News stories for Episode 269, July 9, 2022

News stories for Episode 269, July 9, 2022

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(July 2-July 8)

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

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1) Danniielle O'Connor attended the Adelaide Retro Computer Group meetup a couple of days ago, taking her Australian Coco 2. She took some pictures from the event which she posted on Facebook, showing her setup (including her newly acquired C64):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160002740067641/

2) Tim Lindner, thanks to Mark Blair, now has a bezel graphic made for MAME that is the TRS-80 Color Video TV. Combined with the CM-8 he had done already, we now have period correct bezels for the Coco 1 and Coco 3 eras:

 http://tlindner.macmess.org/?page_id=634

3) Jason Thorpe posted on the Coco group in Facebook that he has a Github for CocoFS, a tool he wrote to interact with the contents of Coco DSK images. It currently only works with 35 track DECB images, but he has compiled and tested it on OSX, NetBSD & 64 bit Windows:

 https://github.com/thorpej/cocofs

He also posted on his Github his conversion of the original Motorola floating point library (IEEE 754) that can be built with ASM6809:

 https://github.com/thorpej/nfp09

4) Allen Huffman posted on the Coco group on Facebook about his experiment to duplicate the MC-10 functionality of being to directly type in CHR$ graphics characters into BASIC programs. Part of this is to get BASIC to print out the graphics characters when LISTing vs. seeing them as BASIC tokens, which it looks like he has figured out:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159995724292641/

5) Allen Huffman has also busy on his Sub-Etha Software site with multiple Coco articles: A) MacInvaders09 by Jamie Cho - last week we covered that Allen had released the sourcecode to his Invaders09 arcade game. In this new article Allen lets us know that Jamie Cho had ported it to the MM/1 back in the day, and then ported it Macs of various CPU generations: 680x0, PowerPC, Intel and now even the newer M1 (ARM) processors. He posts the links to Jamie's Github in the article, both to the sourcecode and the binary downloads:

 https://subethasoftware.com/2022/07/04/macinvaders09-by-jamie-cho/

B) Color BASIC Attract Screen Part 5 is the next article he put up - an update to his doing animated attract screens for games in BASIC. Using multiple suggestions & sample code from Jason Pittman, they speed up and fix some issues. But it still isn't quite fast enough, so with some sample code from William Astle, he also shows an ML routine to speed things up:

 https://subethasoftware.com/2022/07/05/color-basic-attract-screen-part-5/

C) Completing his hat trick for the week, Allen's latest blog post is called "More Coco MC6847 VDG chip "draw black" challenge responses". Here he goes back and forth with Sebastian Tapper on speeding up drawing black lines on a text/SG4 screen using BASIC:

 https://subethasoftware.com/2022/07/06/more-coco-mc6847-vdg-chip-draw-black-challenge-responses/

6) And finally, Allen posted an article on Vintage is the New Old about running NitrOS9 Ease of Use" on a PC or Mac using Ciaran's latest XRoar with Coco 3 emulation using it's built in IDE emulation (EOU normally uses a special driver for emulators which works with VCC and MAME, on a separate floppy image). The article has a download to get everything running from scratch, plus a nice write up on the history of OS-9, NitrOS-9 and NitrOS-9/EOU (and getting XRoar to run EOU, thanks for Michael Furman):

 https://www.vintageisthenewold.com/coco-3s-nitros9-ease-of-use-edition-on-your-pc-mac

7) The Amigos, on their Amigo Stream Team (a partnership with other streamers to share their stream content) have 48KRam (Josh, whom I met at BoatFest) showing how to do a complete Coco 3 recap (using Retrorewinds Coco 3 cap kit):

 https://youtu.be/CGrmuSfML8Q

8) Alderson Retro Computing (who recently joined our Coco Discord) put out a tutorial video for beginners on how to save/load BASIC programs to disk (and get a blank floppy image, using these with both emulators and the CocoSDC, etc.):

 https://youtu.be/fD0NfncmOfA

9) Pedro Pana (Rocky Hill on YouTube) put up a video showing "a cheap but janky way" to get analog audio out of a Coco and into a TV's HDMI input, using a couple of adaptors in a chain:

 https://youtu.be/lIacGn5m7bw

MC-10

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1) Brendan Donahe put up a video showing his using a Raspberry PI Pico to make a wired USB keyboard adaptor for his MC-10. This is a proof of concept, so lotsa wires:

 https://youtu.be/MPuWSxc4ej8

2) Jim Gerrie posted in the MC-10 group on Facebook at link to British magazine Personal Computer World, November 1983 issue, which includes a review of the MC-10 (page 144):

 https://worldradiohistory.com/UK/Personal-Computer-World/80s/PCW-1983-11-S-OCR.pdf

Dragon 32/64

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1) Richard Harding posted in the Dragon Facebook group that the Dragon's 40th Anniversary meetup will be October 22-23 this year at Blanco's Hotel in Port Talbot, Wales. They will be doing a trip to the original Dragon Data factory building as well:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3215186982074282/

2) Vyper68 on the World of Dragon forums has uploaded (in WAV cassette & VDK disk formats) the "Super Cassette" from Melbourne House. This contains the 15 BASIC programs from the book "Enter the Dragon" all pre-typed in:

 https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11033

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

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1) My Drunk Sibling (AJ and Tim) do head to head battle on Math Bingo / Bingo Math - in all 3 sub-games. Bonus: AJ explains how to make a Watermelon Martini while Tim attempts to quickly fix a joystick:

 https://youtu.be/jYzVA9lsvMM

2) Erico Patricio Monteiro posted a quick update and screenshot for his upcoming Lunar Lander arcade/adventure hybrid:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159996009062641/

3) Paul Shoemaker, fresh off of Ghost Rush, put up a teaser video of his current project, which he is learning how to do as he goes. A Coco 1/2 game called Cops 'n Crooks, based on the Atari 2600 Activision game Keystone Capers:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10159993846827641/

4) Johan Koelman has released the cassette image for his new MC-10 game Shogun that we mentioned last week in the MC-10 (based on the old board game of the same name):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/5149100445216736/

5) backhandsandwich (Vincent Tran) on YouTube has posted some Coco 3 gameplay videos this week, all transcodes (unfortunately they are all mirrored backwards, too). Included are: - Defender loading from a dual floppy Coco 3, and then some gameplay. (Unfortunately the video is mirrored so everything is backwards, but you get the idea):

 https://youtu.be/AjMnQhoZz_M

- Joust:

 https://youtu.be/iFiJpDcxVDg

- Donkey Kong Remix - this is one he posted about on Facebook, where he was getting sound issues. From the comments, sounds like his Multipak is not upgraded for the Coco 3 and that may be the cause:

 https://youtu.be/abUfmVIkcXM

6) Gamblin' Cabbie on YouTube did a 2 hour stream playing the Coco 3 cartridge version of Thexder (he is quite good, he reached level 5 on his first try with no cheating):

 https://youtu.be/88VKOY-xK40

7) Our very own Ken @ Canadian Retro Things did a comparison video of the Coco 1/2 version of Grabber vs. the later Commodore 64 version (which I didn't even know existed until last week):

 https://youtu.be/a6VIRRP4iOE

8) The 64K Gamer on YouTube did 3 more Coco game videos this past week - Chuckie Egg, Cashman and Firecopter (all played on real hardware):

 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzgb8hC5w0sJZej2itZT7BA/videos