JamesD
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Posts posted by JamesD
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Thank you all for your kind words. This push me everyday to keep on working
Like Blake said it, i've added a preview of my tool to my site.
Next I will add (when ready) a ST disk containing new levels. And finally i'll release the editor.
@Cybergoth: the release of the source code is planned, but i must clean it before. It's not on my priority list
PS: If anyone has got a playable color version of the disk image on Coco, i'll be really happy
Sadly the Coco version was for the older 1/2 graphics. The Coco 3 could have equaled the Atari ST version but it was never updated. I think I have the disk image around here somewhere.
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I have several Apples and their clones.
1 Apple II+
1 Apple IIe
2 Apple IIc Pluses
1 Apple IIgs
1 Laser 128
1 Franklin Ace 1000
1 Apple III
Funny thing about the Franklin... it's DOS was actually faster than Apple's was. In the process of engineering a compatible DOS from scratch they found faster ways of doing things. I think the format was something like 30% faster. The Franklin also has a pretty nice keyboard.
The Laser 128 was a nice looking machine and the later ones had a 4MHz mode.
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As for expansion, beside the practical implementations, like the Apple I/II, I think the Ti99/4's silver PEB expansion device looked awesome ( http://oldcomputers.net/ti994a.html ) Far better than the Atari 1090.
At least the Ti box looked cool... even if the cable connection occasionally had issues just like the old TRS-80 Model I and it's expansion interface. Sadly it was really big, heavy and expensive. But, look at their earlier expansion boxes and you had a square flat box on the right of the computer for disk, RAM or RS-232. Not quite so attractive.
But then look at other machines.
The Tandy Coco multi-pack interface... horrid looking. (and I had one)
NEC TREK / PC-6001's expansion box... only slightly better than the multi-pack.
Amiga 500 and it's hard drive looked kinda odd and you needed a wide desk.
Some of the C64 add ons like it's voice synthesizer or RAM expansions weren't exactly pretty.
The Exedy Sorcerer... it had an external box with drives and monitor if I remember right. Not ugly but I didn't think it was cool.
To this day I still think the success of the Apple II line had to do with 2 things. Slots and hi-res color graphics. The colors may have been artifacts but they were there. The screen memory map was horrid but people didn't seem to care because if you programmed in Applesoft or just bought software you didn't have to worry about it.
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And it didn't make noises like a teletype when it was "computing." And it didn't have Majel Barrett's voice.
Sorry, I have to disagree here. The 800 didn't have large glowing red, blue, green and yellow buttons or large sliders.The 800 wouldn't look out of place on the bridge of the starship Enterprise (original series version). I can just picture Chekhov using it to aim the phasers, or Spock using it to scan for life forms... Capt. Kirk would probably just play Star Raiders while pretending to look busy
Exactly!
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The 800 wouldn't look out of place on the bridge of the starship Enterprise (original series version). I can just picture Chekhov using it to aim the phasers, or Spock using it to scan for life forms... Capt. Kirk would probably just play Star Raiders while pretending to look busy
Sorry, I have to disagree here. The 800 didn't have large glowing red, blue, green and yellow buttons or large sliders.
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Most of the people thinks that computers which they used are most beautyful, maybe due to nostalgy factor
. Imagine that.
I'm not sure I found my old gray coco to be beautiful but I sure liked it better than the white colored versions.
There were definitely better looking machines out there. Especially when you plug in an expansion interface and a bunch of cards.
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Imagine if the Atari 400/800's had been built like the Apple II's, with slots for expansion. Just imagine the possibilities.
There were a lot of computers you could say that about. Sadly, few companies listened to what people wanted and built what would sell cheap.
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I loved Time Bandit on the Coco. I've never played any other version but it was sort of Tutankham meets Time Pilot.
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So you are just marking the slot as empty and then search from the start for the first empty slot?
You might already be doing this but...
If you want to reduce the search time for an empty slot, keep an index to the first empty slot.
When you free an item you just test to see if it's index is less than the first free item pointer and if so, set the first item pointer to it.
When you fill a slot you look for the next open slot.
If the index is larger than the inventory size then the inventory is full.
This *should* save a little cpu time but at the cost of larger code.
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Zaxxon was one of the most widely ported titles at the time.
It was one of a handful of officially licensed titles for the Tandy Coco... not a bad port either.
It was also on the Spectrum but I hope it played better than it looked.
I loved the arcade game but I sucked at it.
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To each their own
So what do other people think are the best looking 8 bits?
There was a thread on that just a few weeks back.
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I do think the XL styling was nice but I'm not sure I'd say it was the best looking 8 bit. I think I like the 600XL best for it's size.
The EX series looks kinda bland and I really don't care for the feel of the keyboard. And I have 2 130XEs.
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I've always wanted to see what all the fuss was about in OS-9, namely what kind of applications were available for it.
Well, when you start with a Unix like OS, expect a lot of Unix like apps.
There are lot's of computer languages, C, Pascal, Basic-09, Cobol... the list goes on and on. And since it's Unix like, it was a great development environment. At least one bank discovered the Basic was just like what they had on their mainframe and they could buy Coco3's to do development on.
Then there's the usual business stuff like word processors, spreadsheets, databases, accounting packages, etc...
It was commonly used for things like robotics at one time because of it's real time nature.
A lot of the Coco3 games were actually written under it for that same reason.
There's an open source project called Nitros-09 on sourceforge.net that is compatible with OS-9 but also adds speedups for the Hitachi 6309 which was like the 6809 but added new registers and some faster instructions.
There's actually a complete cross development toolkit as well.
Most of the OS-9 docs and files for the Coco are now on an ftp site.
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OS-9 and OS-9 Level II were the best by far.
Think Unix with DOS type commands.
A preemptive multitasking OS years before the Amiga.
Tandy had a GUI front end for it but hardly anyone wrote anything for it... kinda like GEOS.
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Has anyone had any luck playing game images of a TRS80 Color Computer on one of the emulators? As much flack as those computers take, there were some fun games for them. My friend had one and had this kick ass game called Downland, sort of like Donkey Kong, but underground in caves. Another friend of mine ended up buying a Coco just for Downland. He bought just the CPU/keyboard, joysticks and the game cart, and no disk drive, haha.
I would love to play this game, and some others on emulation.
You can try starting with Mocha, a Java CoCo emulator with a lot of games online.
Most people use M.E.S.S. to emulate the Coco but I think the latest release might break a few things due to the work going on with the M.A.M.E. side of the code.
There is the Tandy (TRS-80) Color Computer Games Page that has screen shots and downloads. There are also a couple ftp sites that have more stuff. Someone recently got the rest of the Sierra games running (ones that use the Kings Quest engine).
For information try the Yahoo group where you can ask questions, posts there are also sent to the mailing list where you will see most replies. Most of the serious Coco die hards seem to refuse to use anything but the mailing list for some reason. It's kinda like Apple II users mostly using the net comp.sys.apple newsgroups.
CoCo3.com Forums is another good place to find info. It has less traffic than the mailing list but a lot of people still check messages there.
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Just checking to see what kind of progress has been made.
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I thought it should have been called migraine boy.
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FWIW... as a kid I enjoyed 2600 DKjr.
But would you play it for very long now?
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Yeah, sounds safe. Just list how much testing you've done and if something else turns out to be bad it's not your fault.
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Does anyone know how to test the RAM in a CoCo2?
I am preparing 4 units for sale and one of them has a pretty dodgy looking 64K upgrade board and I would like to test that it is actually working as I don't want to make any false claims when selling it.
Odds are if the computer works running a small Basic program it's good.
But it takes a machine language program to access the upper 32K RAM bank and test it.
I don't know of any programs you could type in off the top of my head but if you ask on the Coco3.com Forums they should be able to help you out.
A lot of coco upgrades look dodgy. Piggybacked RAM chips, perf board and other mods were common with the hardware hacker types. I did my own upgrade and it cost half as much.
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I don't particularly like the idea of it being dual-processor with an 80186, however. If they wanted a 16-bit machine it would have been better to have gone with a 65816 but I don't know if those had come out as early as 1983.
The 65816 didn't come out until at least March of 1984.
The amount of vaporware Atari Inc created was truly unprecedented and will probably never be equalled again in an american tech company.Given the number of different buildings and locations in Atari's early days I can't say I'm surprised at the number of different projects that went on. I'm also not surprised Warner axed them right and left.
The 800 didn't just have an expensive board, that case & RFI shielding was very expensive. It's sad they didn't do more with the card slots.
The Apple may have been a more open system but it resulted in clones and lots of 3rd party hardware that competed with Apple.
The Tandy Color Computer didn't have slots either but they wisely included an expansion connector and later came out with an expansion box. Atari really should have stuck with a similar arrangement.
One really neat thing about finding the stuff for making the original boards is that you could enter the traces into PCB design software and possibly replace a part here or there with a modern part if you wanted. I think it would be cool to release a drop in replacement board with extra features.
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Oh yeah, and the 7800 version needed some work. Too bad really.
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All I can find at the moment is the cassette image. I'll have to see if I can find it on one of the compilation disks.
At one time I actually started working on cracking the coco version but after figuring out 3 or more different loaders that followed each other I finally said the heck with it. I was using a BASIC disassembler at the time so it was kinda tough.