News stories for Episode 255, March 26, 2022

News stories for Episode 255, March 26, 2022

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

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1) Sad news for the Tandy and Coco community - former chairman and CEO of Tandy John V. Roach passed away on March 20th. He was president during the Coco's heyday (starting in 1981) and was CEO for the remainder of the Coco's life at Tandy. He was also one of the people at Tandy that helped push them into making home computers. Mark Siegel is here to share some thoughts on John:

 https://amp.star-telegram.com/news/local/fort-worth/article259598229.html

2) Another tech luminary passed away on March 14 (from CoVid). Stephen E. Wilhite, is most famous for being the one who created the GIF ("jif" as declared it was to be pronounced in his original 1987 spec) graphics format for Compuserve. He also served as the Chief Architect at America Online before he retired. (The Coco 3 had it's first GIF viewer later in 1987, GIFOS9 written by Mike Dziedezic. Many other (and improved) viewers for both OS9 and DECB have been released since):

 https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/23/22992066/stephen-wilhite-gif-creator-dies

3) Brendan Donahe has released a couple of short videos to show his work in progress extensions to BASIC for Coco 1 & 2's with 64K of RAM, to add full palette support for those with his CocoVGA hardware. This lets you modify the palettes without one having to write or learn how to use any ML programming at all:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159805486432641/
 https://youtu.be/eeGpsnYEpdw
 https://youtu.be/T8xgEoAIuoE

4) Chibiakumas (Keith) on YouTube (who has done graphics, sound and input assembly langaage tutorials for the Coco and Dragon computers) put up a video about his second multiplatform assembly language book. This one covers the ARM Thumb, 65816, 6809, PDP-11 & RISC-V CPU's specifically. The video is more a tutorial on making and publishing a book, but his content is always good:

 https://youtu.be/psbb_U4fN5U

5) Robert Sieg continues to experiment with Coco 3 artifacted colours, and published his latest results with screenshots, and a disk image that you can download from Facebook (as well as multiple other related posts during the week):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159813224462641/

6) Like Robert Sieg, Robert Gault is also exploring rendering high color pictures on a Coco 3 in the composite mode. His uses page flipping and a different technique than Robert Sieg's:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159812615512641/

7) John Linville announced that the Coco Crew podcast just passed the 275,000 total downloads mark since it first started.

8) Color Computer Programing on YouTube put up a video tutorial on using LLIST, and other printer commands, from XRoar:

 https://youtu.be/lF-uaYZoxdY

9) The Alderson Video Media channel on YouTube put up a short video to promote his new channel, explaining how his coding career started with the Coco 3 (and he has a CocoPi as well). And it sounds like more Coco related videos are coming:

 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UK8Gkn5KOTE

10) Mike Rayburn posted a video of his Coco PS-2/Joystick adaptor in action with a Tandy Hi-res adaptor. He also had a slightly earlier post mentioning that he has fixed some bugs and is going through thorough testing over the next couple of weeks, and then should have them available for purchase hopefully by mid to late April:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159816137177641/

MC-10

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1) Jim Gerrie notes that the Japanese website that has done many Coco and MC-10 ports of their multi-platform games has got a new one started for a limited number of systems called Ascend. Hopefully the MC-10 and Coco versions aren't too far behind:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/4865220883604695/

2) Darren Ottery posted a video in the MC-10 Facebook group of a work in progress Invaders game, using the MCBASIC compiler and a little TASM6801. At this point he is more experimenting to learn things than promising a finished game, but it looks good so far!

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/4852173484909435/

Dragon 32/64

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1)

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

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1) Ken of Canadian Retro Things put up his video about Nick's new game Zero Hour for the Coco 3.

 https://youtu.be/-nFi1bpTqLc

2) The Amigos released episode 30 of The Coco Show on their YouTube channel - A Mazing World of Malcolm Mortar for the Coco 3:

 https://youtu.be/DFE-4JA4j04

They have also started a channel to start putting their live streams up for later viewing, including their partners. One of the first is Aaron's live stream focusing on Diecom games:

 https://youtu.be/a0bpvNhwFqE

And lastly, their monthly recording of various shows (including The Coco Show) is this afternoon, live on their Twitch channel, starting at 2 pm Eastern. The Coco Show is roughly scheduled for 3 pm.

 https://www.twitch.tv/amigosretrogaming

3) D. Bruce Moore put up a cryptically worded video post on the coco group in Facebook - which includes the tree from his 2017 game, Forest of Doom:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159814291937641/

4) Paul Ripke, in his very first post to the Coco Facebook group, put up a disk image of his own imagination of a Coco based Wordle port (called Colordle), which he wrote on real hardware with his CocoSDC and TSEDIT. His version runs in PMODE 1, and runs on Coco 1,2 or 3 with at least 32K RAM:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159814214117641/

(also load my screenshot colordle.png)

5) Guillaume Major ported the Semigraphics-24 Tetris game (written in 1991 by PSE Computers) from the Dragon to the Coco 1/2. These features special mixed character fonts that will only work on a Coco 1/2 VDG based system, but look very good. He announced this on the Coco Facebook page, with screenshots (and it is already on the archive):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159810111097641/

6) I did a small update to my Coco games page, adding 3 games to the list (including this past weeks Game on Challenge game, Juno):

 http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/coco_game_list.html

7) Episode 22 of Sibling Rivalry, featuring Tim & AJ, features Ciaran Anscomb's Dragon & Coco multi-player game Dunjunz (and they found it as difficult and confusing as I do!):

 https://youtu.be/Z2gNPn_Ur8Y

8) A quick shoutout to the Taylor and Amy show, who just released a video today showing their new Spectrum SD card solution. They picked some popular sample games to try on it, and, showing that a good and/or popular game is as such irregardless of the platform it is on, all but one of them is also available on the Dragon or Coco: