[Coco] Drawing hires graphics

[Allen Huffman]

> 1 have the graphics in disk and load them when needed?

This would probably be the easiest approach, but would chew up disk space.

I put out an OS-9 graphical text adventure-type thing that did just this. I digitized actual photos with a standalone video camera and a DS69 digitizer, then would load the data and push it to the small square viewing window. To save disk space, I did a very simple compression. Under DISK BASIC, the smallest file takes up 2304 BYTES (a granual) with 68 files max in the directory, so that would limit your photos unless you did it as a big direct access file and just did a seek and read data yourself. More work, but you could get more pictures that way.

> 2. have the in memory like bundled in my .BIN file?

The really impressive tape based LOADM graphical adventures seemed to have an impressive way to render screens. Not sure how it worked, but Black Sanctum, Calistoga Island, Shenanigans, etc. made great use of limited memory and did some impressive things.

Doing drawings directly on a CoCo using CoCoMax/ColorMax would be the most retro, but I expect someone has a converter that would take a GIF and turn it in to a CM3 file or something that the CoCo could handle.

		-- A