[Coco] 3D Deathchase demo from CoCoNet

[Roger Taylor]

At 07:00 PM 1/3/2009, you wrote:
>"Roger Taylor" <operator at coco3.com> wrote in
>message news:20090103005230.51E3720A13 at qs281.pair.com...
> > At 06:30 PM 1/2/2009, you wrote:
> >>Should see whether you can load a new game directly from a rather far away
> >>location on the internet. :)
> >
> > The disk mounted in less than a second, but it's garbled, probably due to
> > the fact that CoCoNet currently only reads the direct-sector based formats
> > with no header info, truncated portions, etc.  I need to work on that this
> > weekend.
> >
> > A common 35-track direct virtual disk would be 161280 bytes in size
> > (157.5K).
>
>Hmm... that's what size it is.  According to the MESS imgtools, it's a
>coco_jvc_rsdos type disk.  Is there a specific type which would work?



P.S. to those scratching your head about how I used the virtual disk 
that James posted online:

 From the CoCo, I typed:
DRIVE 0,"http://www.indigobanquet.adsl24.co.uk/coco/deathchase/dchs.dsk"

then:
DIR

I immediately see:
DEATHCHS BIN   2  B  6

LOADM "DEATHCHS"
EXEC

Game running!  What if James deletes the online .dsk or the .bin file 
on the disk while I've got it mounted?  No problem - CoCoNet takes a 
snapshot of web disks and we're just using the downloaded copy until 
we remount the same URL.  Perhaps a DRIVE refresh command is in order 
which would grab a new copy of the web disk.  PC virtual disks don't 
have this problem.  CoCoNet reads/writes each sector to the actual 
.dsk file.  In fact, you can modify the file on the PC while the CoCo 
is reading or writing to it.

You can also think of a virtual disk on the PC, mounted by the CoCo, 
as a live 153K open memory block between the CoCo and 
PC.  How?  Thanks to the DSKI$ and DSKO$ commands in Disk BASIC, you 
can store anything to any part of the "disk" and use your PC to do 
the same, simultaneously.  When the CoCo wants to access a 
block/sector or group of them, DSKI$/DSKO$ and the serial code will 
do the work.  In fact, let's say you have a master program disk in 
DRIVE 0, and three work disks in DRIVES 1-3, all virtual disks so 
things run fast.  That's 459K of stay-put memory for the 
CoCo.  Again, it's all in how you want to look at things.  As long as 
the server is up, the CoCo will power up to the same disks automatically.

CoCoNet 1.0 is going through more testing and will get a few more 
nips and tucks before it's ready to release in any form.  The last 
test I ran went for over 2 days at 57600 bps grabbing and printing 
the HTML source code from google's front page.  The loop ran 
continuously without errors.  I'll run the same test at 115200 bps 
for about a day.

CoCoNet will most likely come with some online sample programs like a 
multiplayer CoCo game (or two) and possibly a live chat 
program.  Some of these demos will require a helping PHP script 
(game/network server script) to run on coco3.com (or mirrors) to pass 
information between unique CoCos.  CoCoNet CoCo's will be able to 
request a unique random address from an online server and call the 
script URL to communicate with other CoCo's privately.  Again, 
functions like this will be built into Disk BASIC.


-- 
Roger Taylor

http://www.wordofthedayonline.com