News stories for July 20 show

News stories for July 20 show:

1) Henry Rietveld shows a rather different take on the (in)famous Angry Birds playing on his Coco. It is Angry Birds Opposition, one of the games from the AGD game packs ported over from the Spectrum. https://youtu.be/zAI2f96Ln6I

2) Speaking of AGD games, games packs #35&36 is out thanks to Pere Serrat and Kees van Oss, which is the 3rd & 4th installments of the games created by the Bearsden Primary School students in Scotland, under the tutelage of teacher Dougie McG, featuring 5 more games. http://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6122 http://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6125 They have also updated the "Big packs" that contain all the AGD images: http://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5971 Newly added this week is that the teacher and students involved with this project would like feedback on the games themselves. One can respond on the world of dragon: http://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6126 and also on Facebook and cocolist. Art Flexser (of ADOS fame) already has an interesting comment/question - he would like to see a sample of the "code" that the kids write in within AGD itself to create the games, to show how it works to those interested.

3) An old article (January 31, 2014), but one I don't think I had seen before, with Retro Gamer's "top 10 Dragon Games", was posted onto the Cocolist by Henry Rietveld. Some are Coco conversions (with non-artifacting color sets), but others were created on the Dragon, and it includes some gems. https://www.retrogamer.net/top_10/top-ten-dragon-32-games/

4) Henry has also posted a video of using a modified CocoSDC to run SDC Explorer for the Dragon, rather than the normal Coco. https://youtu.be/rCwlyYvJwnk

5) A discussion on the Cocolist about the "Trash-80" nickname was started by Mark Anderson: "I have to say I'm shocked at the level of discrimination I receive when I wear my TRS-80 color computer Radio Shack black T-shirt in public, most notable, in bookstores.

 In the past six months, at two different bookstores, I've had an older

couple and an older gentlemen both scoff and say "Trash 80" out loud at me with a smirk on two separate occasions.

 The first time, I let it go, but this last time I said "Don't say that

sir.". He confronted me and said he had an Apple back in the day. I told him I was published in the Rainbow magazine at age 10 and he asked me if I still had a TRS-80. I said I had several.

 Just wanted to know if anyone else here has had similar stories....

Mark"

In my personal case, when I was young, I "corrected" people that *our* computer was nicknamed "Coco", and didn't even have a Z80, so you couldn't call it a "Trash-80". :-)

6) Nick Marentes has an update to Pop*Star Pilot out, that you can download from his site. It swaps the play order so that the original level 2 (the hardest level) and level 3 are reversed, which should allow people to see at least the first 3 levels much easier. Since this game is still for sale, the update comes in the form of a patch that updates your existing, boughten copy of PopStar, and thus is free to all current owners. It also fixes a rare, obscure bug that sometimes caused one to crash for no reason. http://www.nickmarentes.com/ProjectArchive/popstar.html

7) James Diffendaffer release a short video showing a Coco 1/2 duplicating a graphics demo originally done on the Commodore 16/4+ group. It does show some of the speed difference between the two machines (and James' shows it both running at stock .895Mhz speed, and with the Coco 1/2 speedup POKE). Commodore version: https://www.facebook.com/groups/commodore16/permalink/10156802059609481/ James Coco 1/2 version: https://youtu.be/zEPYm3B0nE0

8) Blair Leduc has now released version 0.4.0 of his 6809/6309 assembly extension for Visual Studio Code, a work very much still in progress, which adds opcode autocompletion, the start of documentation when hovering the mouse cursor over an opcode, renaming symbols, code lens, and much more. https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10157332518287641/

9) Gary Neal is converting an old game he did in BASIC into ML, and there have been lots of suggestions and even graphics submitted by others for him to try out: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10157325796157641/

10) A video was released on YouTube this week showing using a Wico Trackball on a Coco 3 - unfortunately, to play the Tandy Demolition Derby cartridge, which it is really not designed for. :-p https://youtu.be/ChoJHza0HNA

11) Hopefully this isn't too late, but Henry Rietveld posted (on Friday morning) that he has some Coco hardware items for sale, including some rarities: Grey MPI. Coco3 modded also. $50 64k coco1 with composite out and HJL keyboard. $50 (The HJL keyboard has the 4 function keys, and is color coded, and is widely renowned as being one of the two best keyboards that the coco 1/2 ever had (along with the Mark Data Products one - but that had no colored keys, and only the stock 53 keys)). Disto Super Controller 2 four in one with both floppy and hard drive in half height case Boots to HDBDOS $200 The Disto SCII (the controller that ran in No-halt mode under OS9/NitrOS9) is rare enough, but also having the 4 in 1 board in it at the same time (which included Hard disk interface, serial port, parallel port, & real time clock) is very rare these days. If anyone is interested, his email is: rietveldh@hotmail.com

12) Todd Wallace posted a video showing his first foray using the OPL3 chip on Ed's sound card: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10157339367092641/

13) Mat Chy has done a quick video of a demonstration of doing a semigraphics-12 Pole Position style engine: https://www.facebook.com/mat.chy.5099/videos/144696556632480/

14) Jerry Young posted a live stream on YouTube on Thursday, playing live MC-10 games, and a description of the machine, his MC-10's, and some of the accesories that he has for it. (He plays Lost World Pinball and Pacman in this video). (skip 3:20 in for the start): https://youtu.be/dM4o9WLtqPc

15) Jim Gerrie has 2 more MC-10 games shown on his YouTube page: Corpses from Hebdogiciel (adventure game) https://youtu.be/5x0wNqPzZ0Y Space Rescue (clone of the 1979 game Lunar Rescue) https://youtu.be/bJ9oZcSuIbc

16) Jim Gerrie also has a new interactive page to select from his programs to run, which lets you run them through a web browser: http://faculty.cbu.ca/jgerrie/Home/Type-in-Mania.html

17) John Laury's quest to learn Coco 6809 assembly language continues - this time doing some shape drawing on two graphics pages, and then flipping between to get animation: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10157339902662641/