Armchair CoCoFesters

Okay, maybe "fester" isn't the best word. Still, those that couldn't attend the CoCoFest in Chicago managed to congregate in the coco3.com chat room and were treated to some great times. Rumor at this early date is that a lot of folks took video and pictures at the Fest. Hopefully we'll be seeing those soon, and I've course I'll link them here as I come across them.

The big announcement, of course, was SockMaster's "translation" of the original Donkey Kong to the 6809 CoCo. The Donkey Kong arcade machine was originally run on a Z80 processor. SockMaster has all the technical bits on his website. What was great about it was the anticipation and build up to the release. Lots of CoCoists, lots of excited CoCoists. The CoCo community really needs to do this sort of thing more often!

http://www.axess.com/twilight/sock/dk/index.html

On Sunday, we got word that Steve Bjork was there (yes, THE Steve Bjork) and had all sorts of goodies. The main one that made everyone's eyes pop was an unfinished version of The Last Ninja. This game was done for other systems, but never finished for the CoCo 3. Alas, Tandy had too tight a deadline and by the time Steve got to it, it was too close to the deadline to finish. Is it possible it could get finished now? Stay tuned. And check out Steve Bjork's CoCo site at:

http://coco.etechwds.com/

Apparently there was a forum about creating the CoCo 4 and a project was started along those lines. This would be a "VR CoCo 4" with super enhanced graphics capabilities and other goodies. Stay tuned for more on this project as it develops.

Briza and I logged some of the chats. While unedited, they are currently living at:

http://clubltdstudios.com/files/coco/cocofest07/

Some great reading in there if you can wade through. If not, wait for the edited versions. ;)

There's been a bit of controversy of the last year regarding attendance at the Fest, versus folks that just want to (or have to) armchair it. I won't get into that here. :) But I will say that this "Fest" brought more CoCoists online and in contact with each other than anything else over the last couple of years. As I write this, there's still a large crowd in the coco3.com chatroom discussing lost games, the coco 4, and other CoCo items. There's even people just bantering. It's a Good Thing. We need more of this... if we can have a VR CoCo, then we can certainly do more things together for VR CoCo gatherings!

Give the chat a try. Give a message board a shot. Post something. Just sit and chit chat. But get out there and show your CoCo Love!

Angel's Luck,
Capt