[Coco] Worst game ever...

[Allen Huffman]

On Jan 23, 2015, at 9:41 AM, Bill Loguidice <bill at armchairarcade.com> wrote:
> 
> Pooyan is one of my favorite arcade games, and a favorite home port on a
> variety of systems. My only major disappointment with the CoCo version (the
> platform's relative graphic and sound capabilities aside) is that it runs a
> bit slow.

Pooyan was also one of the games I played a ton of on the CoCo. I never saw the arcade version until much later via MAME.

> The Atari 8-bit version of "Clowns & Balloons" benefited from paddle
> support. It's a shame that the CoCo never had paddle controllers as far as
> I know (I'm not about small runs of them). I would imagine with the
> joysticks being analog that it wouldn't have been that difficult to create
> relatively speaking.

Games like Centipede and Pong made great use of the CoCos analog controllers. I just remember how we "all" seemed to hate analog back then and just wanted an Atari stick. Amusing since today analog is back on every game console.

The paddle seems to have fallen out of use... I was surprised to find them referred to as "spinners" these days. I think our terms were just fine.

The Atari 2600 had two types of paddles... The ones that came with the unit stopped at each side, for long games, then they had the driving controllers that spun without stops. I believe one of those was a rotary encoder... I had always assumed the other was a potentiometer like the CoCo's joysticks and were easy to hook up but maybe the ones I read about had more circuitry than that.