has nearly doubled in price since his first order. Price is between 75 and 130 British pounds, depending on what style of kit (or full built) version you want. (Nice bonus - he links to his presentation on DragonTalk to show the physical board running)

 https://www.dragonplus-electronics.co.uk/product/supersprite-fm-6x09-for-dragon-and-coco-computers/

7) Barry Nelson has release an update to his custom MAME branch to fix an issue with Coco serial printers. Barry makes Coco centric custom builds of MAME, and also doesn't stay on the bleeding edge, making sure that the release is very stable.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159438155082641/

Hit github:

 https://github.com/abcbarryn/mame

8) Trey Tomes has posted video and source for his latest update to his X32 Over-Extended Color Basic project, which now handles some internal string functions to better handle BASIC tokens. He has a demo video showing it properly trapping errors with illegal arguments for the CLS command (he also did a later update noting he had added the ability to get the date and time):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159438000687641/

His GitHub project:

 https://github.com/treytomes/cocos/releases/tag/v0.1.1a

9) Alison DeNu, as part of this year's SepTandy, released a YouTube video showing her 3D printing a shell for a Program Pak:

 https://youtu.be/okMFBPTN-JA

10) Allen Huffman has been busy with a lot of things on both Facebook on his Sub-Etha Blog site, including some that he has scheduled for release during the month of September: You can see them here:

 https://www.youtube.com/allenhuffman/videos

He also did one that is only on Facebook: getting better random number generation in BASIC:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159434794662641/

11) Carlos Camacho posted the listing for an interesting Maze generation style program originally written in the Extended BASIC for the PC-6001VW (a 3.8 MHz Z80 based system from NEC that included a VDG compatible chip and a sound chip, from late 1981/1982. He and some commenters were translating the code to the Coco and Coco 3 to see what speed differences there were:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159434682972641/

12) After a lot of work, Mike Rojas (who has been blogging his progress) has gotten his non-functioning Coco 3 fully working:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159431693907641/

13) Rutherford Le Blang (who wrote an earlier Coco emulator called "Return of Coco" way back in 2000 (I remember using it), has started working on fork for VCC to incorporate some of the GUI niceties that he did on Return of Coco back in the day, that will hopefully be rolled back into VCC itself in the future. One in particular is the ability to double click a BIN file, which will cause it to run that BIN automatically in fullscreen mode:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159438820867641/

14) Glen Hewlett (author of the Joust transcode) put up another blog posting - but this time, on some of the "tricks and cool features" from William Astle's LWASM package, including label tricks, conditional assembly, etc.:

 https://nowhereman999.wordpress.com/2021/09/02/lwasm-tricks-and-cool-features/

15) Allen Leno on the Coco Facebook group showed the finishing of his installing modern components (including a color LED keyboard) into a Coco 3 case, with pre-set up Coco emulators:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159440303772641/

MC-10

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1) Simon put up a demo for the MC-10 doing an ML sound routine (please remember, the MC-10 *only* has a 1 bit sound source... no 6 bit DAC like the Coco has), supporting 2 voices at once:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/4192158164244307/

Source code:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/4194903650636425/

2) Anders Carlsson posted an update to Simon's original upload, also on the MC-10 Facebook group, changing it so that musical data can be entered as note names (like D-3 would be a D note in octave 3), which will make it easier for people to transcribe songs to play in Simon's music player:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/4195630503897073/

Dragon 32/64

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1) John Symes posted a couple of photos in the Microdeal Facebook group of the 2 Tapematic high speed tape machines that they used to duplicate tapes from their copy company TopCopy:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/204334613785733/posts/833414964211025/

2) I think I forgot to mention last week (having YouTube quit working until I rebooted threw me off), but our interview with Stewart Orchard a couple of weeks ago invoked a nice response from his sister Kristen: "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."

3) As mentioned above in the general news, John Whitworth has a limited run of his SuperSprite FM+ boards available for order.

4) The date has been set for Dragon Meetup 2021 at the Cambridge Centre for Computing History: November 27th/28th:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/2987825281477121/

5) Pere Serrat has released a Java app that will convert VDK files that are not a multiple of 256 bytes to 256 bytes, to make them Drivewire 4 compliant. The new files will then be compatible with XRoar, MAME, CocoSDC & Dragon-MMC. You can download it from the Dragon Facebook group:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/2987824751477174/

6) Arvid Claasen posted photos of his "Step 1 towards building my own Dragon 64" project:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/2987336701525979/

7) John Whitworth has uploaded a couple of disk images to the Dragon group on Facebook: Flex for the DragonPlus, OS9 for the DragonPlus with DragonMMC drivers: Flex:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/2986719951587654/

OS-9:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/2986696724923310/

8) Pere Serrat uploaded his latest version of DOSPlus5.0Extended (0.25.15G) which has triples the timeout for the Read routine for the Becker port, thanks to some collaboration with Michael Furman (author of PyDrivewire):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/2986621114930871/

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

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1) Antonio Carlos Jimenez Ely posted a video of him playing Glen Hewlett's Joust transcode/port, but with a twist - he is playing it on his CocoPi (Pi 400), but then through a Remote Desktop session so that the game is hosted on the Pi, but he is playing on an entirely different computer:

 https://youtu.be/vac5mprBP7k

2) Deborah Maxwell showed a video (and uploaded a CAS image) of a BASIC game called Missile!, which she converted from a TRS-80 Model 1/3 to the Coco:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159437725252641/

3) Jim Gerrie has ported Deborah's Missile! game to the MC-10 as well:

 https://youtu.be/R-yJmGvXrLs

He also completed his Freecell port that we mentioned was a work in progress last week:

 https://youtu.be/fP8-12ip2yw

4) Alison DeNu, as part of SepTandy, has released a couple of BASIC games: Simply Better Blackjack, a low res blackjack game that she started almost 40 years ago (and got about 75% finished at that time), and this year she found the tape again, loaded it back up, and finished the game:

 https://youtu.be/t5fJM_DZ4zc

JumpShip: A high res Extended BASIC game that is turn based space flying game that she wrote in 2020:

 https://youtu.be/pvRjNCIg8mg

5) Cuthbert Dragon on YouTube, as always, has released more game play videos on his Dragon, including St. George and the Dragons (a graphical game written in BASIC by the looks of it), and Waxworks (a text adventure game done in PMODE 4 to give better looking characters with lowercase):

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

6) Old School Games & Stories did a play through video of Canyon Climber:

 https://youtu.be/y7FxHX3D9VI