News stories for March 28, 2020 show

News stories for March 28, 2020 show:

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1) Ciaran Anscomb (author of XRoar) has a blog up for a game concept for the Coco 1/2 and Dragons, that uses some tricks on the VDG and SAM chips to achieve smooth vertical scrolling.

 http://www.6809.org.uk/dev/tm002/

(Click on the picture of the cat, and it will fire up the web version of XRoar and actually run the demo software proof of concept showing the smooth scrolling - and it has been tested on real hardware as well).

2) Paul Shoemaker has made a Tandy style, full color label design for Doodle Bug (which was our Game On Spotlight feature not too long ago):

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158022330267641/

3) Fred Rique has made an attract mode option for Coco games that uses Coco fonts, as well as screenshots. It's a cross platform frontend that can launch mutliple emulators including MAME.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158025055617641/

4) Jim Gerrie has a blog post about his "Type-in Mania 2020 Awards", where people can compete with BASIC mini Manic Miner low-res game, and actually win a trophy. This year he also has a second trophy for the person that can win his port of the classic Atari 2600 Adventure - who ever completes it on the highest level. Both contests require you to send a screen shot, and have to be sent in before the end of April 19, 2020.

 https://jimgerrie.blogspot.com/2020/03/type-in-mania-2020-awards.html

5) 5 videos showing Pere's work with the V9958 graphics upgrade for the Wordpak II+:

 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLztSQPoCDnvZ2VCFvYbA5_pRpwxpep-Lw

And, a video of Foggy's Quest:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/permalink/2565996363660017/

And some screenshots of patches to BASIC to properly handle DIR and LIST with the 80 column text mode:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/permalink/2571902069736113/

And finally, some more photos of the AGD game Foggy's Quest using the V9958 16 color mode:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/permalink/2562573934002260/

6) In light of CocoFest being postponed, Diego Barizo has lengthened the deadline for the Asimov Awards (tentatively) until September:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/imacoconut/permalink/613260849524857/

7) Jerry Stratton has release SuperBasic for the Coco, which allows using a modern looking scripting language to create the equivalent BASIC code:

 https://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/hacks/coco/superbasic-trs-80-color-computer/

Allen Huffman has a good summary and sample code on his blog:

 https://subethasoftware.com/2020/03/18/jerry-strattons-superbasic-for-the-coco/

8) Dave Veary got his Coco 2 on the internet via his Raspberry Pi controller (which is also running his keyboard):

 https://youtu.be/twmN56GtmE0

He also did a quick tutorial on hand coding machine language subroutines into BASIC programs:

 https://youtu.be/-omEvR8tdeU

9) Allen Huffman has an updated entry for optimizing his BASIC bouncing ball demo... including a final optimization by Ciaran Anscomb (author of XRoar), that cut the time almost in half (scroll down for reader submitted optimizations):

 https://subethasoftware.com/2020/03/19/color-basic-optimization-challenge-attempts/

10) Ron Klein has updated the CocoPI3 by adding Greaseweazle and HxC command line tools, from a request from David Ladd.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/748644118674047/permalink/1248458572025930/

He also has a demo video of using the CocoPI3 to get online to a BBS:

 https://youtu.be/jUn6xv-nhZk

11) Jim Brain has an update on his "quest for DMA" blogs:

 http://www.go4retro.com/2020/03/23/coco-dma-missing-without-a-trace/

12) Darren Ottery put up a video demoing some stuff he has been doing with Coco MIDI Pro:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158053574347641/

13) David Ladd has detailed on Facebook and Discord a hack to the original 12V 26-3029 Radio Shack floppy controllers that allows the use of high density (1.2 and 1.44 MB) floppy disks.

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158050751572641/

14) Allen Huffman has a blog post up on "How random is RND in Color BASIC?"

 http://subethasoftware.com/2020/03/27/how-random-is-rnd-in-color-basic/

15) The Home Computer Museum in the Netherlands did a live stream showing the entire museum (almost an hour), and the Coco pops in for a bit here:

 https://youtu.be/tuVgoEJQ1Sw?t=2248
 The Color Computer 3 makes an appearance at 47:30 (note: we have 64 colors, not 256)

Game On segment videos:

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1) Rob Inman, on his YouTube channel "Tandy Color Computer 3" put up a comparison video of the real arcade game Mr. Do, and the Coco 1/2 clone Mr. Dig (which was our Game On Spotlight feature a couple of weeks ago):

 https://youtu.be/McwX-9_F00g

2) Ken Reighard is selling the DVD-ROM version of Nightmare Highway, special CocoFest edition (includes "the power of Terry", which adds some new gameplay elements), even though CocoFest has been postponed:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158025437942641/

3) Wayne Campbell did a series of videos (1 per level) of solving each level in the Coco 1/2/3 game cartridge, Soko-Ban. He is playing on a Coco 3 emulator, so it shows the enhanced Coco 3 colors. He has all 50 levels up now:

 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLo_QedaGeFcAjaamWIMZPnRZSPBwo2meC

4) RetroCoupleGR YouTube channel did an almost 2 hour live stream of Dragon 32/64 games (and it's labelled volume 1!). It's in spanish, so hopefully some of our spanish speaking friends can help translate.

 https://youtu.be/UGz9MCxU63U

Includes:

Barmy Burgers (Burgertime clone by Blaby) - I think this is written in BASIC, which is pretty impressive
Bonka (Space Panic clone by J. Morrison Micros)
Canyon Climber by Datasoft (Coco version with artifacting colors) just shown briefly
Chuckie Egg by A and F Software
Fearless Freddie by Mat Short
Jet Set Willy
Robin Hood (by Pocket Money Software)
The Bells (by Blaby)
The King (in glorious PMODE 3!)
Colorpede (Coco 1/2 artifacting)
Planet Invasion (Defender clone by Spectral Associates)
Cuthbert Goes Digging (Space Panic clone by Microdeal)
Galactic Ambush (Space Ambush on Coco; Galaxians clone from Computerware)
Galagon (Galaga clone by Spectral)
Galax Attax (Galaxians clone by Spectral)
King Cuthbert (Monkey Kong by Ken Kalish, Donkey Kong clone)
The Master (Clone of Kung Fu Master from the arcade)
Moon Cresta (officially licensed) (crashed on load screen)
Skramble (Tom Mix clone of Scramble)
Space Invaders (clone by Jim Morrison Micros)
Whirlybird Run (Scramble clone by Spectral Associates)
Zaxxon (just title screen)
Rommel-3D (Battlezone clone by Michtron)
Rommel's Revenge (Battlezone clone)

5) From Erico Patricio Monteiro on Facebook: While working out the sounds, I ended up compiling a sequence of sounds from COCO games, here it is, can you name them? :)

 https://youtu.be/3PVZ-iv6nAA

6) Darren Ottery (with help from Brian Palmer) has uploaded a revised version of the BASIC game FrogMaster that was originally published in a 1986 edition of Australian Coco magazine:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158030482742641/

7) Henry Reitveld put up a video showing loading times for his just purchased copy of Gunstar - running it from real floppy drives (I believe with 6 ms track to track?), CocoSDC, and a real hard drive.:

 https://youtu.be/REIAV_SxreI

He also has a video showing it's attract mode running in his Coco arcade cabinet setup:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le07UDi8xdI

8) Ciaran has a demo up on his online version of XRoar showing sprites, the hardware VDG based scrolling, and keeping a score on the screen, that we discussed on an earlier segment.

 http://www.6809.org.uk/xroar/online/?autorun=/tmp/qwe/bugs.rom

9) Guillaume Major, speaking of XRoar Online, has now got experimental links for Coco 1/2 cartridge images on the Color Computer Archive, that you can immediately launch on XRoar Online (Show Downland 1.1, click on the "Play now!" button, and select right joystick=keyboard (arrows and left ctrl)):

 https://colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Cartridges/

10) Jim Gerrie has also released Dragon & Coco versions of 4 different text adventure games:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/permalink/10158048649827641/

And he has ported "The Devil's Whist" (originally from Australian Coco Dec. 1986 issue) to MC-10, Coco and Dragon:

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/permalink/2572330463026607/

11) A new Dragon video gameplay channel "Cuthbert Dragon" started this past week, and already has over 1 dozen game play videos, with a camera actually filming off of a CRT (and a cool thing is, they have the original Dragon packaging to show for some of them):

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