Help me with identifying old TRS-80 games

[Cynicaster]

I dont normally read the classic computing forum, but I was recently reminiscing with an old friend of mine about playing video games at his house in the 80s, which was done on a TRS-80 computer. I dont know a thing about that computer or what model it was, but I remember it was grey and it had discrete square plastic buttons, with a red button on there somewhere. There were three games that I primarily remember, but I have only been able to recall one of them, which I confirmed via YouTube as being Mega-Bug (we gotcha!).

 

The others are driving me nuts, and I dont even have vague guesses on the names. For the first one, all I remember about it is that it was a side-scrolling space shooter type game that, in retrospect, seems like it may have been inspired by Defender (this wouldnt have occurred to me at the time because I never got into Defender until much later). I dont know why, but for some reason Im picturing a sort of beige-colored background rather than the usual black/space background, but Im not 100% certain.

 

The other was a game that involved dinosaur-like creatures that could walk around the screen and even out into the distance so that they looked farther away and smaller. I remember thinking it was kind of fancy at the time. That is all I remember; I dont even recall what the object of the game was.

 

Anybody have any ideas?

[BassGuitari]

For starters, the system was definitely a TRS-80 Color Computer.

The dinosaur game is almost certainly Dino Wars. If the "defender" game was on cartridge, it was probably Starblaze. Tape and disk games would take a bit more digging.

[Cynicaster]

For starters, the system was definitely a TRS-80 Color Computer.

 

The dinosaur game is almost certainly Dino Wars. If the "defender" game was on cartridge, it was probably Starblaze. Tape and disk games would take a bit more digging.

All of the games were cartridges. Starblaze and Dino-Wars are the games I was looking for, thanks!

 

In my search, I came across two other games I remember my friend having: Popcorn and Poltergeist. So weird to see those now; I never would have thought of them ever again if I had not decided to try to identify the others.

[Charlie_]

The space game was probably Stellar Life Line.

http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/stellarlifeline.html

 

Ah.. never mind... had a white background...

Edited July 30, 2014 by Official Ninja

[RangerG]

Dino-Wars, I love the roar in that game.

[John_L]

It's funny, because you're talking about some of the lesser software written for the CoCo. Dungeons of Daggorath was a cool first person game where you fought various monsters in a quest to kill The Wizard, and speaking of 3D, Rescue on Fractulus was pretty cool as was Sub Battle Simulator which ran under OS 9. There were also a couple of Kings Quest adventures that were huge Sierra software hits. Although the titles you mentioned were fun games, they were pretty simplistic compared to other software that was written later on.

[Cynicaster]

King's Quest was on the TRS-80? Never knew that.

[Omega-TI]

King's Quest was on the TRS-80? Never knew that.

 

Yes, it was available for the Model 1000.

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G3Kdbc7EoY

[JamesD]

King's Quest was available for the CoCo 3.

[John_L]

[Charlie_]

That is my terrible video of the coco playing King's Quest II. Even as bad as the video is, you can see how well the coco3 plays those Sierra games. On some systems they are painfully slow, but the coco plays them rather well at a very good speed.

 

Only King's Quest 3 was officially released for the coco. I think maybe Leisure Suit Larry was also. All the other games were ported over to the coco by Guillaume Major. As far as I know all the Sierra AGI games were done. You can see them at the Nitros9 nightly site. http://nitros9.sourceforge.net/latest/

[John_L]

That's the CoCo for ya... when it needed to compute, it really stepped up to the plate. Other systems had faster processors, but at the end of the day, the CoCo would out perform those systems. I think it's a testament to how well the 6809/6853/6847 chipset was made by Motorola. Also, when chipsets are made, the chip maker would generally provide a sample layout of a typical system. I can't say for sure, but Tandy probably followed Motorola's sample pretty closely, and I think that's why the system performed so well. Motorola was good at designing efficient designs that allowed the system to perform so well, even when other systems had faster CPUs. CPU clock speeds are only part of the equation.

[Cynicaster]

Yes, it was available for the Model 1000.

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G3Kdbc7EoY

I guess I always considered the TRS-80 and the Tandy 1000 as separate and pretty much unrelated platforms...? It's funny, because I actually had a Tandy 1000 SX that looked exactly like that picture, and yes, I did use it to play Sierra games. But I was more asking about that machine shown in John_L's avatar.

[BassGuitari]

I guess I always considered the TRS-80 and the Tandy 1000 as separate and pretty much unrelated platforms...?

They are. Tandy 1000 is essentially an IBM PC clone, while the Color Computer is pretty much its own animal.

 

Following the original Model I system, "TRS-80" was really a brand name for Tandy computers rather than a specific model. Dozens of different Radio Shack computers were prefixed with "TRS-80," like the Color Computer, PC2, Model 100, MC-10, Model II, etc. Even most of those were completely unrelated to one another.

[Omega-TI]

I guess I always considered the TRS-80 and the Tandy 1000 as separate and pretty much unrelated platforms...

 

Yeah, I can see your perspective, but as the CMM of a Radio Shack back in the mid 80's and they were all T)andy R)adio S)hack to me.

[The Usotsuki]

To me only the B&W Z80 machines were "TRS-80", even though old CoCos and the 2000 were called "TRS-80".

[John_L]

TRS-80 did stand for Tandy/Radio Shack, and the 80 was referencing the Z80 in their first computers, but "TRS-80" became the brand name, so other computers like the Color Computer, MC-10, even the pocket computer carried the TRS-80 moniker. Once the PCs came along, and Tandy was in line jockeying for a position as a major PC maker, they drifted away from "TRS-80" and even "Radio Shack" to separate it from the home market and present a name more in line with the business market they were looking to be a big player in. Somewhere around 1983ish when the CoCo 2 hit was when the transition began, and eventually, even the descendant Model 4D and 4P computers as well as the arc of the Model II line, the Tandy 6000, all carried the Tandy name. BTW, if you ever owned an AST computer, that's who Tandy sold their computer factories to when they exited the PC biz.

[John_L]

I was more asking about that machine shown in John_L's avatar.

 

That's an image of a Color Computer 3 as displayed on a Color Computer 3. You're probably thinking about the Tandy 1000 EX which had a form factor similar to the CoCo 2/3....

[Cynicaster]

That's an image of a Color Computer 3 as displayed on a Color Computer 3. You're probably thinking about the Tandy 1000 EX which had a form factor similar to the CoCo 2/3....

Interesting, but no, I don’t think so.

 

As you can see, I know nothing about these computers, aside from waning memories of hanging out at a childhood friend’s house. To me, “TRS-80” was a single machine/platform, just like Commodore 64 or VIC-20. Apparently, it has taken 30 years for me to learn that there were other machines commonly referred to by the same name.

 

The few things I remember are that it was grey-ish in color, and it had square/discrete buttons with spaces between them, and one of those buttons was red. It had joysticks, which I believe were big bulky white-ish affairs, with a square red button, and floppy sticks (analog maybe? Didn’t know the difference back then) that would spring back to center. I remember the plastic “handle” on the stick of my buddy’s joystick would fall off, leaving just a little metal pin, which we would continue to use as a joystick anyway. Ah, the 80s.

[The Usotsuki]

A CoCo 1?

[Cynicaster]

A CoCo 1?

BINGO--that's the one. Man, I haven't seen that thing in 30 years, but looking at that image, it's like it was yesterday.

[John_L]

That's the original Color Computer. It was a larger form factor than the CoCo 2 and 3 and had the difficult to use "chicklet" keyboard. The joystick you're referring to was the better model joystick that was sold. There was a black model with a big red button on the forward face and had a silver joystick. The "Color Computer Deluxe Joystick" was quite a bit better and could be toggled between staying where you placed the joystick and "snap to center" by holding the joystick in the lower right and flipping some tabs on the bottom. Looked like this:

 

 

 

 

[raskar42]

 

[Cynicaster]

Ha, yep, that’s the joystick alright.

 

There was actually another neighborhood kid who, coincidentally, lived right across the street from this friend of mine who also had the same model TRS-80. I wasn’t over there nearly as often, so memories are even sketchier, but I think the only games he had for the computer were on tapes. I seem to remember him having these ridiculous floppy joysticks that weren’t self-centering. Must be the ones you’re talking about here. I remember he had a cool (for the time) baseball game that was rather difficult to control properly because of those floppy sticks (I would have been used to the Atari 2600 joystick at the time). I remember thinking it was great to see a baseball game that showed the arc of the ball through the air with a shadow underneath it, rather than the flat/2D representation found in Atari 2600 Real Sports Baseball.

 

There was another game he had that used pseudo-vector-style graphics (a la Battlezone), but I think it was set in outer space rather than in a tank. I imagine it would look corny today, but I remember being blown away back then by the 3D effect of it. Any idea what that game might be?

[BassGuitari]

I think it's fair to say control was the bane of many otherwise excellent early Color Computer games.

Polaris was a great game that made excellent use of the standard free-floating joystick...but ruins it by forcing you to use the keyboard to fire. So you have to kind of brace the joystick against the computer or something and move the stick with one hand while using the fire keys with the other. Pretty awkward.

Project Nebula was a pretty sweet Star Raiders clone that used two joysticks for no reason (one was to aim and fire, the other was for thrust). IIRC Quasar Commander did something similar. They should have aped Star Raiders even more and used the numeric keys for thrust control, but it's still a fun, playable game.

Radio Shack had some really good games that they made unnecessarily complicated and cumbersome to control. (Of course, there are plenty of cases where they hit it out of the park, too, like Popcorn, Clowns & Balloons, and other paddle/cursor-based games.)