News stories for Episode 231, September 25, 2021 show

News stories for Episode 231, September 25, 2021 show

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

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1) All Things Tandy Radio Shack had an almost full hour interview with Mark Siegel - originally with DataSoft, he went to Tandy and became instrumental on things like designing the Deluxe Color Computer, the Coco 3, getting OS-9 Level II onto the Coco, and more. He also was involved with the Tandy 1000 line and many other things, and all of this comes up during the interview:

 https://youtu.be/OpV-8Ok7qFY

Also, Mark has graciously agreed to be our guest on October 30, so get your questions ready (I have a *ton* in the works already!)

2) John Whitworth announced that all 18 of his first production run of the SuperSprite FM+ boards have now shipped (literally all over the world). He sold a couple of kits as well. He is working on getting parts for the next run:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/277387053720893/posts/298411584951773/

3) Fabian Rodriguez has updated the Cocopedia Wiki to include upcoming retro event shows that include (or exclusively have) Coco's:

 https://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

4) As part of his SepTandy Coco videos, Allen Huffman has many more videos released this week, with a few more queued up to finish out the month next week (24 videos in all, at my last count):

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

5) Scotty Animation on YouTube has been going through some of his TRS-80 8 bit's and their BASIC's recently, and was quite surprised at how extensive Extended BASIC on a Coco 2:

 https://youtu.be/31ek4B3O2lo

6) Patrick B. in our Discord has made available (through Google Drive), a searchable PDF that is 2,352 pages long that is an archive of messages from both the Tandy Delphi forums between 1988 and 1994 (these forums were for the Tandy 1000/MS-DOS line). While this does not have the Coco forum itself from that time period (which Rainbow also sponsored), it does have multiple references to the Coco, and it's interesting to see some of the back and forth as to which was more powerful for specific uses:

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hLMLN2oRHRQckwsRYV0EhSFcKJcO-8L6/view?usp=sharing

7) Alex Redman put up a video on Facebook showing a Coco 3 DECB enhancement written by Ron Redman (I assume related to Alex?) from Softworks in 1989, which seems to add functions like key repeat (not sure if this based on ADOS3?), and then runs a BASIC database program of some sort that I am not familiar with:

 https://www.facebook.com/Redman.Alex/videos/606926560308816/

Some other SepTandy entries this week:

8) Pedro Pena has added the final (part 4) video showing his building his Coco 2 motherboard from scratch, including populating the board, burning the ROM's, and testing the SDC Explorer and some artifacting games:

 https://youtu.be/OPx7hGcEO9U

9) TheRetroChannel does a followup to his last year's SepTandy S-Video & composite mods with an improved, simpler design. He also goes through the differences between NTSC and PAL:

 https://youtu.be/oG9dxo2g6To

MC-10

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1) The Atari Live forum on Facebook had a post by Jose Antonio Vaca Bello, where he received an MC-10 without a power source, so he built his own (with pictures):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/388151097983296/posts/2353840248081028/

2) Greg Hamilton finally received his MCX-32 in Australia on September 22 - and boy did it take a roundabout trip to get there, having been shipped out from Minnesota on July 8:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/4261806120612844/

3) Canadian Retro Things (Ken) has released a video on how to set up and use an MC-10 emulator (he also promotes our upcoming Oct 23 MC-10 Special):

 https://youtu.be/Q2UnzN3CDGY

Dragon 32/64

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1) Noel's Retro Lab on YouTube put a video up going into a deep dive on the Dragon 64 and it's video output and fixing it up for his LCD screen:

 https://youtu.be/lQRipdxTPpg

2) Garreth Owen posted an old price list from July 1983 in the Dragon Facebook group, for the "Farmfax Dragon", which sounds like it was something along the lines of the "Project Green Thumb" Agvision/VideoTex machines for farmers that Tandy originally did back in 1979, except that this was more offline with custom farmer related software and an optional printer (apparently even farmers needed break time, however... the bottom shows joysticks and game cartridges too):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3004787463114236/

3) David F. Gisbert on the Dragon Facebook group has been adding to his cartridge game collection, including a a lot of 3rd party games that were never sold in cartridge form in the North American market:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3005603416365974/

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

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1) Paul Shoemaker is continuing work on his H.E.R.O clone for the Coco, and did his first experiment for animated water:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159470336167641/

2) Jim Gerrie put up a video showing his MC-10/Coco BASIC version of Sokoban. This is based on the original 1981 BASIC version (by Hiroyuki Imabayashi):

 https://youtu.be/GAohUE7SVXo

3) A YouTube channel with the strange name "I only did it for the Calculator Watch" did a play example of a game called Dynamite, which was from the "Dragon 32 Cassette 50 Game 39" collection tape (the company that made these cheap BASIC compilations did these for multiple platforms, so there are also Atari, ZX81, Acorn, C64, etc. versions of this game available):

 https://youtu.be/u3bWq08ToFI

4) Glen Hewlett has put up his blog post for his conversion of the arcade Defender to the Coco 3, which of course is our high score challenge game of the week this week, which goes into some detail of the debugging processes he used, using the MAME debugger:

 https://nowhereman999.wordpress.com/2021/09/25/defender-for-the-tandy-coco-3/

Glen put up some gameplay video as well - although it is impossible to play with one hand while holding a phone camera (some would say Defender is impossible to play with 2 hands...):

 https://youtu.be/jLdAvNj8HNI