[Coco] COCO to PC transfer and Using VCC

[J.P. Samson]

On Sep 11, 2008, at 2:25 PM, Allan Chaney wrote:
> Unfortunately, the colors are really out of wack.  If you choose N  
> on the
> "Do you have a color monitor?" question it only shows up in Black  
> and White.
> If you choose Y then the colors are messed up especially while  
> looking at
> the text.
>
> Is that a VCC limitation?

Yes, but it's also a "limitation" of the CoCo 3 RGB monitor.  I  
suspect if I ran the game on a real CoCo 3 with an RGB monitor, it  
would look just as... colorful.

To create a CoCo 3 RGB monitor version, I imagine what you did was  
switch from PMODE 4 graphics to PMODE 3 with the color registers set  
to white, blue, red, and black.  This was the quick and dirty way to  
get an approximation of the artifact colors on a CoCo 3.  But as you  
can see, it looks very ugly.  Indeed, the Paladin manual suggests  
running the game in the black & white mode to make the text more  
readable!


> It's really too bad Side 2 of the disk was not imaged as well.  That  
> would
> have saved me a lot of trouble.

The Sundog games were pretty widely distributed, and were still being  
sold at the beginning of this decade.  The guy who had the rights (Jim  
Davis) completely vanished from the CoCo scene several years back.  As  
far as I know, no one was ever able to contact him again, and so he  
took all the game masters with him.  Dunno if Glen Dahlgren ever kept  
any masters, although I think he is still active in the video game  
industry.

Anyway, the point being that someone who's still active in the CoCo  
community probably has copies of Paladin and who might be in a better  
position (equipment-wise) to get them onto a PC.

As I mentioned, Tim Lindner (tlinder [at] macmess [dot] org) and  
Andrew Ayres (keeper63 [at] cox [dot] net) are the two behind the  
archive you've been accessing.  I suggest you contact them by e-mail  
and see if either has the original Paladin disc.  They could then very  
quickly make a copy of the unprotected city disk onto a PC.

Also, join the forums on coco3.com.  There are some collectors there,  
too, who don't read this e-mail list.  One of them may have a disk  
image on their PC's.


> I also found the manual on the iso image at scans/manuals/pdf/ 
> paladin's
> Legacy.pdf
>
> They did a nice job of scanning the manual in scrollable book format.


The advert for the game is at the back of the manual, and I sure do  
remember that from the Rainbow days.  (I'm afraid I wasn't one of your  
customers, so I've only ever gotten to see a little of your game for  
the first time in the past day, Allan!)

-- JP