[Coco] CoCo Video Player Project

[James Dessart]

On 4/3/09, Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com> wrote:
>  Promotion is all about gimmicks, and playing video on a 30 year old
> obsolete computer sure is gimmicky. It would make a heck of a demo :-) even
> if what is going on behind the scenes is not very complex.

What would be best is if you could get all 64 colours displayed on an
RGB monitor. The video could be compiled to machine code that's
hardwired for each frame, and the base program just loads a frame of
instructions off disk, which executes to fill the screen with the
current frame. Or instead of constantly reading instructions, you have
one set of instructions, and you just update the immediate part of the
opcode with the values from disk. Self-modifying code isn't very
elegant, but it's fast.

If one were feeling motivated enough to do such a thing. Personally,
I'm not all that interested in actually trying this out, since my CoCo
is much too far away. :(

It'd be an interesting possibility, and a challenge to get it looking
good. I don't know what kind of frame rate you'd be able to get, but I
think a CoCo 3 would be the minimum to do it fast enough to be
impressive.

-- 
James Dessart
<http://skwirl.com/cody/>