News stories for Episode 241, December 11, 2021

News stories for Episode 241, December 11, 2021

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

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1) RetroRewind.ca has officially opened up their Coco section on their online store. This includes their recap kits for various Coco 1's, 2's and 3's, their recap service (where they replace the caps for you), and their brand new CocoSDC's with cases. There is more coming soon!:

 https://retrorewind.ca/tandy-coco?limit=100

2) Roger Taylor continues to update everyone with the high res scans of the GIME chips. On this past Sunday, he uploaded preview pictures of both full production versions of the GIME die itself, along with some labelling (although some of that is guesses at this early stage). Also, I should mention that I believe that Sean Riddle is the one doing the GIME chip disassembly, and he has done other chips in the past (see the next story):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10159615857697641/

3) Allen Huffman posted a link to a discussion about the VDG chips (both original and T1) from stardot.org.uk (an Acorn computer site - it also used the VDG), which includes decapped photos of the character ROM on the original 6847 chip itself, which were also done by Sean Riddle. There is even a mention from "robcfg" (who is also active on the World of Dragon forums) of the method used: "Regarding the process, if I remember correctly, the chip is torched in order to melt the package and get to the die, and then it's put in hot acid to clean it as much as possible. Then the pictures are taken with a motorised microscope and stitched together with a software like Fiji."

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159616597187641/

Discussion link:

 https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=22505

Allen also released a video showing how to manipulate individual bits easily in Extended BASIC (it's not the quickest method, but perfect for trying things out):

 https://youtu.be/rJqE29Qz_GQ

4) Larry Anderson posted a photo of a Coco Tuner cartridge (originally by Real-Time Specialties, Inc), which was used for tuning musical instruments. I think that I faintly remember hearing about these back in the day, but I have never seen one until now:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159619566487641/

5) Alexander Sidorenko is making his own Coco 2 from scratch - he initially showed some screenshots (it was quite blurry), and then improved video, and in the comments the board itself:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159622159727641/

6) Ciaran Anscomb released verision 1.0.3 of XRoar, which fixes some 6801/6803 implementation bugs (for the MC-10 emulation), MPI slot selection fix when RESET is hit, and several others:

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

7) Michael Furman has been working with the new XRoar (particularly with Coco 3 support), and he released a video showing how to use some of the debugging tools in XRoar with GDB:

 https://youtu.be/EymiOwIzwSE

8) John Strong put up a list of the specific cables one should get for his custom Coco 3 style CocoPi case, onto the CocoPi Facebook group:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/748644118674047/posts/1710440712494378/

9) Vince of the Retrospectreviews, a Youtube channel in Australia that we have showed before, released a video specifically Christmas themed - typing in a Christmas programs from Rainbow (including the fun of finding bugs):

 https://youtu.be/ZbXO_IK7Qls

10) Henry Reitveld released a video showing he hooked up both a Gotek and an IDE harddrive and copied files from the Gotek to the IDE (including a little BASIC program to do so):

 https://youtu.be/qjhec7mthbI

11) Tormod Volden has put up a new version of the Toolshed utility suite for Windows:

 http://toolshed.sourceforge.net/snapshots/

12) Simon Jonassen posted a short video which I will show here, doing a spinning dot plot (128 dots) spirograph type shape, that runs very smooth and fast and takes minimal CPU time (see the blue border time indicator). It also is NOT using double buffering, rendering everything on the displayed screen at all times. He has issued a challenge for people to figure out what he is doing in the Coco Discord #assembly channel, where is has included the source code (with very minimal comments currently)

 (show local "film.mp4")

13) Ciaran Anscomb (Sixxie) is hosting a mirror of Sock Master's original Coco websites, since Sock's old internet provider shut them down:

 http://www.6809.org.uk/sock/

If John Shawler is on - a plug for BoatFest 2021 (what it is, when it is, where it is)

 boatfest.info

MC-10

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1) On of the things Jim Gerrie ported to the MC-10 this week is a little different: A simple AI program that generates Haiku poems, originally from the book "AI for Small Computers" by John Krutch:

 https://youtu.be/TIABHXvy38A

Dragon 32/64

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1) Tony Jewell posted an almost 40 minute summary video, talking with all of exhibitors from the Dragon Meetup 2 weeks ago:

 https://youtu.be/vsHayyHWMzw

2) The Dragon Data Archive channel on YouTube also released a 10 minute walk through video of the Meetup, with no commentary:

 https://youtu.be/0SEDQnZFr3Y

3) TJ Ferreira posted a YouTube video to his channel about the new (to him) MC-10 system he picked up - his very first TRS-80 computer of any sort:

 https://youtu.be/WNjdCr_RP9I

4) Noel's Retro Lab did a video of various things that recently has received - two of which were an original 1986 Radio Shack Catalog (see around 8:45 he briefly shows the Coco 2 disk drive), and a replacement Dragon power supply from DragonPlus (around 11:40):

 https://youtu.be/CcQfKG--wjg

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

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1) Tim Lindner, who has been doing a series of retro video games of various platforms playing against his sister AJ, called "Sibling Rivalry", did the Coco 1/2 game Wildcatting on this past week's episode #6. Note - a little bit of "blue" language in the video:

 https://youtu.be/w0-JK7Clgjo

2) Jim Gerrie put out a 4K Basic clone of Run Dino Run, itself a clone of game Google put up in their browser:

 https://youtu.be/dw0Gpg8yjDQ

3) A newer user to our Coco Discord, raskalous, put up a video of his gameplay for the MegaBug Game on Challenge from last week:

 https://youtu.be/p_dMWEz6Ivg

NOTE: FROM HERE ON IS THE "GAME PROJECT UPDATE" roundtable:

PRE-RECORDS:

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- Sheldon MacDonald released some screenshots and early gameplay video for his current project - a 16 color vertical scrolling hockey game. Using the 128x96x16 graphics mode, this allows it to run on both a Coco 3 and a Coco 1/2 with the CocoVGA & SAM Accelerator upgrades installed. It also fully supports Ed Snider's PSG sound/RAM card, playing background music during play (as shown in the video):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159615406397641/

- Pere Serrat and Kees van Oss have release the next AGD update game pack (#41), which contains 6 games: Bandito, Bullet Storm, Bunny vs. Fox, Bunny's Big Adventure, Chiquito and Code-112:

 http://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=10983

LIVE UPDATES (order will be whomever needs to go on first):

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- Nick Marentes has a new blogpost for Zero Hour, which includes his new game loader, 2 newly designed/redesigned levels, and a sound sample tribute to David Ladd (which you can hear in his video demo):

 https://nickmarentes.com/ZeroHour/12.html

- Ciaran Anscomb, in a partnership with Neil Blanchard, is coming out with a GMC enabled cartridge version of his modern Tetris game, Blockdown, featuring background music:

- Dave Veary has an update on his Spare Pirate Kimiko game/hardware project/Kickstarter

- Jay Searle and me will announce/show an early preview of the Coco 3 version of PETSCII Robots.

- Steve Bamford will do some demo play of Circe's Island (last time on the Dragon Special he went through technical details and sprite design)

Tentative - won't know until Saturday morning if they can make it:

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- Paul Thayer - CocoBan (based on an Android game, itself very loosely based on Sokoban)