News stories for Episode 276, August 27, 2022

News stories for Episode 276, August 27, 2022

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

(August 20-August 26)

ANNOUNCEMENTS: Nick and I have not heard from Michael Duncan, whom we were supposed to do a pre-record interview with sometime this weekend, in almost 2 weeks. I have to assume he either got really busy, or decided against an interview, which is too bad. Xenion was a really good game (we just had it as the Game on Challenge a few weeks ago), and he had an unreleased game that was going to come out for the Coco 3 after Xenion that Nick still had an early copy of. Hopefully he is still interested, and we just have to delay it.

September 3 we will interview Dave Dies of Diecom fame (as well as earlier game titles for the Coco from several other companies).

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.

Still trying to line up some other interviews; but trying to schedule these is still very much like herding cats (even if it is only one cat).

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

---

1) Allen Huffman put a post up on how GOTO, GOSUB/RETURN work in BASIC (including GOSUB using the stack for where to RETURN to, which allows nested GOSUB's for as many as you have free RAM for). He then goes into the assembly language equivalents (JMP/BRanches and JSR/BSR), and shows a way to "cancel" a J/BSR by simply doing an LEAS 2,s:

 https://subethasoftware.com/2022/08/23/goto-gosub-stack-overflows-and-6809-stack-jumping/

2) Pierre Sarrazin has announced that version 0.1.79 of the CMOC C compiler has been released. Besides general bug fixes and optimizations, it now adds floating point support for the DragonDOS environment, and an option to allocate more stack space in OS-9:

 http://sarrazip.com/dev/cmoc.html

3) The official dates & hotel for CocoFest 31 have been announced:

 https://www.glensideccc.com/cocofest-31-event/

4) 3 Minute Retro (Phil Kruman) did a 3 minute video about the Coco 2:

 https://youtu.be/KUj0ouAxhHE

5) Another Coco 2 video from YouTube channel Thecircuitandgameguy101 appeared this week as well, where he did some modifications to a small kaleidoscope program (originally from Hot Coco), as well as his hooking it up to an old TV to get it to display through RF:

 https://youtu.be/uWrfl4yv9nU

6) Rocky Hill on YouTube (Pedro Pena) posted a video (for fun), showing his using the program FreeRouting to auto-route PCB traces of his open source version of the Coco 3 motherboard that he did in KiCAD (a separate app). Since the auto-routing is fairly slow (even at the 8x playback speed he used for this part of the video), he decided to overlay the video with what I can only describe as "dad jokes", some with a geek flavor:

 https://youtu.be/h4MrQJgeFVc

7) FFF Gaming Emporium on YouTube did a video showing a complete disassembly of his Coco 2. It's done with no commentary, but some TV running in the background, so you may want to mute it:

 https://youtu.be/o_1m4BLKN_c

8) Color Computer Programing on YouTube put up a short video showing his doing a Defender style program in BASIC, with firing and target ships added since his previous weeks video:

 https://youtu.be/MYI1maMuoaU

9) Roel Van de Paar in Australia put up a short video in answer to a question from a 17 year old, who wants to make a new programming language inspired by Color BASIC. He proposes some quick tips on 5 possible solutions:

 https://youtu.be/NG_q8fHGd0Y

MC-10

---

1) James Host has continued uploading more issues of the Australian MC-10 dedicated magazine to the MC-10 facebook group, with 3 issues (May, June and July 1984) being uploaded this past week. The July 1984 issue was the last one; after that the MC-10 content was merged back into a more general Coco magazine.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/files/files

2) Joel Rees posted an update to his MC-10 assembler; it is now capable of creating .c10 files which XRoar can read as a virtual cassette file:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/5278940948899351/

Link to the Sourceforge project:

 https://sourceforge.net/projects/asm68c/

Dragon 32/64

---

1) Spanish YouTube channel Hobby Consolas (Hobby Consoles) did a show covering the Dragon 32, including some BASIC games (a Battleship clone, a golf game, and Go Fish), and a bit of history about the computer. Unfortunately, YouTube autotranslate doesn't seem to work as well when there is background music (which they have at times), so I am hoping one of our Spanish speaking viewers can email us or let us know on the Coco Discord in more detail what they talked about on the show. I must say it looks like they have a lot of fun doing the show, and it has a large user base of 234,000 subscribers:

 https://youtu.be/O4Q5P9Yq_PA

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

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

1) Ken of Canadian Retro Things (you may recognize that name...lol) Posted a video reviewing the Inufuto Japanese developed cross platform games, trying them a multitude of systems, including the Coco's and MC-10:

 https://youtu.be/60TovQpF4fI

2) The Amigos released episode 35 of The Coco Show - reviewing the educational programming game from Tandy / The Image Producers, Color Robot Battle:

 https://youtu.be/o9A1mLzUOeg

3) Simon Jonassen posted a couple of updates to his porting of Timber Man over the MC-10 over the week, so I will just show the latest one. He shows the animated lumberjack, and the hand/menu selection moving around:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160078001217641/

4) Paul Shoemaker posted a couple of quick video updates of some projects that he is working on - a port of the Pico-8 virtual console game "Invasion" (originally by Joe Rodriquez) and a spinning earth animation:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160072845422641/

5) Ken Reighard posted a video of a new Coco game that he is working on called Robot Nightmare, running in a higher semigraphics mode. It's kinda a little like Wizard of Wor, but with many more elements added:

 https://youtu.be/RoAnbSUYH80

6) Coco Forest on YouTube was busy this week - with multiple 2-pack videos of the artwork and gameplay for Dragon 32 games. Of note this week is Downland - which came on cassette in the UK, not cartridge like it was by Tandy in North America.

 https://www.youtube.com/user/MaryWinstead32/videos