[Coco] Update on new Coco 3 game engine

[John Kowalski]

on Fri Aug 16 14:01:14 EDT 2013
Nick Marentes <nickma at optusnet.com.au> wrote:

>It's all working for me now with an '87 GIME CoCo3. I'll setup an '86
>GIME CoCo3 on the weekend and test my code.
>
>Good to see you back John.

Hi Nick,
It's always good to keep both an '86 and '87 CoCo around for testing.
You never know how differently something is going to run on both of
them when it starts getting technical/tricky.


on Sat Aug 17 12:44:30 EDT 2013
Retro Canada <retrocanada76 at gmail.com> wrote:

>hey John, do you still live in St-Hubert? I live in Brossard I saw your old address in your
>fantastic mod player.

No, I've moved now, to the eastern townships.

on Sat Aug 17 11:33:02 EDT 2013
Richard Goedeken <Richard at fascinationsoftware.com> wrote:

>By the way John, I'm a big fan of your Donkey Kong port. I think this is the
>single most impressive piece of software for the Coco. I'm not all that great
>at DK but one of my colleagues at work is pretty good. Unfortunately MESS
>doesn't emulate the joystick input quite right, so some day I'll have to bring
>in my Coco 3 and see if he can make it to the 'pie level' on the Coco.

Thanks :)  Yeah, a lot of the programs I've written didn't work
properly on emulators right off the bat.  Luckily the emulators get
more authentic over time and eventually run them ok.
I wrote and tested Donkey Kong on a real CoCo 3, and was a bit
surprised when the joystick didn't function in MESS (but I assume it
should in the latest version??)  It was probably a pretty simple
explanation - I cut as many cycles/delays as possible out of my
joystick routine simply to keep it from slowing the game down.  The
emulator either didn't supply a valid joystick reading to the
(emulated) 6809 that soon, or something in the way I set the
audio/joystick registers might have been a little non-standard
compared to the way it's usually set.

John Kowalski / Sock Master
http://users.aei.ca/twilight/sock