News stories for April 4, 2020 show

News stories for April 4, 2020 show:

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1) 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/

2) 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/

3) 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

4) 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/

5) 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/

6) 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/

7) 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

8) 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/

9) 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

10) Jim Brain has 2 updates on his "quest for DMA" blogs:

 http://www.go4retro.com/2020/03/23/coco-dma-missing-without-a-trace/
 http://www.go4retro.com/2020/04/03/coco-dma-all-charged-up/

11) 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/

12) 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/

13) Allen Huffman has had so many other Coco related blog posts, I am just going to scroll through the newer ones:

 https://subethasoftware.com

14) 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)

15) David Wiens posted his original source code & manuals for the SDisk and SDisk 3 (Coco 1/2 and Coco 3 respectively) drivers for OS-9. These were advance floppy drivers that supported sector sizes from 128 to 1024 bytes, single & double density, up to 80 tracks

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/1929079184021683/permalink/2546348015628127/

16) Coco Crew episode 58 is out, and features an interview with Carl England (of the Disk utility "Defeater" fame, as well as a review of the freshly released Gunstar.

 http://cococrew.org

17) Ed Snider has released a video showing how to tweak and adjust his MC-10 Composite board addon:

 https://youtu.be/0Ss3wtzch-o

18) "Bertoid" on Youtube is trying to repair and debug a Compacta Uniboard 6809 based computer - so he pulls out his old Coco 2 (non-North American, since it is the full sized white case-I suspect Australian) that has been in storage for 35 years) and attempts to get it fixed up and running to help (and finds out it has hardware mods). Spoiler: It isn't working by the end of the video.:

 https://youtu.be/7gvMJ6ilvAU

19) NitrOS-9 EOU Beta 5 is coming along well - Here is a quick preview from MAME showing the new GShell launching a VDG based app (Rescue on Fractalus, in this case) directly with no extra "launcher" program. This is NitrOS-9 EOU Beta 5/6809 version, and has the optimized Fractalus that I demoed almost 3 years ago (about 10% faster than the original Tandy version). This will finally be released on Beta 5, and also includes a new 6309 optimized version that is faster than the 3 year old demo. Current plan is that EOU Beta 5 will be released by the end of April, after a few more changes and some testing by the internal team.

 (Show quicktime movie Curtis has on his desktop-no sound. Recorded from MAME)

Game On segment videos:

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1) Henry Reitveld has posted videos of the two Light Gun games for the Coco 3 (both by Diecom, using their hardware adaptor for the Sega Master System light gun: Iron Forest:

 https://youtu.be/DrRqpJIqzIE

Medieval Madness:

 https://youtu.be/lsnbbpHk6Is

2) Rob Inman streamed a couple of game plays of Time Bandit on Friday night (including a stream from me recording on my phone):

https://youtu.be/dEX7ekCa_mE

3) Cuthbert Dragon on YouTube has some more game play videos on the Dragon 32 this week: Talking Android Attack (with cassette), Time Bandit, Creepies (which I have not seen before), Moon Cresta & Dragon Slayer:

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

4) Giger Punk has a video attempting to play "All Because" on a Dragon 32 (he has trouble loading it, so after his pre-amble, skip to 3:18). Of course after reading instructions on 9 stages of play - it crashes.:

 https://youtu.be/0KQCcxNLAd4