[Coco] CoCo versus the rest of them

[Roger Taylor]

At 02:11 AM 5/2/2011, you wrote:
>(I just had to rename the subject line to bring it more in line what 
>this thread was becoming)
>
>One thing we can all agree on is that Drivewire and Roger's drive 
>pack are landmark products for the CoCo that can make the outside 
>observer to our community take notice.
>
>I use Drivewire exclusively for my development work, not having 
>powered up my floppy drives in months. I haven't used Roger's IDE 
>but those that prefer the conveniences of a PC development 
>environment, is also a developers dream.


Thanks for the kind words, Nick.  The CoCoNet server is now 
integrated into the Phoenix IDE so that it can fire up at the end of 
your game build and mount the virtual disk(s) for the CoCo.  I can 
probably do the same thing for DW support, but I won't include the 
files with my installer.  You'd just tell the IDE where the DW .exe 
is, and it would automate the rest.

If you haven't seen the progress of Phoenix, you're in for a surprise!

I'll post a link to the new 3 build as soon as I FTP it to the server 
in a bit.  Note that these are just the snapshot builds I'm letting 
people download and use.  I've been working on Phoenix for several 
years but recently invested close to $1000 in commercial .NET 
components that are part of the system and a major overhaul was done 
which is why I have passed my deadline for the 1.0 release, but I'm 
getting close now.

The size, location, and max/minimized state of the window is 
remembered as well as the skin you choose out of 8 cool built in 
skins.  The docking panes can be redocked elsewhere, isolated, 
resized, tab-merged with another pane's area, and more.  You can 
customize the appearance of Phoenix to look how you want.  I still 
have to save the docking pane's states which should come by build 4.

I'm putting together a video now of Phoenix going through some skin 
changes and moving about of some docking panes and then a build of 
the massive Projector-3 graphics system in about 2 seconds.  I should 
have this posted to youtube sometime this afternoon and I'll post 
these links here for anyone wondering what the heck Phoenix is.

I'm also considering releasing the source code to my Jeweled game as 
a Phoenix project (built in) to help others create high-speed sprite 
based games.  Jeweled has super fast sprite routines which take the 
data-based sprites and turn them into direct 6809 instructions before 
the game starts.  The reason the sprites in Jeweled are moving kinda 
slow is because they're following a set of rules that causes them to 
smooth-glide towards their new point which is usually not far away 
from the previous point.  When you take out the game logic and give 
the sprites a simple set of movement rules, 64 of them move around 
damn fast.  This game should be a good starter for new or rusty CoCo 
coders.  Also when you take out the FIRQ-driven PCM audio pump for 
the background music, things speed up much quicker.  I'm using a big 
chunk of CPU time for playing the background music which is made of 
raw samples.




-- 
~ Roger Taylor