News stories for Episode 282, October 8, 2022

News stories for Episode 282, October 8, 2022

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(October 1-October 7)

Discord discussions from Robert Allen Murphy - this should be a separate segment (a few were just posts about stories from elsewhere, but Discord should get it's own segment, along with the "who's new to discord"?).

First, a correction to my talking about the SAM Doubler that Brendan Donahe sells, from Brendan himself:

"I was catching up on my CoCoTalk a day or two ago and wanted to share a slight correction - the SAM accelerator, which allows full double-speed clock access to RAM and ROM doesn't require SRAM. It actually doubles the speed of the SAM and the SAM still does DRAM refresh. In some cases, it's necessary to install faster DRAM or PIAs. Note that a CoCoVGA with rev 0.92 or higher is also required, because the sampling time of the digital video data is still different and the standard 6847 VDG is unable to capture it.

More importantly, I want to give credit where it's due. The SAM accelerator is completely Ed Snider's design. He figured CoCoVGA could run faster and we could change the digital video data sampling timing on it so once he got me a sample SAM accelerator, I tweaked CoCoVGA to run at 50MHz instead of the original 25MHz.

Note that the way it's designed today, _any_ high speed poke does full RAM/ROM double speed. This can render some games (Fahrfall comes to mind) unplayable with the SAM accelerator. Also, we haven't figured out the incompatibility with real floppy drive controllers yet. CoCoSDC works fine."

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

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1) James Diffendaffer released a blog post including a 6309 native mode patch, and optimized code, for the Coco 3's BASIC multiply code. He also shows a screenshot of a raytrace 320x192x4 color picture showing the speed difference; on the left is how far the code got using the original BASIC and 6809, with the right showing (done in the same amount of time) the final rendering of the same BASIC program but using the 6309 and multiply patches:

 https://jdiffendaffer.blogspot.com/2022/10/updated-basic-hardware-multiply-patch.html

He also posted some USR routines that you can use enable/disable 6309 native mode, as well as a 2 color Coco 1/2 compatible version of the raytracing program. (note: do not do disk access or use the PLAY command when in native mode - BASIC needs patches to do those things correctly in native mode):

 https://jdiffendaffer.blogspot.com/2022/10/6309-native-mode-usr-control.html

2) Color Computer Programing posted a video showing some his experimentation with Sine and cosine waves on the text screen:

 https://youtu.be/W1trI4VMhGY

He also did an update to his music playing program:

 https://youtu.be/9pPXn96XlpQ

3) Dennis Bathory-Kitz, creator of the original Colorkit lowercase hardware upgrade, Color Quaver 4 voice synthesizer program, columnist in a variety of TRS-80 and Coco magazines, also happens to be in charge of the Coco List email group. There hasn't been a lot of traffic lately, so he made a post this last week to ask if people still wanted it around. Now there is a lot of traffic, pretty well all "yes!" (especially for those who are not on Facebook).

4) Jaime Idolpx on Facebook posted a copy of the ROM from the original blue case Agvision videotex terminal ROM:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160143887462641/

He had earlier in the week posted photos of the one he managed to acquire (these are quite rare):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160141703852641/

5) Jim Brain, current president of Glenside, was at Tandy Assembly last weekend, and joined in a project with Randy Weaver (owner of the Radio Shack sign that this story is about) and Brendan Donahe (he of CocoVGA fame) to light up said sign, under Coco control, but without drilling or cutting anything on the letters themselves. Jim also included the BASIC sourcecode they used to get it running at the show, although he mentions that a lot of optimizations and additions could be done (show 1st video clip - make sure to set HD):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160141565407641/

6) Keith March has continued to post more technical documenation on the MM/1 computer to the MM/1 Facebook group:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/3194643584094250?sorting_setting=CHRONOLOGICAL

7) Video Game Central on YouTube has started a rather ambitious project - Porting 3DSage's (another YouTube channel) Doom engine to a Coco 3. The video just shows some low res pixels reacting to keypresses, but it is listed as "Day 1" of his doing this project (NOTE: This is in BASIC as well):

 https://youtu.be/q2YyVrcuOiI

MC-10

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1) Dillon Teagan showed a screenshot of his port of Paul Shoemaker's "Great Pumpkin" animated graphics demo to the MC-10 Facebook group:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/5405341966259248/

It's also available for download from the MC-10 Facebook group:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/5405338616259583/

2) ep00ch on YouTube did a quick video showing his driving an Apple ImageWriter 1 from his MC-10:

 https://youtu.be/CBa84V8jVO4

Dragon 32/64

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1) The Dragon group on Facebook had another luminary recently join the group: Ian Thompson-Bell introduced himself as "the project leader for the original Dragon 32 at Patcentre until the initial product launch and for some time beyond until development work was taken over by Dragon Data's own R&D team.":

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3281641748762138/

2) The channel "The only way is 32k" on YouTube did a quick video comparing similar game artwork between a Dragon 32 and a BBC Micro. It doesn't show identical games, but similar ones (like two clones of Donkey Kong):

 https://youtu.be/u9N3Yw1QI2E

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):

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1) Paul Shoemaker has released an NTSC Coco 1/2 version of his new Halloween edition of Ghost Rush, in time for Halloween): Video of gameplay:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160141160567641/

Download link from Facebook:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160141162207641/

And late this week he also released the Dragon 32/64 version:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3287307001528946/

Download for Dragon version from Facebook:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3287436871515959/

2) A bug in the scoring of Robot Nightmare by Ken Reighard has been found, and Ken has already fixed it.I If you purchased the game, contact Ken on Facebook or by email, and he will electronically send the fixed version to you:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160141198352641/

3) Paul Thayer posted a preview video of his upcoming Coco 3 game, CocoBan, showing off some quick clips of multiple levels. He also mentioned to me that the game is close to being done (some disk I/O routines to work on for real hardware), but he is looking for some play testers. For those interested, contact him via the Coco Discord with his handle "Red Beard":

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160146520977641/

4) Jim Gerrie released the text adventure "Pirate Island" (originally by David Meny in 1985) for the MC-10, and has added a save/load game feature to it while he was converting it: Video of gameplay:

 https://youtu.be/xl4mmkJSkJI

Blogpost entry:

 https://jimgerrie.blogspot.com/2022/10/david-menys-pirate-island-1985.html