[Coco] For Roger - Mary and the Butterflies

[Roger Taylor]

At 10:12 AM 4/11/2008, you wrote:
>Roger,
>
>A few days ago I got my copy of "Mary and the Butterflies" in the 
>mail - I just played it for a few minutes (gotta dash to work 
>soon!), and I am really impressed! While a fairly simple game, it 
>really is polished and fun to play. The music and sound effects are 
>really nice.

Thanks, Andrew.  I have someone writing floppies for me due to being 
way bogged down here.  While the game seems fairly simple, after a 
while you'll notice those sly butterflies seem to know just when to 
swoop upwards and away from you which can be frustrating unless you 
know how to predict where they might land.

Hiding behind the trees will take back points from your score pretty 
quick, and also sometimes a bee will slide right down between the 
edge of the screen and the tree top and fly around down low for a bit 
before finding it's way out.  If you're back there during this time, 
you're a goner.  :)

Background music is possible within BASIC with some work.  I don't 
have time to tutor this right now but I can give some pointers 
accasionally to help get you started.  I also have a background 
speech generator for the CoCo 3 that's stashed away in my gobs of 
source project files.    You basically send a string of phonemes to 
the processor and out comes the speech while BASIC keeps on running, 
even the flashing cursor.

You can do a lot with the USR() function in BASIC.  This might be 
your key to integrating ML routines with BASIC programs.


>As a programmer, I want to see the routines (my understanding of 
>6809 assembler is very rusty, though). My real interest lies in 
>making some kind of BASIC assembler routing library to allow BASIC 
>programs to obtain some of the same features as your game (mainly 
>background music and non-flickering graphics, if not the speed).
>
>Probably a pipe dream, though.
>
>Thanks again for the game - I can't wait to see Jeweled!

My goal is to impress or don't release it, but Mary and the 
Butterflies was a warming stage to get me back in the game after 
years of coding for the PC instead of the CoCo.  However, I've put in 
way too much time over the years with the CoCo so it's in my blood 
and I can crank out something neat fairly quick if I devote the 
required time.  By the way, Bob Devries and Robert Gault deserve 
credit for helping debug both Mary ATB and Jeweled, but noone has 
seen any of my source code yet.

Throughout 2008 expect more impressive CoCo 3 apps/games to materialize.