[Coco] Kicking the Z-80 butts...

[Hugo Dufort]

Knowing that the NES uses a resolution of 256x225, in terms of raw 
resolution, such a game is within the Coco3's capabilities (it could 
even scroll and double-buffer at this resolution). However the Coco3 has 
a more slightly more limited palette and, of course, no coprocessor 
offering blitter functions or sprite management...

I'm currently working on a nice platformer / vertical scroller game that 
will use a similar resolution. We'll see how it works out...

Hugo

Le 2015-04-28 20:48, Mark McDougall a écrit :
> On 29/04/2015 5:25 AM, J Arcane wrote:
>
>> Video is absolutely the limiting factor with the CoCo, or at least video
>> and sound. The 6809 powered some very high quality arcade games in 
>> its day,
>> but the CoCo lacked a dedicated sound synth, and the graphics support 
>> lacks
>> the built in sprite and scrolling modes that hardware like the C64 
>> had. So
>> you have a very powerful processor, but that processor has to do a 
>> lot more
>> of the work running a game than it does on something like a C64 or 
>> one of
>> Konami or Williams' boards.
>
> This. Adding higher resolutions and colour will do nothing but burden 
> the 6809 further. You only need to look at the NES with (scrolling) 
> tilemap and sprite hardware to see how much load that takes off the 
> CPU, and what sort of quality games you can produce. I'd venture to 
> say that a Coco with such hardware would place it somewhere between 
> the NES and SNES in capability.
>
> The Williams boards with a 1MHz 6809 (after Defender) had a blitter 
> for moving graphics around memory, optimised for the video memory 
> architecture. Konami's Tutankham only had (split-screen) scrolling, 
> but Juno First had a blitter as well.
>
> Of course it's all academic without any software developed 
> specifically for it. I firmly believe that adding tilemap/sprite 
> hardware capability to the Coco will open up all sorts of 
> possibilities for porting existing, high quality games to the Coco. 
> It's far easier to port a game than develop a new one, and you don't 
> need to be a commercial games developer to do it. Just think about 
> Super Mario Brothers on the Coco!
>
> Regards,
>


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