[Coco] [Color Computer] 128 or 512?

[theother_bob]

All good points. As far as "What can be done in 512K games-wise that can't be done in 128K?", even Basic games could benefit greatly by using the extra memory for...
-variable/data storage (easy)
-swappable code sections (tricky but cool)
-preload graphics into HPUT buffers (easy and powerful)

The last two items are basically equivalent to using a ramdisk. The third one is my favorite because it's easy to swap pages on the fly. You could have a multi-level game with different graphics for every level. A 128K CoCo3 has one spare 8k page that can be used for one spare set of HBUFFer graphics (which can be saved to disk). With 512K you could obviously use a lot more pages, That and a little ML help can make Basic sing. 

As far as my own programming goes, I'm not writing games in Basic at this point, but thinking about future development on Color FOG, a disk gui interface. There is currently a version that works on stock 128K cc3 with or without a hard drive and HDB-DOS.

I have decided that the next version (if there is one) will require 512K and a hard drive. It will probably be 80 columns as well, and so require an RGB monitor. Few if any features may be backported to the RSDOS version.

Bob

----- Original Message ----
From: Richard Atkinson <rga24 at cantab.net>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 3, 2007 4:25:04 AM
Subject: Re: [Coco] [Color Computer] 128 or 512?


In my view, games that are 128K compatible but which detect 512K and have
enhancements for 512K are best. That way 128K users get to play and they
have an incentive to upgrade to 512K whenever possible.

Admittedly this means the extra 384K would be more likely to be used for
'novelty' extra features rather than core game programming. It could be used
for cutting down on loading times for multiload games, but that wouldn't
really encourage people to upgrade.

What can be done in 512K games-wise that can't be done in 128K? I still
think of 128K as a large amount of memory for an eight bit computer...

Richard


On 1/3/07, James Diffendaffer <jdiffendaffer at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> You might be able to make a better game by supporting 512K only but if
> you want to draw new (or former) people into the CoCo community you
> have to consider that 512K CoCo3 machines are pretty rare.  I've only
> seen a couple on ebay in as long as I've had an account there and
> that's been several years.
>
> My CoCo3 is 128K.
>

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