News stories for Episode 230, September 18, 2021 show

News stories for Episode 230, September 18, 2021 show

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

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1) Sad news - Paul Barton passed away on Wednesday at the age of 76. The creator the NoCan3 "super" upgrade board and a ton of other Coco 3 hardware products, Ron Delvaux let us know about his passing, and has created a memorial Facebook page for him. Ron Delvaux has created a memorial page - please contribute any thoughts and remembrances of Paul on the group page on Facebook:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/396877438501583/?notif_id=1631767096845181&notif_t=group_name_change&ref=notif

Also, here is the duplication of his last "CocoZilla" home page, which he copied over from his original GeoCities site, where you can see the variety of projects he worked on:

 http://www.geocities.ws/idezilla/CoCoZilla/frontpage.html

We should also mention the passing of Sir Clive Sinclair, who created the ZX80, ZX81, Spectrum, etc computers and helped drive the price of all home computers down (especially with the first two computers mentioned above), also passed away this past Thursday at the age 81. The MC-10 was made to be a direct competitor for these (although a little too late to have much effect).

2) The Amigos are having there "once every few months" ICC (International Computer Club) meeting online, streaming from their Twitch channel, starting at 6 PM Eastern today. 3 of use will be on to represent the Coco - Nick Marentes, Stevie, and myself. Feel free to join in watching the stream, and asking questions in the Twitch chat!

3) Henry Reitveld has posted on Discord and the listserv that there is a retro computer show on September 25 at the Cambridge Hotel and Conference Center in Cambridge, Ontario. He and some others, including Neil Blanchard from the Coco Crew, are planning on attending and exhibiting Coco's and Coco related products. This is a chance for Canadians to attend a retro computer show, just in case the Canada/US border has not opened up before both Tandy Assembly and CocoFest (Cambridge is just southeast of Kitchener/Waterloo). $10 for adults for the full day, children under 18 are free:

 https://www.kijiji.ca/v-events/kitchener-waterloo/world-of-retro-computing-expo/1580760299

4) Juan Castro posted a link to Brazilian blog he did of making a graphical text driver (inspired by Super Color Writer, which later became VIP Writer) for BASIC on Coco 1/2's. We have seen many similar things over the years (Screen-64, The Solution, Screen Machine, etc.), but Juan has actually made his in a ROM combined with HDB-DOS, so when you fire up a Coco 1/2 with this ROM, you get full HDB DOS and the graphical text. This allows you an extended character set, more characters on the screen at once, and mixed text and graphics. His blog explains the very long development history, and includes screenshots. He hasn't released it to the public yet as he still wants to add some features (like ON ERROR GOTO):

 https://www-retrocomputaria-com-br.translate.goog/2021/09/16/entao-voce-se-acha-um-procrastinador/?_x_tr_sl=pt&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=pt-BR&_x_tr_pto=nui%2Celem

5) As part of his ongoing Coco game programming projects, Paul Thayer has put up a GitHub with some assembly language library routines to share with everyone. As of this writing he has 6 such routines up now, with more to come. They range from forcing a cold restart and setting up a 256x192x16 Coco 3 graphics screen to reading the joysticks, keyboard and disk sectors:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159461478022641/

Direct GitHub Link:

 https://github.com/pthayer100/Coco-3-6809-Library

6) John Whitworth's Supersprite FM+ boards (the first run) are shipping, and now being received in the hands of those who ordered. Jason Downs shared a picture of his on the Coco page on Facebook:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159461117887641/

7) Numerous CocoPi updates again this week - a MAME bugfix courtesy of Tim Lindner, picture gallery's from Ron Delvaux, more Coco 3 compatibility in XRoar, etc. Thanks to Ron Klein for continuously updating this new CocoPi image:

 https://coco-pi.com/news-updates/

8) Timothy Halloran posted some photos and a description of his 6309 512K Coco 3 system that he has modified to be completely powered by USB-A, rather than the original Coco 3 power supply:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159458136832641/

9) Allen Leno showed pictures and a video from his now completed packing modern components into a Coco 3 case that then run the Coco in emulation (MrDave6309 has done similar). If the Coco had kept going into modern times and they had kept the same case design...

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159457354902641/

10) VCF-East (in Wall, New Jersey) is on Oct 8-10 - is anyone on the panel or in our audience attending this show?

 https://vcfed.org/wp/2021/08/31/vcf-east-2021-will-be-the-biggest-show-yet/

11) Coco related SepTandy content this week:

• Anachronistic Things on YouTube put up a video showing Tetris and Audio Spectrum Analyzer running on a Coco 2 (which included some cartridge repair). (Should warn you; he is still setting up for aping, so the audio/video is rough in spots):

 https://youtu.be/xheDSOHd5YY

• Allan Huffman had a lot more more videos get released this week as well, on a variety of subjects (and scheduled some more for next week):

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

• Noel's Retro Lab got several computers on his September 16 episode, including a PAL Coco 2 (unboxing at start of episode, including some extra/different manuals):

 https://youtu.be/qKthyDXdOQ0

• Pedro Pana put up parts 1-3 of his video series about making his own Coco 2:

   https://youtu.be/H2KNHDKdDhw
 Part 2 has an interesting display: You get to see (highlighted in green on the parts list, and red on the schematic) what part he is installing on the video feed, all at the same time):
   https://youtu.be/MNNGa4_IVk4
 Part 3 is 
   https://youtu.be/sGEANZCR-Eo

• Joe's Computer Museum and live guest Mike Rojas (who is an active Coco community member who just did the Apple IIGS RGB monitor adaptor) did a 3&1/2 hour live stream which started with the Coco 3 with Mikes' adaptor on an admittedly poor shape Apple monitor:

 https://youtu.be/JnEmoHn812I

MC-10

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1) RetroComputing with Mike on YouTube put up an MC-10 showcase video for #SepTandy (which has a Zippster composite mod in it):

 https://youtu.be/Y2ELLlsMViE

Dragon 32/64

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1) An interesting question was answered on the Dragon Facebook group - what programs were released on cartridge form for the Dragon? Simon Hardy answered this in the comments, and includes some from multiple companies, not just Dragon Data itself (and some of those are from 3rd parties that sold the same games on cassette/disk only in the North American market):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3000478283545154/

2) Also, like our VCF-MW last week, Cambridge in the UK is having their Retro Computer Festival Oct 9-10:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/2996936520565997/

They are also hosting the Dragon specific meetup at the end of November as well:

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

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1) Paul Thayer has posted a public beta of his Coco 3 CocoBan level editor, and would like some feedback on it. Both from a testing standpoint, and also on any suggestions for improving the editor itself:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159461572087641/

2) Deborah Maxwell has uploaded more programs to the Facebook Coco group that were typed in from the Computer Space (Adventures and Games) book collection. You can find all of the programs that she has uploaded so far:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/files

3) Jim Gerrie has released a WAV file for this updated Sokoban re-code to the MC-10 Facebook group:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/4241470692646387/

4) Scott Cooper (Tazman in our Discord) has starting learning assembly language, too, and put up his first video of bouncing face in low res graphics:

 (load local file "Scott Cooper (Tazman) first ML program.MOV")