JamesD

Bally Astrocade

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.

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.

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.

Just checking to see what kind of progress has been made.

I thought it should have been called migraine boy.

But would you play it for very long now?

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.

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.

The 65816 didn't come out until at least March of 1984. 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.

Oh yeah, and the 7800 version needed some work. Too bad really.

Not an official port but the Tandy Coco version: http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/donkeyking.html It matched the arcade pretty well in layout, number of screens and gameplay. Yeah... the sound leaves a lot to be desired like most Coco titles and the artifact colors aren't true to the arcade but that was life in the Coco lane until the Coco3. Here is the Donkey Kong Jr clone for the Coco1/2: http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/juniorsrevenge.html and for the Coco3: http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/returnjuniorsrevenge.html I thought the reason so many Kong versions were backwards was because they couldn't fit another level on the shorter screen without shortening the ladders and changing the gameplay. Either way they changed it so I don't see the advantage myself.

Oric has some odd graphics that may prove time consuming to duplicate. I think the VIC uses a character generator and might be easier to do. Some modes of the 6847 might be easy to emulate so an Atom emulator (6502) or VZ/Laser emulator might be possible.

It's not for any of the mention systems but... http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/questforthelda.html

We'll have to see how it feels when the fighters follow the arcade movement schemes more closely. There'll be no more non-shooting fighters then, and it'll also have more than one fighter firing at the same time then, which in combination should make it some more challenging. At least I hope so I have the original version on one of those joysticks with several old arcade games (this is the Space Invaders unit). The game is a lot of fun and gets pretty difficult after a couple levels. If the final game matches the arcade, you won't complain about it being too easy.

Du-oh! I missed that!

(beware: OFFTOPIC) Is there a good reason to use illegal opcodes? Is it possible to make faster code (in some situations) by using them? Actually yes. There are some illegal opcodes that make conversions between 8 and 16 bits faster (or vice versa). I'm pretty sure there were others as well but those were used so much that Zilog actually made them part of the eZ80 instruction set. Documented this time.

One of the advantages of the 65816 is that you could use the DP register to place page 0 type functions elsewhere. That would let you open up the lower memory map for the speccy so you don't have to translate all the memory addresses. For ROM you mostly need common entry points like their open ROM project has.

Because of the number of colors and the user definable graphics characters it made certain types of games easy to do on the C64 and they looked pretty good. The Plus/4 was totally character generator based and look what people are doing with it on the game XeO3. http://www.xeo3.org/

Hmmmm.... and I've been trying it the other way around. Guess I'll have to check that out. I wonder what the sync is doing it doesn't like... if only I had a scope to hook them up to. Off and on is too slow but switching sources let mine *kinda* sync to the IIgs so I believe it will work with other sources if I do the same thing. Thanks for the tip!

Well, I don't know about capture cards but for tuner/capture cards the ATi 550 or 650 chip sets offer the best quality from the reviews I've seen. My brother also happens to use one for video capture and it works pretty well. Just remember to always download the latest drivers if you get anything with ATi chips. Deinterlacing depends on settings in the software. For capture cards check forums like AVS Forums or MediaPortal forums. I know some people use those little USB adapters. USB2 is a must for the best quality though.

Hmmmm.... and I've been trying it the other way around. Guess I'll have to check that out. I wonder what the sync is doing it doesn't like... if only I had a scope to hook them up to.

If I remember right, the C64 let's you specify colors for each character. Simulating that beyond a color set for each line could be nasty unless you have a similar font mode or have bit mapped graphics with enough resolution and colors to duplicate it by drawing the characters.

Well... I think I have the same monitor/TV (silver stand and speaker section but black around screen?) and it has trouble syncing to ANY old computer or game from any input source I've tested (SVID, Composite, RF). It works fine with VCR or DVD output but I've tried over a dozen old computers and none sync correctly. It's the monitor. Technically, it will sync to a Coco3 if I reset the Coco repeatedly until it does but that's not very reliable. No amount of resetting gets it to work with other machines. I've tested Atari, every Coco model, C128D, Apple II+/IIe/IIc+/IIgs, Franklin Ace, NEC Trek, Nintendo, Space Invaders... and that's just the ones I can think of at the moment. None sync properly. It's probably the chipset. Sadly, that's part of the reason I bought the monitor. I just didn't test that part until after it was too late to return. An RGB to VGA converter will probably work though.