Good morning all,
Well, at least where I'm at it's still morning. I'm sure all of the readers of this blog (all four so far) are members of the CoCo mailing list, and are probably already aware of the recent developments on the CoCo scene. If not, crawl out from under that rock!!! You can look at the at mailing listarchive to get caught up. I'd suggest looking at around Christmas time to see that Aaron Wolfe, Boisy and Jim Hathaway have made the CoCo internet capable with a Java version of DriveWire 3. And to top it off, Aaron now has a CoCo3 serving up a web page!!!
The gang of three have entered the project in RetroChallenge Winter Warm-up 2010 and by looking at the current entrants, I'd say they have a great chance!!! They have implemented a telnet client, an IRC client, and have successfully connect CoCo to CoCo over the internet. That's cool by ANY standards.
Now, over on CoCo3.com, there's been activity as well. A gang of four, consisting of Jason, Briza, Robert Gault and Potatohead, have discovered and provided test dsk images of a 256 color mode (composite only so no RGB love here) that uses i byte per pixel. Meaning NO special software or page flipping techniques will be required to design some great 8-bit games with cool graphics and enough CPU cycles left over for killer sound effects and music.
As someone pointed out regarding both of these projects, these have been done with hardware and equipment that was available in the 1980's so there is no special hardware being utilized with any of this. The 256 color composite mode DOES require a 512k CoCo3; that's my understanding anyway. The DriveWire3/internet capabilities should be available to any member of the CoCo line.
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Okay, time for some eVil Bay updates:
First on the hit list is a semi-nice looking CoCo1 with a few carts. It has a little wear about where you'd expect, but, it also has a COOL keyboard overlay that I have no Earthly idea where it came from...
Here we have a first generation CoCo floppy controller - Model 26-3022. This is the ONLY Radio Shack made controller that can be modified for hi-density floppy use. It's also the least reliable in OS-9/NitrOS-9.
If you are in the market for a NICE CoCo1, this auction may be your ticket. It comes in it's original box, has the manuals, cassette recorder, and couple carts and the CoCo Learning Lab on cassette. So far the price is reasonable and shipping is tolerable. Should make a nice score for some CoCoNut.
Shadow-Nightwarrior is back with another interesting auction.A set of 5 1/4" quad-density OS-9 floppies containing a C compiler. Good luck on figuring it out. Even more good luck on getting a drive that'll read those disks...
Well, I guess that's it for this episode. If anyone has any suggestions of what they want to see, let me know and I'll try. If anyone would like to post articles here, contact me and we'll get it arranged...
Later,
MCCM
2 comments:
Hey, Potatohead here.
No 512K CoCo required. Really, this is the 640x200 pixel mode. At most it's a 30K graphics screen buffer, easily doable on an ordinary 128K, which is what I have.
Okay, cool. I probably got confused with one of the demos that's running around out there....
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