[Coco] CoCo Video Player Project

[John W. Linville]

On Fri, Apr 03, 2009 at 09:47:38AM -0300, James Dessart wrote:
> On 4/3/09, Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com> wrote:
> >  Promotion is all about gimmicks, and playing video on a 30 year old
> > obsolete computer sure is gimmicky. It would make a heck of a demo :-) even
> > if what is going on behind the scenes is not very complex.
> 
> What would be best is if you could get all 64 colours displayed on an
> RGB monitor. The video could be compiled to machine code that's
> hardwired for each frame, and the base program just loads a frame of
> instructions off disk, which executes to fill the screen with the
> current frame. Or instead of constantly reading instructions, you have
> one set of instructions, and you just update the immediate part of the
> opcode with the values from disk. Self-modifying code isn't very
> elegant, but it's fast.

Dunno, my guess is that moving the data to the CoCo is a bigger problem
than filling the video buffer.  Loading from the disk blocks of code
to fill the memory buffer would significantly increase the total data
transfer (i.e. transferring code + data instead of just data).

> It'd be an interesting possibility, and a challenge to get it looking
> good. I don't know what kind of frame rate you'd be able to get, but I
> think a CoCo 3 would be the minimum to do it fast enough to be
> impressive.

That probably depends on whom you are trying to impress... :-)

John
-- 
John W. Linville		Someday the world will need a hero, and you
linville at tuxdriver.com			might be all we have.  Be ready.