[Coco] How I "Ported" Planet of Death to Coco

[Joe Grubbs]

This is so cool Jim, I just checked out your page and it blew my mind. Thank you for sharing all of this work! I know what I'll be doing during my flight to Chicago :)



> Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2015 11:31:03 -0300
> From: jimgerrie at ns.sympatico.ca
> To: coco at maltedmedia.com
> Subject: [Coco] How I "Ported" Planet of Death to Coco
> 
>    Steve,
> 
>    I don't work from binaries only text source (BASIC,JAVA,C, etc.)
>    scavenged from the Net or magazines (if you know of any good prospects
>    let me know).  In the case of POD, someone had ported the original game
>    to C so it could be run on one of the old TI calculators (or something
>    like that).  I came across it while researching POD.  It had all the
>    objects, messages, locations, and responses nicely typed out in neat
>    strings and a numeric table of the room motions (luckily in a pretty
>    standard format of room numbers for N,S,E,W,U,D for every room). I just
>    plucked these, and then plunk them into a pretty flexible BASIC
>    two-word parser engine from Compute magazine (I think), called "Tower
>    of Mystery "(which Neil Morrison of the Yahoo group sent me and which I
>    have tweaked with a 32 character word wrap routine, so it fits
>    everything neatly onto an MC-10/Coco screen). Then it was just reading
>    and watching various walk-throughs to tweak the "Tower of Mystery
>    engine to provide the right responses to all the verb object
>    combinations needed.
> 
>    I forgot to mention, another ZX derived game of mine is FESQUEST (which
>    is a homage to the Coco Fest Chicago events).  It is a rehash of a port
>    to the MC-10 of "Pit with Monsters" by Jim Enness for either the ZX81
>    or Spectrum (can't recall which), which I typed in from a Brit computer
>    mag many years ago.
> 
>    If you look at my
>    http://faculty.cbu.ca/jgerrie/Home/jgames.html
> 
>    programs marked with * are completely new programs.  Ones marked with +
>    are either remakes (drawing inspiration from or possibly code as in the
>    above case) or more straightforward ports of BASIC source modified to
>    run on the MC-10 (and then later further modified to work in Color
>    BASIC for the Coco and Dragon).
> 
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