News stories for Episode 238, November 20, 2021

News stories for Episode 238, November 20, 2021

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

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1) Pere Serrat has uploaded more software for the SuperSpriteFM+ boards for Coco's and Dragons, including music streaming software. He has also uploaded his first AGD games pack for the board - a 6 pack of games. They require the Supersprite FM+, 32K of RAM and a 6309 (for Dragon or Coco).

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159575972192641/
 https://www.dragonplus-electronics.co.uk/supersprite-fm-downloads/ 

2) Jeff Birt posted a short walkthrough video for Tandy Assembly that he made, and he was one of the speakers:

 https://youtu.be/FTISzi0H3d8

3) Ciaran Anscomb has released the latest XRoar version 1.0.1, which now includes both MC-10 and Coco 3 support. Versions are available for OSX, Windows and Linux, as well as the online browser version:

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

4) Congratulations to the Coco Crew podcast, which has now had over 250,000 accumulated downloads over it's 6&1/2 year run. That fact that viewer numbers for all the Coco podcasts have been increasing steadily is a testament to the Coco community as a whole, and the fact that it is growing.

5) Mike Rojas posted on Facebook his "Coco 3 Switchboard" which is a replacement board for the membrane board in the original Coco 3 keyboards (which, as many of us know, can wear out an start to not register keys). His package contains 57 Panasonic switches, the board, flex cable and connectors needed, and you use your original keys from your existing Coco 3 keyboard. He is expecting to get this down in price to around $23 USD + shipping:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159577526302641/

6) It should be mentioned that Mike gave props to Nik Brisevac posting pictures of his switch keyboard that he had posted on Facebook earlier this week as well (this one is more of a home project, and not meant to be commercial):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159574736912641/

7) Jason Oakley posted an export script written in LUA to be used with the Aseprite sprite editor. He originally wrote it fort he VZ200 (which also uses the same VDG chip as the Coco and MC-10), but it now supports FCB statements for the Coco:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159572088022641/
 https://github.com/WauloK/VZ200-Aseprite-Export

8) Color Computer Programing has put up a couple more BASIC programming demo/tutorials this week:

 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq8e7rmnX95GZuou36i0t5Q/videos

9) Pierre Serrazin has released an update to CMOC, the C like cross compiler to generate Coco/Dragon programs (both for regular Disk BASIC/DragonDOS and for OS9), now up to version 0.1.172. This update contains several bug fixes, adding memmove, memichr and vsprintf functions to the CMOC library, and some optimization tweaks when you compile with the "no-relocate" option (ie making position dependent code).

 http://perso.b2b2c.ca/~sarrazip/dev/cmoc.html

MC-10

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1) 8bitsinthebasement on YouTube (who has been on our show) has put up a video about the Alice 4K computer from France (which is where he now lives):

 https://youtu.be/eYgm6st_9tQ

Dragon 32/64

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1) The Dragon Meetup is next weekend, and we plan on getting some of attendees on during CocoTalk next week! If we can arrange it, we may be streaming some live coverage from the show before our normal start time.

 https://www.facebook.com/events/566234304459800/?active_tab=discussion

2) Chris's Retro Corner on YouTube did a video unboxing a Dragon 32 he received, including manuals, tapes, etc.:

 https://youtu.be/O2qFc1d5EOM

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

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1) Remember the 6 new MC-10 (and 7 new Coco) games we showed from the Japanese site last week? Apparently they are still going: (Xevious clone - Coco version is 32K/PMODE 3, MC-10 is 20K/PMODE 1. It does look like the Coco version of these games run at 128x192x4, while the MC-10 versions use 128x96x4)

 https://youtu.be/reS3NT8HMaI
 http://inufuto.web.fc2.com/8bit/impetus/

2) Pere Serrat has now uploaded a 6 pack of games for the Supersprite FM+ board. They required the Supersprite FM+, 32K of RAM and a 6309 (for Dragon or Coco).

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159580338377641/

3) An update on MrDave6309's Coco 3 game patreon from last week - he has reached the minimum funding goal already with time to spare.

 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/844758331/retro-video-game

4) Jim Gerrie has release Peepers, a game originally on the Sinclair ZX81 (published in ZX Computing Aug/Sep 1983 issue):

 https://youtu.be/sfGutpBSY6g