remz

One of mine was around 1987-88, when I walked into my usual Commodore store and they had an Amiga on display. I was young and programming in Basic on a TRS-80 and C64 at that epoch, so I was "knowlegeable" enough to know about colors: I proudly asked "How many colors the Amiga has?" The clerk opened the Workbench Prefs, and explained me: "Son, on this machine, you can create colors." My mind exploded when he dragged those 3 RGB sliders that I was seeing for the first time. We had to purchase one a few months later.

I remember Vette! on the classic Macintosh around 1989, with filled polygon. I believe there was a black&white version as well. It was pretty impressive at the time.

And speaking of serial ports: Who decided that it would be a brilliant idea to have both serial, external SCSI and parallel ports to use DB-25 with often random pin gender, fully aware that mistake connection might toast the machine and/or device?

The video composite RCA output on the Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000. It outputs monochrome. What were they thinking, when even the 4-years older Commodore 64 had super sharp S-Video output. The A520 rf modulator is an inergonomic abomination.

I still have my Roland LAPC-1 in a regular tower PC: it is the only "full length" card I have ever owned: it slided into tiny slots on both ends of the case. I didn't even knew the case had these slits. They were not "bigger than video card" per say, since the Hercules monochrome card was also a full-length ISA. But it is true that generally, sound card got smaller, while video card got bigger over time. I also had a Gravis Ultrasound Max, which was big, although I think it was not quite as long. But wow, wasn't that card a beauty.. Ah well in fact this guy here had both cards installed and we clearly see the difference with a full-length ISA: the bottomest card is a Roland LAPC-1, and the card just above is a Gravis Ultrasound MAX.

It is not a simple light gun: it works completely differently than the Nes Zapper. It can track like a cursor with pixel-perfect accuracy. It actually "sees" the electron beam of the CRT while the screen is actually being drawn. Fun fact: In Lemmings 2: The Tribe on the SNES, there is an easter egg: If you plug your Super Scope, you can actually shoot and kill the lemmings! It is amazing that the programmer managed to slip that in the game, since it is not even listed as a "super scope compatible" game.

Amazing job! This is a work of art: documented, complete game engine. I also wrote a sprite/tilemap engine for the coco 3 a couple of years ago using compiled sprite. You can see a youtube video of it here, or you can download the DSK and try it. It runs at 60 fps with up to 8 sprites, but that was it. No game logic, no sound, nothing else https://sites.google.com/site/rveilleux/coco3home/rems-coco-3-files Rem sprite demo: http://youtu.be/0tsD7sQ1bAY Fantastic work Richard!

Hey gamesarefun, I know that game: it was amazing . I had it on an Apple II and I still have the floppy disk somewhere. It was one of my favorite game, it even included a level editor. I believe the original game title was "Flappy", you can see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flappy But on the Apple II it was called "Floppy": http://www.vizzed.com/play/beyond-floppy-appleii-online-apple-ii-5397-game The information is a bit harder to find today because of that recent moronic wave of 'Flappy Bird' crap..

And here are some demos made for a standard 128K CoCo 3 to show what this little machine could do: It could also 'simulate' the sound of a C64 SID: And lastly my most ambitious project: first-person realtime texture mapping: You can download the files to try them on a real CoCo or an emulator here: https://sites.google.com/site/rveilleux/coco3home/rems-coco-3-files

Hi Jay, I too am a fan of the CoCo 3, which I bought about a year ago. I did code some demos showing its amazing power which I feel hasn't been exploited. You can see my Youtube videos here on my page: http://sites.google.com/site/rveilleux/coco3home/coco3youtube If you own a Coco 3 you can even download them and run them. They all work on a stock 128KB coco 3, on a RGB monitor. In case you haven't seen it, I urge you to see "Sock Master" boing ball demo on a Coco 3, simply delightful: It is almost Amiga-class. Or the excellent "hi-color" mode demo displaying 'thousands' of colors. Amazing.

Herbarius: as JamesD replied I 'hand-converted' the music, so basically *any* SID could be played but only by working for hours converting notes, frequency, instruments, etc. Note that CocoSID was mainly designed to mimic Rob Hubbard musics, and might not be well suited for some complex or weird SID. Also important to note that some feature of SID are not supported at all, so music containing "digital samples" or other funky modulation would not work. That being said, I don't know if the CoCo is female. Sure you could argue that its 'character impersonation' might be effeminate ( look here: http://www.spacious-mind.com/assets/images/radioshack_trs80coco2_ad.gif ) but with the bow-tie I would rather think it's male. Anyway you make your own mind Yes, basically the only coco 3-specific stuff going on in this demo is the background screen in 16 colors, which could be removed anyway. And about the high speed POKE, there is also a High Speed POKE for CoCo 2, so it could be modified to work on a CoCo 2 (or Dragon for that matter) probably without too much problem by someone with the appropriate knowledge. There is also a thing about PAL vs NTSC for games and video tricks. But in this case, the CoCoSID demo doesn't rely on video timing at all, so this shouldn't be an issue.

Thanks guys! I'm the guy who coded that demo. Indeed as Bruce said, the 6809 can really move a lot of data with its "MMX"-like instruction. In fact they are 'SIMD' (single-instruction, multiple data). For example, the instruction: pshs d,x,y,u,dp,cc writes a string of 10 bytes and requires 15 clock cycle. (In 16 color mode, this means you can set 20 pixels in one instruction, faster than 1 pixel per clock). Thus the CoCo 3 can yield a maximum fillrate of 1193333 bytes per second (i.e.: 1.1 MB/sec). Do you know if any other 8-bit computer faster than that?

In fact the result would be a 50 Hz NTSC, like the Amiga had to allow PAL game compatibility on this continent.. Interesting, however 50Hz flicker is somewhat visible to the eye. Indeed in the sprite demo it would allow maybe another sprite or more background animated tiles. Does the Tandy RGB monitor supports 50Hz too?

No problem! It's funny you mentionned the Propeller chip, as I already coded some little demos on it in the past. It was called the HYDRA XGameStation. Anyway about the CoCo 3 "Wolf" baddies: there is not much hope and clock cycle left to add anything Although there are certainly things that could be done to turn the demo into a game. But the main goal was making it work. Thanks!

Hey guys, I just finished coding a "Wolfenstein-3D" style demo that runs on the Tandy CoCo 3, and I've put a small video recording on Youtube running on an emulator: