[Coco] Fix It Felix retro style game (based on Donkey Kong style of play)

[Allen Huffman]

On May 2, 2013, at 12:29 PM, Ben <ben_jimenez at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Is there any software to convert a bas game to a bin file?

There were BASIC compilers made for the CoCo -- I saw them advertised in Rainbow but never saw one in person. I do not know if they were ever created for the CoCo 3. This would be an interesting project, actually.

I am sure that is what you meant, but if you just want to turn a .BAS to a .BIN, we did that with our MiniBanners program. You would LOADM"MINIBAN":EXEC to run it, and it had the appearance of a machine language program (screens would instantly pop, not get "drawn" like BASIC does, for example). I used a code compactor written by Carl England which would renumber by 1s, and pack every line as much as possible up to the 255(?) byte token limit. This made the code smaller, and run faster.

I then used code I wrote to scramble the program and turn it in to a machine language loader that would load in to memory, unscramble, and execute with the BREAK key disabled. I thought, at the time, it made the program look better than if it was just some BASIC program.

We did not use any copy protection, but we did serial number every disc and asked people nicely to please support us and not pirate the program. Looking back, I wish I had released all the tools I wrote for this -- bulk copying of discs, etc. I will have to do that if I find them again.

		-- A