The Sunday CoCoist 5/27/07

The Sunday CoCoist

[Date fixed 6/2/07. Wacky green bold text fixed. Oops. -CC] It's been two weeks, so what's up with the cheesy little post, you ask? Well, there really hasn't been a whole lot to comment on. heh! While there's plenty of CoCo Good Stuff rolling along out there in CoCo land, including the mentions in the last few Sunday CoCoists, it seems like everyone's quite busy off actually doing it! That, of course, is pretty darn exciting, as is. If I catch anything that breaks suddenly, though, I'll throw up a news post.

Inside the Evil Lab

Of course, I could be writing my own CoCo articles. Ahem. Tonight I'll be having a wee bit of CoCo quality time. With luck, on Wednesday I'll get into the lab and have some Pimpin' to report. Specifically, the 40 pin socket has been sitting there for three weeks just begging to be soldered onto the GloCo's board, an I haven't even looked sideways at it. Sigh.

I'm also going to try to get a bunch of those old tapes I've acquired of late onto floppies. Then try to whack 'em into shape to run properly on an RGB CoCo 3. Over on CoCo Downunder, they guys have an archive of games that have been patched already. I haven't had a chance to peek at them and the site doesn't list the contents, but it might be worth a look if there's one you need. A quick look at the archive doesn't reveal anything I recognize (maybe a Cuthbert game), but you'd really want to dig into the .dsk images. Go on, you know it'll be fun.

Anyhow, the tapes I have include old Hot CoCo Instant CoCo tapes, some utilities, and a game or two. Anything post-able will go up ASAP.

Updata

Randy posted an interesting article to the CoCo Downunder blog about Glen Dahlgren of Sundog fame. Good historical and chronological list of games and information about the man behind one of the most successful CoCo game companies. If anyone has any more information about Glen or his current whereabouts, be sure to email Randy.

While you're there, don't forget to stop by the downloads sections. More and more stuff being added all the time.

Darren A. has updated/added his CoCoDisk utility here: www.coco3.com/users/DarrenA/. The program runs under Windows and adds a GUI based method for making real CoCo disks on your PC. I couldn't test it, on account I don't have a floppy in my PC, but it looks pretty straight forward and easy to use. If you need to transfer files from your PC to your CoCo from .dsk images, this is just the thing!

Sites To See

This week I thought it would be interesting to browse a bit deeper into CoCo super genius Tim Lindner's site, called "frakendirary," at tlindner.macmess.org. Tim's site is primarily his personal journal, which is a good read and well presented using WordPress. Now my daughter's both want a Tinkerbell room, as well. Thanks, Tim. I love painting.

The CoCo aspect of the site, though, consists of several pages including some excellent technical resources for programmers and hardware hackers. There's information on how to copy the protected Diecom floppy disks, technical information on the Diecom Light Gun, and The Rat graphic system. Of particular interest is the extensive information Tim has written and collected about the Tandy Speech/Sound pak, including the difficult to obtain manual and technical reference.

Additional handy technical stuff include one page printout reference sheets, designed by Tim, on the 6309 and the CoCo's PIAs. There's also a reproduction of several Byte articles from 1979 about the creation of the shiny new 6809. Fascinating reading!

Tim's site is a great not because the volume of content, or attempt there of, but because what's there is complete and infinitely useful. You could spend months playing with this information and it is definitely a site every serious CoCoist should be checking in with regularly.

Angel's Luck,
Capt.

PS Heh. I hit SAVE as draft instead of PUBLISH, so this one's late, too. Let's just make it a tradition. :)

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