News stories for Episode 239, November 27, 2021

News stories for Episode 239, November 27, 2021

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

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1) Allen Huffman has posted part 2 of his exploration of the differences between the original VDG and the T1 VDG:

 https://www.vintageisthenewold.com/the-cocos-lesser-known-screen-color-revisited

He also posted about the newest XRoar 1.0x supporting the Coco 3 and the MC-10), and demonstrated the keyboard shortcut support that the MC-10 supported for both BASIC commands and the semi-graphics blocks:

 https://youtu.be/z3HQniJtXQ0

2) Mike Rojas received a home-hacked Coco 1 recently, and took pictures. If you want to see the early 1980's hardware hacker ethic in action (used whatever you have laying around to get the job done) - this is an excellent example, and I remember seeing similar hacks done back in the 1981-1983 time frame:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159594222767641/

3) It's a little late now, but both Barry Nelson uploaded Thanksgiving themed pictures in GIF format that can be viewed on the Coco using various GIF picture viewers (Coco 1/2/3 and DECB or OS9) to the Facebook Coco group.

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

4) Simon Jonassen uploaded

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159596990122641/

5) Rick Adams has been working on a BASIC preprocessor that lets one use some structures, etc. like more modern BASIC's have, that can cross translate to native Microsoft BASIC on the Coco (similar to another project that we covered last year):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159586247312641/

6) Coco-pi.com has their latest updates - XRoar 1.0.2 (featuring some bug fixes for Coco 3 and MC-10 support), and MAME 0.238, as well as Rick Adams DECB pre-processor that we mentioned earlier:

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

7) Color Computer Programing on YouTube posted more BASIC videos - including a screen saver, factoring numbers, solving quadratic formulas, and the using subscripted variables to generated random numbers:

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

MC-10

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1) Jim Gerrie posted a link to a retrocomputing post on reddit about getting an MC-10 running again... and suggests upvoting it to get some more attention for the MC-10:

 https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/qyguok/here_is_my_trs80_mc10_hope_i_can_get_her_running/

2) Jim also posted a longer video of his testing MC-10 emulation in Ciaran's latest XRoar (it's Jim that found one bug the Ciaran had fixed for 1.0.1):

 https://youtu.be/9s6zhcHcp3g

3) Simon Jonassen has been experimenting with precise timing on the VDG in the MC-10 - including switching colorsets multiple times per row (pics shown on an emulator, but should also work on the real hardware). This is a technique similar to how the Coco game Dragon Fire did it:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/4468913166568804/

Dragon 32/64

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1) Chris Hawkins posted his second Dragon 32 video - last week we showed his unboxing to find out what he got shipped to him. This time he goes through the magazines and cassettes that he received (no gameplay footage... yet):

 https://youtu.be/mUbpB8_Rs-k

2) John Whitworth has uploaded a Word document to the Dragon group on Facebook showing both the pin connections between the Premier Sprite board to the Dragon cartridge port, and also BASIC extensions that support it:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3049946121931703/

3) Arctic Retro put up a YouTube video exploring his newly acquired Dragon 32, including disassembly it, replacing some caps (even though it appeared to boot up prior to that just fine), and testing some games:

 https://youtu.be/YbAX0WcDKyA

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

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1) Michael Furman has been doing videos recently of playing the Games of the week, but using his pyDrivewire product, and also answering a pyDrivewire question at the same time. He has done Lunchtime and Calixto Island, and 3D Space Wars over the past few weeks:

 https://www.youtube.com/user/MikeyN6IL/videos

2) Paul Thayer put up a short video blog explaining his progress on his upcoming Coco 3 game, CocoBan:

 https://youtu.be/R2I5eiFcixU

3) The YouTube release of episode 26 of The Coco Show by the Amigos was posted this past week, featuring Donut Dilemma:

 https://youtu.be/21oFRUKn0vc

4) Jim Gerrie posted a video of Speedboat (originally by Steven Holiday 1984 the book Fantastic Computer Games for the Coco:

 https://youtu.be/X3dxK3HyTw4

5) "I only did it for the calculator watch" on YouTube add a couple more videos showing a couple of games from the "Cassette 50" BASIC game compilations - this time featuring "Do Your Sums" (actually a dice throwing program or a PLAY command prompter) and "Derby Dash" (Which had 2 versions from 1983 and 1984):

 https://youtu.be/vEPyBWJtS8Y