News stories for Episode 273, August 6, 2022

News stories for Episode 273, August 6, 2022

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(July 30-August 5)

ANNOUNCEMENTS: We will be taking questions via email to Cocotalk, or on Discord, for a pre-record interview with Michael Duncan that will be recorded in 2 weeks, for edited playback the following week (August 27th). Please have any questions you may have for Michael sent to us by Friday, August 19th.

Also, August 20th will see 3/4 of the original NitrOS9 development team (Bill Nobel, Alan Dekok & myself) on for a special reminiscing on the 30th anniversary of NitrOS9.

September 17 will see a full interview with Frank Linhares of retrorewind.ca. Previously we had touched on his first computer being a Coco 2, and then into his retro repairs and hardware creating, but this time we will be covering his full computer career, including being on TV with the Lab with Leo Laporte, meeting and being friends with early internet personalities like Amber MacArthur, Kevin Rose, etc.

We have more interviews lined up but are still ironing out some details; we will hopefully be able to announce over the next week or two.

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

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1) The Coco Crew has released Episode 86. It includes a host discussion on "Who are our listeners" and a review of game "The Wild West" by Novasoft.

 cococrew.org

2) Allen Huffman posted part 2 of his blog series on Color BASIC RAM hooks. In this case he actually adds a patch to CONSOLE OUT that forces any lowercase output to uppercase (leaving the input alone), to demonstrate how to hook into a call.

 https://subethasoftware.com/2022/08/02/color-basic-ram-hooks-part-2/

He also posted part 2 of his IF AND/OR THEN vs. IF THEN IF blog series, where he experiments with different situations of doing multiple compares and seeing which methods run the fastest, or are the smallest:

 https://subethasoftware.com/2022/08/04/if-and-or-then-versus-if-then-if-part-2-2/

3) Paul Fiscarelli gets a shoutout on Adrian's Digital Basement - he sent Adrian a sound board (based on the Coco's own) for his 6800 based SWTPC computer (and briefly shows an animated, multi-voice graphics demo for the Coco as well):

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-dA24sfnSI

4) Frank and RetroRewind.ca will be at the World of Retro Computing Expo 2022 in Kitchener, Ontario on August 28, 2022. He will have a Coco set up for people to play with, as well as having his retro hardware for various computers available for sale:

 https://twitter.com/retrorewindca/status/1555601161754927110?s=21&t=IAVcLvlRVa7rCqo3dq0mSw

5) Carl England posted an update to his disk utilities package that he has been working on to also work with CocoSDC DSK images (as well as real floppies), and he states in his Facebook post in the Coco group, "...looks like it is 99% complete". This features selectable # of tracks (18 to 80), faster backups (on real disks) than DECB, optional SuperBoot on newly formatted disks, SDC directory navigation, multi-file copying, etc. He is currently writing documentation for it, so expect it out soon:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160041595942641/

6) Richard Kelly released version 1.9A of his "Easy Directory" utility on the Coco Facebook group. It's a file selection menu & program launcher (written in BASIC):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160036348402641/

MC-10

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1) Simon Jonassen posted on the Facebook MC-10 group that he has an LZSS decompressor routine working on the MC-10 (and a compressor written in C so that it will run a variety of platforms), and is gauging how much interest there is for such a project:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/5234197786707001/

Dragon 32/64

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1) Mike Miller posted a DSK image of the DragonDOS version of Robert Gault's drive RPM checker on the Dragon group on Facebook:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3233668926892754/

2) Good news - John Whitworth has re-opened DragonPlus Electronics, and changed it's web page a bit so that it only display items in stock:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3233553273570986/

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

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1) Jim Gerrie (of course!) has some new MC-10 releases: Volcano - a 10 line BASIC game entry:

 https://youtu.be/R3rUpadlrhQ

Alien Attack - converted from a game by David W. Stewart from Portable Program Review Magazine, December 1985. Jim did an update to it during the week as well, so his latest version is shown:

 https://youtu.be/Ycfsud7QK2k

Haunt - another David W. Stewart conversion, this time from the October 1985 issue of Portable Program Review Magazine. This is a low res 3D dungeon & dragons type game, something like Akalabeth:

 https://youtu.be/Wf-y70BbUDU

2) Hugo Dufort put up a video showing, as he put it "Finally won one game of Shanghai!". For those of you who have not seen the game winning sequence, here is your chance:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160040327752641/

3) Coco Forest on YouTube put up some more Dragon game videos, played on real hardware with the original artwork: Time Bandit / Glove:

 https://youtu.be/RxeaJXZvUPs

Airball / Wizards Quest:

 https://youtu.be/QiOVGPb7nA4

Grabber / Alcatraz II:

 https://youtu.be/YcBYeaMRvXU

4) Retro Games Trove put up a review of the Dragon 32 game "Ring of Darkness", which was later ported to the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC. It's unabashed clone of the original Ultima 1 game, and they review the Spectrum version of it, but my understanding is the Dragon 32 version is very similar, just without color (they do have a screenshot from the Dragon, but just showing text). A nice thorough review, including the reviewer making their own colored maps on graph paper (I only did black & white back back in the day myself):

 http://www.retrogamestrove.com/game-166-ring-of-darkness-1982/

5) Chris Poacher posted an article from Retro Gamer Magazine (their retroradar column) about childhood memories about the Dragon by Iain Lee, and how it managed to make weekends fun when everything was shut down:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3234878090105171/