News stories for Episode 248, February 4, 2022

News stories for Episode 248, February 4, 2022

=========================================

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

---

1) Ken at Canadian Retro Things goes through fixing a Deluxe joystick, using an IBM PC Jr joystick:

 https://youtu.be/q1rmpZXmGlw

2) On the World of Dragon forums, a bug fix for emulating the SuperSprite FM+ board on a Coco (and how to control which screen is displayed) was mentioned by Pernod70 that is in the latest 0.240 release, which will now make switching screens work both on the Dragon and the Coco:

 https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5961&start=90

3) The Coco Crew covered "Turbo Rascal", a cross platform Pascal IDE for developing for 8 bit CPU's. They mentioned that the author (Nicolaas Ervik Groeneboom) was looking to expand to the Coco and 6809. Some other already supported systems (like the VZ200) already feature VDG support, so it wouldn't totally be from scratch. Carlos Comacho posted about this project on the Coco Facebook group, including a screenshot of a Millipede port done on the VZ200, and the author of project himself has shown up in the discussion:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159727345362641/

4) Speaking of the Coco Crew, they release episode 80 early in the week. Some things included this month John going over his in development joystick tester in detail, Neil reviewing Soviet Bloc (a Tetris game by John Strong that supported stereo sound on the Orch-90, panning the sounds left and right based on where your pieces are falling), and the discussion topic was on how expensive Coco's (particularly Coco 3's) are getting to be on ebay, etc.:

 http://cococrew.org/

5) John Linville also released a video update on his Coco / Tandy 1000 joystick tester, showing his respun board design:

 https://youtu.be/lNDiBSgUXns

6) Allen Huffman pointed to a video discussing the history of the Computer Magic (later CommaVid) Magicard (a programming / development card for the Atari 2600/VCS from back in 1981/1982). In it, it mentions that one of the creators, John Bronstein, is mentioned as having bought a TRS-80 Color Computer to hook up to the cartridge (while plugged into the 2600) to do the programming. All 3 of the creators of this worked as physicists at FermiLab... which I believe some other Coco people have as well. (2:14-2:50 - although the narrator mistakenly refers to the Coco having a "6509"): The post:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159726786072641/

The video:

 https://youtu.be/mjuYv0pmNLE?t=135

7) Pedro Pana has posted a couple more videos showing his progress on the USB keyboard interface for the Coco, and will hopefully be on the show today to summarize his progress and answer a few questions. He had 3 update videos this week: Part 2 - getting the SHIFT key working, although he still had a bit of a response time issue. He did get Tetris working, which has some slightly odd keyboard routines. He also reveals that both keyboards work simultaneously:

 https://youtu.be/k5mxc9rM_4o

Part 3 - He shows it registering more than one key at once, the Capslock key works like SHIFT-0, and he shows it working with a PS2 keyboard as well (with a PS/2 to USB adaptor dongle) - even hot swapped, which didn't always work on PS/2 based PC's.

 https://youtu.be/XRjkQ9mmF6k

He also just released a 20 minute video showing how he fixed a broken Coco 3 that he bought off of ebay:

 https://youtu.be/2T3f3HH7CZk

8) An Italian retro computer live stream called "La Macchina Del Tempo Live" ("The Live Time Machine") talking about computers that were out in the December 1982 time frame. They show a Coco 3 boot screen (but the DISK ROM is copyright original 1982 by Microsoft, so I guess that counts). He demonstrates some games from the 1982 era as well on various computers; on the Coco he shows off Dale Lear's Fire Copter from Adventure International (1:04:50), and Doodle Bug by Computerware (1:19:30):

 https://youtu.be/TXQd7yqwDU0

9) Allen Huffman put up another blog post about doing conversions in BASIC between decimal, hexadecimal and binary numbers, and the complications that arise when working with 16 bit numbers (coles notes version - you have to treat them as 16 bit SIGNED numbers), with a big shoutout to rflberg who helped Allen figure it out:

 https://subethasoftware.com/2022/02/01/coco-and-16-bits/

MC-10

---

1)

Dragon 32/64

---

1) John Whitworth posted in the Dragon Facebook group that he is continuing work on recreating the Dragon Beta based on the prototypes that still exist. This was the last machine Dragon Data was working on (a business machine) before they went under, and was quite advanced: up to 768K RAM, dual 2 MHz 6809 CPU's, RGB output, 80 column text, high res graphics, built in floppy interface:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3100409476885367/

2) Adrian Sinclair posted photos on the Facebook Dragon group of some 60x40 cm (about 23.5" x 15.75") reproduction full color posters he got made based on original Dragon packaging:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3100136220246026/

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

==============================

1) Tim Lindner and sister AJ return to the Coco for a 2fer for a Sibling Rivalry game of Cashman:

 https://youtu.be/UpCyDwk6Dug

and of Gantelet:

 https://youtu.be/OyAc6yK-cvc

2) Rick Adams released a Coco 3 BASIC text version of Wordle (he is taking suggestions for the Coco version's name - he has suggested COCOle or RickLe), that you can download and play from his github:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159731633232641/

3) Pere Serrat mentioned something in a post to the World of Dragon forums: that he has 12 AGD games already converted over to use the SuperSprite FM+ board (only 6 are currently available from John Whitworth's site in support of the board):

 https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=11002

And, he also released the next 6 pack of converted AGD games for "regular" Dragons and Coco's (#49), featuring: Ninja Poison Part I Ninja Poison Part II Stickman Tank Battle The 8 Level Game The Hair Rising Adventures of Mr. Hair

 https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11003

4) Jim Gerrie finished up his port of Laser Chess from the Atari ST to the MC-10, and has a new longplay video showing the finished version (show the end where one player actually kills the other):

 https://youtu.be/8B8g9gLdNMg

He also released "House Adventure", originally from the Club 100 library of text adventures:

 https://youtu.be/JiPyKWw0Da8

5) SimonWGB (who was one of our guests on the first Dragon Special) has been doing his various computer game playing streams on a variety of computers and consoles, and has done the Dragon again this past week. But this time around he plays some games that he doesn't usually play; in this case Fire Force (a viciously hard game but with a great multi-voice musical soundtrack):

 https://youtu.be/MQcB9FyZ4lQ

6) TGP Highscore Runs on YouTube did a gameplay video of Galacticans - a Galaxian clone made in the UK in 1983:

 https://youtu.be/p5nq6VDe9tY