thegamezmaster Posted September 21, 2011 Share Posted September 21, 2011 Are there any good games for this computer? Don't know much about it, got it from my Dad's stuff. Just computer, power supply, tv hookup, and data tape recorder. Thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+thegoldenband Posted September 22, 2011 Share Posted September 22, 2011 Sure, there are tons, though without a disk drive you lose some options. Two of my favorites were Downland and Dungeons of Daggorath; the latter is arguably the CoCo's killer app, a game many years ahead of its time. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesD Posted September 22, 2011 Share Posted September 22, 2011 http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/coco_game_list.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thegamezmaster Posted September 22, 2011 Author Share Posted September 22, 2011 They made a disk drive for this? Any good cart games? Not really into rpg's no offence to those that are. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jhd Posted September 22, 2011 Share Posted September 22, 2011 I gave away my Coco set-up about 1990. That said, a few games do stand-out in my memory: Galactic Attack -- your basic Galaxian clone; I played this one a lot when I was younger. The Coco does not have hardware sprites, but this game makes it look like it does. This was a cartridge. Bustout -- a pong clone, but still quite fun; also a cartridge The King -- This is an excellent Donkey Kong clone; it is available on tape. Zaxxon -- one of the very few officially licensed titles on the Coco, it is surprisingly good given the hardware limitations. It is also available on tape. There was a good Joust clone that I played endlessly; alas, I've long since forgotten the name. Most of the major arcade games of the day appeared on the Coco in some form. Note that the graphcs are not comparable to the A8/C64 systems. The maximum resolution is only 256x192x2 colours (4 with artifacts). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briza1 Posted September 23, 2011 Share Posted September 23, 2011 I gave away my Coco set-up about 1990. That said, a few games do stand-out in my memory: Galactic Attack -- your basic Galaxian clone; I played this one a lot when I was younger. The Coco does not have hardware sprites, but this game makes it look like it does. This was a cartridge. Bustout -- a pong clone, but still quite fun; also a cartridge The King -- This is an excellent Donkey Kong clone; it is available on tape. Zaxxon -- one of the very few officially licensed titles on the Coco, it is surprisingly good given the hardware limitations. It is also available on tape. There was a good Joust clone that I played endlessly; alas, I've long since forgotten the name. Most of the major arcade games of the day appeared on the Coco in some form. Note that the graphcs are not comparable to the A8/C64 systems. The maximum resolution is only 256x192x2 colours (4 with artifacts). Ok the Joust game u refer too is either Buzzard Bait or Lancer, I found the Buzzard bait version better graphically and had the reaching troll arm. but Lancer the controls were more precise but graphics were not as good Then there was the OS-9 version Pegasus and the Phantom Riders which I found to be more fun as it had more graphics and game play 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charlie_ Posted September 23, 2011 Share Posted September 23, 2011 Yeah, the coco2 is a charming little system. As mentioned there wasnt a lot of licensed games but all the popular games of the day made it to the system under different but similar names. While the graphic capabilites of the coco2 where limited, you will find some games that are better looking than the same game on the A8 or C64.. 1st one that comes to mind is "Sailor Man". Popeye for the coco. Canyon Climber, Zaxxon, Pooyan.... Anyway, on the other hand is the Coco3. It runs all the coco2 software and on its own can hold its own if not surpass other 8-bit computers. The perfectly emulated Donkey Kong, Nick's Pac-Man, Zenix, Sinisstar........... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briza1 Posted September 24, 2011 Share Posted September 24, 2011 Yeah, the coco2 is a charming little system. As mentioned there wasnt a lot of licensed games but all the popular games of the day made it to the system under different but similar names. While the graphic capabilites of the coco2 where limited, you will find some games that are better looking than the same game on the A8 or C64.. 1st one that comes to mind is "Sailor Man". Popeye for the coco. Canyon Climber, Zaxxon, Pooyan.... Anyway, on the other hand is the Coco3. It runs all the coco2 software and on its own can hold its own if not surpass other 8-bit computers. The perfectly emulated Donkey Kong, Nick's Pac-Man, Zenix, Sinisstar........... Chaz, mate don't forget the Awesome port currently in the works The Game Lemmings, If it gets completed it will look exactly or so similar to the Amiga version, So far the Dave has done the bulk of the hard work, now his just doing the main coding now to put all the controls and Game Engine together to make a 40 level version and then work on the other 40 levels later on. So far the conversion looks really impressive, If Nick Marentas says it is on the way to being the best Game ever on the coco 3 then it says a lot coming from Him Even Nick is working on a Zaxxon remake which will have Defender and Scramble elements thrown in so far it looks impressive laters Briza Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charlie_ Posted September 24, 2011 Share Posted September 24, 2011 Chaz, mate don't forget the Awesome port currently in the works The Game Lemmings, If it gets completed it will look exactly or so similar to the Amiga version, So far the Dave has done the bulk of the hard work, now his just doing the main coding now to put all the controls and Game Engine together to make a 40 level version and then work on the other 40 levels later on. So far the conversion looks really impressive, If Nick Marentas says it is on the way to being the best Game ever on the coco 3 then it says a lot coming from Him Even Nick is working on a Zaxxon remake which will have Defender and Scramble elements thrown in so far it looks impressive laters Briza Hi Briza. I know about Lemmings because I talk with Dave every morning in IRC chat. Nice person, and I can't wait to try the game. I'm looking forward to it! I'm glad to hear Nick is working on another coco game! One thing I always wished is that Nick would go back and hack his pac-man so that the ghost act more like the arcade version. His coco3 pac-man blows all other 8bit versions away as far as graphics and sound, but the game play is too radically different from "proper" pac-man. You supposed to be able to loose ghost by going around turns faster than them, but Nicks pac-man is the opposite. Also ghost almost never just change to the complete opposite direction out of the blue. There are "rules" written for their behaviour and the coco3 pac-man is nothing close to them. Still, on its own its a good pac-man type game and I do enjoy it from time to time but get frustrated because I always try to play it like its pac-man but it is a really a different game the way the ghost AI is working. Here is a quick link on ghost behaviour :http://gameinternals.com/post/2072558330/understanding-pac-man-ghost-behavior Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesD Posted September 24, 2011 Share Posted September 24, 2011 Chaz, mate don't forget the Awesome port currently in the works The Game Lemmings, If it gets completed it will look exactly or so similar to the Amiga version, It's based on the VGA version. The graphics are stored as bit planes but it's easy to convert them to the coco. Even Nick is working on a Zaxxon remake which will have Defender and Scramble elements thrown in so far it looks impressive That should be interesting. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briza1 Posted September 25, 2011 Share Posted September 25, 2011 Chaz, mate don't forget the Awesome port currently in the works The Game Lemmings, If it gets completed it will look exactly or so similar to the Amiga version, It's based on the VGA version. The graphics are stored as bit planes but it's easy to convert them to the coco. Even Nick is working on a Zaxxon remake which will have Defender and Scramble elements thrown in so far it looks impressive That should be interesting. Hi James. Here is a Url link to Nick's progress so far, That's if u don't have the link for his workshop http://cocogamedev.maxforum.org/2011/05/18/new-game-fortress/ laters Briza Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briza1 Posted October 25, 2011 Share Posted October 25, 2011 I gave away my Coco set-up about 1990. That said, a few games do stand-out in my memory: Galactic Attack -- your basic Galaxian clone; I played this one a lot when I was younger. The Coco does not have hardware sprites, but this game makes it look like it does. This was a cartridge. Bustout -- a pong clone, but still quite fun; also a cartridge The King -- This is an excellent Donkey Kong clone; it is available on tape. Zaxxon -- one of the very few officially licensed titles on the Coco, it is surprisingly good given the hardware limitations. It is also available on tape. There was a good Joust clone that I played endlessly; alas, I've long since forgotten the name. Most of the major arcade games of the day appeared on the Coco in some form. Note that the graphcs are not comparable to the A8/C64 systems. The maximum resolution is only 256x192x2 colours (4 with artifacts). Draconin was a very nice clone of the Bosconian game. 1 of my favs. Star Wrek based on Star trek was a good game also a Fav. Xenion is a good clone based on Xevious. Colorpede which I think is an excellent clone of Centrepede Pumpman also another good game based on Dig Dug These all came on tape. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LocalH Posted October 25, 2011 Share Posted October 25, 2011 Don't forget Gantelet, a quite nice Gauntlet clone. There's also a good licensed version of Arkanoid. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Gemintronic Posted October 25, 2011 Share Posted October 25, 2011 Is Super Pitfall a CoCo 2 game? If so, I always found it to be an awesome platformer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobotech Posted October 25, 2011 Share Posted October 25, 2011 I'm curious, are there easily available (read: cheap) floppy drives for the Coco? It is one of the systems that i was highly intrigued by as a young teen but never could afford. However I got a really nice Coco 2 a couple of years ago but got just the computer, nothing else. I never have had the urge to do anything with it since I had nothing else. Never saw any floppy drives for it ever in the wild. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briza1 Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 I'm curious, are there easily available (read: cheap) floppy drives for the Coco? It is one of the systems that i was highly intrigued by as a young teen but never could afford. However I got a really nice Coco 2 a couple of years ago but got just the computer, nothing else. I never have had the urge to do anything with it since I had nothing else. Never saw any floppy drives for it ever in the wild. No need for the use of a real disk drive setup now Mate, Either u can use Drive-Wire or Coconet or MicroSD and let the Pc be the Storage device. That's how most users do it now. It's easier and more efficient Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briza1 Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 Is Super Pitfall a CoCo 2 game? If so, I always found it to be an awesome platformer. Super Pitfall was only ever ported to the coco 3, And it was the NES version The original PitFall games were done on the coco 1,2 and they were based on the original game on the Atari 2600 and the sequel Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charlie_ Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 (edited) I'm curious, are there easily available (read: cheap) floppy drives for the Coco? It is one of the systems that i was highly intrigued by as a young teen but never could afford. However I got a really nice Coco 2 a couple of years ago but got just the computer, nothing else. I never have had the urge to do anything with it since I had nothing else. Never saw any floppy drives for it ever in the wild. Briza is right. You can get Drivewire and use a PC with a serial to usb adapter and cable as a disk drive. I know a few people claim to really like drivewire. I however am not a fan at all. I dont like the highspeed. Even though you can POKE the speed back to normal it goes back to high speed at any disk access. Plus lots of things ive tried dont work including the best of the coco3 games. If you can get ahold of a disk controller for the coco, all you need is an indusrty standard 360k floppy drive. So any drive in a case with power supply and ribbon cable can plug into the disk controller and work. EDIT: It doesn't even need to be a 360K drive. One of those full height single sided drives will work just as well. Especially in RSDOS. Edited October 27, 2011 by Official Ninja Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesD Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 Ok the Joust game u refer too is either Buzzard Bait or Lancer, I found the Buzzard bait version better graphically and had the reaching troll arm. but Lancer the controls were more precise but graphics were not as good Then there was the OS-9 version Pegasus and the Phantom Riders which I found to be more fun as it had more graphics and game play I was a big Joust fan back in the day and I thought the graphics of Lancer and the gameplay was more like the arcade... with the exception of the absence of the lava hand and different colors for the bad guys it was pretty close. (the arcade has different levels of bad guys represented by different colors... which isn't really possible on a CoCo I/II on small images) Pegasus and the Phantom Riders seemed to be based on the code from Lancer but with altered graphics and background to get around copyright issues. Since both were from Spectral Associates it's not surprising. Phantom Riders was marketed through Tandy where the others weren't. BTW, the CoCo color artifacting doesn't just display 4 colors. With different dot patters you can produce a lot of colors, however, that usually requires a larger area of the screen to successfully accomplish. Pegasus and the Phantom Riders was the only one of the three that attempted to use artifacting extensively. There was some with the lava and islands on the others but that was about it. http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/pegasus_and_the_phantom_riders.html http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/lancer.html http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/buzzardbait.html 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jhd Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 BTW, the CoCo color artifacting doesn't just display 4 colors. With different dot patters you can produce a lot of colors, however, that usually requires a larger area of the screen to successfully accomplish. Pegasus and the Phantom Riders was the only one of the three that attempted to use artifacting extensively. There was some with the lava and islands on the others but that was about it. http://nitros9.lcurt...tom_riders.html Wow, that is an impressive screenshot -- those are easily the most colourful graphics that I have ever seen on a Coco game. Were there many other games that used mult-colour artifacts? I was active in the Coco scene from 1982 through about 1989, and I don't recall having ever seen such a technique before, nor did I see it discussed in the magazines of the time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briza1 Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 BTW, the CoCo color artifacting doesn't just display 4 colors. With different dot patters you can produce a lot of colors, however, that usually requires a larger area of the screen to successfully accomplish. Pegasus and the Phantom Riders was the only one of the three that attempted to use artifacting extensively. There was some with the lava and islands on the others but that was about it. http://nitros9.lcurt...tom_riders.html Wow, that is an impressive screenshot -- those are easily the most colourful graphics that I have ever seen on a Coco game. Were there many other games that used mult-colour artifacts? I was active in the Coco scene from 1982 through about 1989, and I don't recall having ever seen such a technique before, nor did I see it discussed in the magazines of the time. Another Game I am aware of that used some sort of Artifact scheme to get more colors on a RGB pal coco 1,2 unit was Donut Dilemma by Nick Marentas. It used the 4 color mode, but with alternating horizontal scanlines He got it to display 6 colors and they were Light Blue and a RED for the extra 2 colors This was another cool coco 1,2 game u could get on Tape http://members.optusnet.com.au/nickma/ProjectArchive/donutcc.html laters Briza Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesD Posted October 28, 2011 Share Posted October 28, 2011 (edited) Wow, that is an impressive screenshot -- those are easily the most colourful graphics that I have ever seen on a Coco game. Were there many other games that used mult-colour artifacts? I was active in the Coco scene from 1982 through about 1989, and I don't recall having ever seen such a technique before, nor did I see it discussed in the magazines of the time. Actually, there were quite a few. It was common on graphics adventures and some arcade games. Only M.E.S.S. does a good job of emulating the color artifacting so if any screenshots were done with a different emulator you won't get as nice of colors. Some of the screen shots on the color computer games page don't look as colorful as the original but here are a few that are close: http://nitros9.lcurt...nmythology.html http://nitros9.lcurt...ardsisland.html http://nitros9.lcurt...eadventure.html http://nitros9.lcurt...uofthepast.html http://nitros9.lcurt...wizardsden.html http://nitros9.lcurt...m/tutankam.html http://nitros9.lcurt...inggallery.html http://nitros9.lcurt...henanigans.html http://nitros9.lcurt.../seasearch.html http://nitros9.lcurt...ndsofegypt.html etc... Just remember that artifacting only works on an NTSC machine/TV. It was discussed in magazines a lot. If you ever got to play with Graphicom, it had a whole page of textures you could cut and paste with for drawing. There were a lot of colorful graphics sent in to Rainbow Magazine and they had a monthly contest where they published the winners. A couple of machine language programs were published in magazines that would flood fill an area with a pattern to get the same effect. One was in Color Computer News and it added a DYE command to BASIC if I remember right. I remember typing it in and not being able to get it to work. I think it had issues with DISK EXTENDED COLOR BASIC. The other was in that small computer magazine Tandy published. Edited October 28, 2011 by JamesD Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jhd Posted October 28, 2011 Share Posted October 28, 2011 I obviously missed out on a lot of Coco software ; presumably because I never had a disk drive. Virtually nothing was available retail (besides Radio Shack stores) and as a kid I had neither a chequing account nor a credit card, so buying mail-order was a real challenge. The only title on the above list I have seen/heard of was Sands of Egypt, and that was a (glowing) review in the Tandy in-house magazine. Did Color Computer News have a newstand distribution, or was it only subscription based? I regularly got Hot Coco, very occasionally Rainbow, and I had a few issues of Color Computer Magazine. Again, I was limited to what I could find locally in stores -- which was not too much. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesD Posted October 28, 2011 Share Posted October 28, 2011 (edited) I obviously missed out on a lot of Coco software ; presumably because I never had a disk drive. Virtually nothing was available retail (besides Radio Shack stores) and as a kid I had neither a chequing account nor a credit card, so buying mail-order was a real challenge. The only title on the above list I have seen/heard of was Sands of Egypt, and that was a (glowing) review in the Tandy in-house magazine. Did Color Computer News have a newstand distribution, or was it only subscription based? I regularly got Hot Coco, very occasionally Rainbow, and I had a few issues of Color Computer Magazine. Again, I was limited to what I could find locally in stores -- which was not too much. Actually, it was in the July 1983 issue of Color Computer Magazine. My bad. The only magazines I saw at newsstands were Rainbow and Hot CoCo. Color Computer News probably never made it to the newsstand. CoCo support really varied by location. <edit> FWIW, I actually drew some of the graphics I used in Graphicom and loaded them in from BASIC. Then I just used GET/PUT to do animation. DRAW usually produced better results for arcade games in BASIC because it was easy on memory. GET/PUT were also pretty slow so you had to double buffer to make it look nice. That took 12K in hi-res and didn't leave much for your game. Edited October 28, 2011 by JamesD Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.