News stories for Episode 278, September 10, 2022

News stories for Episode 278, September 10, 2022

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

(August 27-September 9 - two weeks since Sep 3 interview was long)

1st a big thank you to Henry Reitveld for helping get me in contact with Dave Dies to arrange last weeks interview. Without him, it wouldn't have happened.

Next week (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.

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

---

1) Ron Klein announced that the newly released CMOC 0.1.79 package update for the CocoPi Project has now been released:

 https://coco-pi.com/new-cmoc-0-1-79-package-available-for-coco-pi/

He is also updated MAME for the CocoPi to version 0.247:

 https://coco-pi.com/new-mame-0-247-package-available-for-coco-pi/

2) Coco Crew released a shorter episode (87) month, but we are all glad that John is now out of the hospital and recovering. Hope your return to full health is quick, John! Neil reviews Fabrizio Caruso's "Cross Snake" port to the Coco from his CrossLIB cross-platform, now using 4 color graphics rather than semi-graphics.

 http://cococrew.org

3) SepTandy 2022 on YouTube has started, and one of the first entries from "Geek With Social Skills", who did a pickups, trades and donations. The main Coco related one is the Deluxe 2 button joystick unboxing he did, and it's in pristine shape (possibly never used):

 https://youtu.be/SXGEf3WEuNQ?t=189

4) Michael Furman posted two video blogs (so far) for SepTandy. #0 - he finds a bunch of 3.5" disks that were formatted for the Coco, and goes through some of the stuff he found, and how he hooked up his 3.5" drives to his Grease Weasel to read the disks RAW (and export the disk images in multiple formats):

 https://youtu.be/jtXj-loHK0Y

And following that up with episode #1, where he actually recovers some of the graphics from his desktop publishing software he wrote in 1989 when he was 13:

 https://youtu.be/cGDnpwevqTo

And episode #3, which is an update on running Drivewire on the CocoION Ethernet card (episode 2 is in game news) - he is just getting back into it after having to work on other things the last few months:

 https://youtu.be/wY8Z_YDpc1c

5) Todd Wallace (TekTodd on YouTube) put up a video of using a Coco 3 for something you don't see every day - making an MS-DOS boot disk (on a 720K 3.5" disk):

 https://youtu.be/FDNs14Ye8j0

6) Matt Heffernan of Slithy Games on YouTube (we covered him before when comparing BASIC speeds) did an unboxing / testing video of the MiSTer (DE10 Nanon), testing many consoles and home computers, including the Coco 2:

 https://youtu.be/nI3hYOvx-Ww?t=3826

7) Color Computer Programing on YouTube put up some new "learn as we go" tutorials up this week, but rather than working on game style programs, this time around he is working a graphic screen simple word processor in BASIC (and also did some exploration of pages with PMODE, and using the PMODE command):

 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq8e7rmnX95GZuou36i0t5Q/videos

He also did a video on PMODE and PCOPY with respect to graphics pages:

 https://youtu.be/S8yBabwU7Dg

8) Last weekend was the World of Retro Computing in Kitchener, Ontario (a retro show for a variety of retro systems. Several Coco luminaries were there, including Fabian Rodriguez, Neil Blanchard and Frank Linhares (who is out interview guest on September 17):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160084271477641/

10) Allen Huffman posted multiple blog entries for SepTandy: - an assembly language subroutine to save and restore the 32x16 text screen:

 https://subethasoftware.com/2022/09/02/coco-6809-assembly-save-restore-screen-routine/

- his story of rediscovering a "hidden" feature in his own Invaders-09 game:

 https://subethasoftware.com/2022/09/03/i-found-hidden-stuff-in-my-own-game/

- an article on calculating 8 bit checksums, originally for the XModem protocol:

 https://subethasoftware.com/2022/09/04/checksums-and-zeros-and-xmodem-and-randomness/

- an article on an undocumented way to specify disk drive #'s in DECB: The manual (and most usage) has one append the drive number with :# at the end of a filename (for example RUN "TEST.BAS:1"). But it also allows putting the drive # before the filename in the form of #: (ie RUN "1:TEST.BAS"). I seem to remember that several Microsoft written disk operation systems (I think even MSDOS?) supported this syntax. Allen does note that later disk BASIC enhancements (like RGB-DOS, HDB-DOS and others do NOT support this).

 https://subethasoftware.com/2022/09/05/disk-basic-and-drive-numbers-before-the-filename/

- an article on various cycle counts to speed up clearing an area of memory (in this case, the screen), going from a loop with sta ,x+ all the way up to stack blasting 6 bytes at a time.

 https://subethasoftware.com/2022/09/06/counting-6809-cycles-with-lwasm/

11) Rudy's Retro Intel on Youtube for this year's SepTandy did a video on RF to composite & audio mods to a Coco 1 with a TinyComp for <$20:

 https://youtu.be/GXVS1jthHkc

12) Scott Animation on YouTube did video showing his making and testing a Coco keyboard to USB project (original version is online) using an Arduino:

 https://youtu.be/ov41TXYs8I8

13) Kick Rock and Roll on YouTube did a nice little brief history of the Coco line (including the Agvision and Videotex predecessors to the Coco), using text on a Coco screen itself. There are a few minor inaccuracies, but on the whole it is good:

 https://youtu.be/735OlGOKjR8

14) Craig Marshall posted photos (warning - swear word on one of them) from the Adelaide Retro Group in Australia (same group that Danielle O'Connor attends), including a Coco 1 that melted being in the back window of a car during a long drive:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160100516217641/

He also posted a video of a plotter printer running from a Coco:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160099983437641/

15) Mike Rojas announced a revision to his Coco Switchboards (replaces the mylar for the Coco keyboards with switches and an actual circuit board) with a shout out to Boisy Pitre on some of the refinements, including a spacer that he will send out to people that already ordered one of the 30 he has sold so far:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160096042297641/

16) Jason Reighard (CocoMan) took some photos of a historic building Prospect Kentucky - The Falsoft Build which Lonnie Falk built to house Rainbow magazine during it's hay day:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160092989372641/

MC-10

---

1) Jim Gerrie shared a little MC-10 one liner that draws a filled heart type shape using Cosine math. It's converted from an Apple II program by Rogerio Neves:

 https://youtu.be/xV7qDmkeXUo

He also did an updated version of his 1 line Maze generator (that we have shown some months ago), crunching it down even smaller to 96 characters:

 https://youtu.be/Nx6v06JCXXM

And lastly, he produced a low res picture in honour of the passing of Queen Elizabeth II:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160100152422641/

2) Joel Rees posted part 1 of MC-10 assembly language series - "Getting VTL-2 (Very Tiny Language) Running" to his blog (going through errors/bugs he found and fixed, etc.):

 https://joels-programming-fun.blogspot.com/2022/08/trs-mc-10-assembly-lang-pt1-vtl-2.html

Dragon 32/64

---

1) Richard Harding posted in the Dragon group on Facebook that the official gaming challenge this year for the Dragon Meetup (Oct 22-23 at Blanco's Hotel in Port Talbot, Wales - home of the original Dragon Data) is none other than Paul Shoemaker's Ghost Rush, Dragon version:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3256921677900812/

2) This is actually for Coco and Dragon - John Whitworth posted on Facebook this morning that he had sold out of his pre-soldered Supersprite FM+ boards. Because of his concentrating on his health, he had not planned on making any other pre-soldered versions... but some people in the community came through and did the soldering on his behalf, and they are back on sale:

 https://www.dragonplus-electronics.co.uk/product/supersprite-fm-6x09-for-dragon-and-coco-computers/

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

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

1) Neil over at RMC (formerly Retro Man Cave) did a video on what would have appeared on store shelves in Britain in the 1980's for computer games. He goes through the various cassette (and a few disk) games for all the heavy hitters (Amstrad, Spectrum, BBC Micro, etc.) but also touches on the Dragon & Microdeal for a bit:

 https://youtu.be/MyYbVl3sol8?t=306

2) AJ & Tim of Sibling Rivalry put up a video promoting their upcoming appearance at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo (running October 14-16), including showing some of the merchandise, and Atari 2600 & Intellivision cartridge collections, and are asking their viewers to give some suggestions for head to head games to play during their live show. Maybe they can sneak some Coco references in at the expo as well:

 https://youtu.be/KIox9evk6NE

They also had Tim's episode of Drunkoligy, where he showed you how to make a gin and tonic after you have had too many gin and tonics and you reverse the ingredient sizes:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANMOnO2zf2Y

Also, after the two weeks ago episode on the Intellivision's Burger Time licensed game, they returned to the Coco this week with Sibling Rivalry 45: LeMans from Spectral Associates (This is also a SepTandy video). Unfortunately, they didn't know that the difficulty level affects the way you drive - the lowest skill level lets you turn instantly on a dime, while level 15 lets you skidding arcs around corners etc.:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfxNmhxao50

And just yesterday, they played a game on the Coco that is part of our two week Game On Challenge - Glove (a Gauntlet clone released for the Coco and Dragons in 2006):

 https://youtu.be/Ju1qr5MSUKI

3) Amigo Aaron of the Amigos did his Friday Night disaster stream by doing a live stream last night of Coco games by Tom Mix, as part of their SepTandy:

 https://youtu.be/KDfM9pcMEq8

4) CocoForest on YouTube added many more 2 pack Dragon game videos with original game artwork the past 2 weeks, including some Dragon exclusives:

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

5) Paul Thayer posted a quick video on the Coco Facebook group showing his CocoBan playing in composite mode (although in an emulator, so it looks a lot cleaner than real hardware would look like on a real CRT :). It also serves as a bit of a tutorial on how to get through level 1 in this upcoming game...

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160088233447641/

6) 8Bitsinthebasement on YouTube did a pre-release review of MrDave6309's game Space Pirate Kimiko (currently runs in emulation only, as he is getting some add on hardware finalized for the physical Coco release):

 https://youtu.be/hqNAmYzFPZY

7) Mikey also put up his SepTandy VLOG #2 - titled "Why Mikey is not a Game Programmer":

 https://youtu.be/NDoOpxA3tGw

8) Ken of Canadian Retro Things - whom we should / should have heard from VCF-MW today, posted a SepTandy video of his 5 more nostalgic games for the Coco:

 https://youtu.be/nUN-55lereI

9) Retro Gaming Nook for SepTandy put up a video of Random Gameplay Part 1 (Arkanoid, Slay the Neries & Space Assault):

 https://youtu.be/kzlTbxNHLHU

And part 2, where they played Skiing, Donpan, and their first Coco 3 specific game, Rampage!:

 https://youtu.be/MV6vdu8BAVM