[Coco] CoCo graphics adventures ... online?

[Roger Taylor]

At 09:43 AM 8/26/2005, you wrote:
>>Thanks!  Ok, now if I can talk to Mannequin who I think dabbles in PHP as 
>>well.  This should not be that hard of a game to port to the web.  The 
>>graphics themselves can be scaled and converted to JPEG quite easily, and 
>>the program logic can very well be done in PHP and probably much easier.
>
>Roger,
>
>This is a great and interesting project you are taking on - I wish you the 
>best of luck, and I hope it turns out the way you plan it. I am pretty 
>sure I have a copy of the game as well (plus many other similar games in 
>BASIC). I have always thought I would give a shot at such a thing, too - 
>but I already have waaaaaay too many projects.


For this project I think just using the original 256x96 halftone images 
from CoCo Zone will suffice.  Ofcourse, I'll do some processing on them 
beforehand to yield more pleasing images like a smoothing filter or maybe 
some recoloring here and there, but that's the easiest part of the project.

The other issue is keeping the HTML design separate from the PHP 
code/logic.  In other words, the BASIC code of the game needs to be 
translated into PHP statements that deal with how the HTML is refreshed, 
etc.  I forsee no real problems here.

The input dialog for accepting commands can be as simple as an edit field 
like in the CoCo Cafe.  Anyway, I'm not sure how much random activity is in 
this game to keep it from being winnable the same on each play, but I aim 
to make it not so predictable or easy to win if it is now, so that players 
will keep returning.  If this project goes well, we can convert other text 
and/or text/graphics adventures the same.  The ones that should be easy to 
convert are written in BASIC since we can't always reverse engineer a ML 
adventure.

What sparked this idea is my decision to start coding web site content in 
PHP and MySQL from now on.  I have spent way too much time being a part of 
the ever-so-unstable HLA project, a Win32 assembler/compiler with huge 
potential and power, but not practical enough for CGI anymore, and I have 
lost ground with my projects that I have going on elsewhere because of the 
time it takes to develop using HLA.


-- 
Roger Taylor