[Coco] Games that don't fit on floppies (was Super IDE vs. Drive Pak)

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 10:02 PM, Brian Blake <random.rodder at gmail.com> wrote:
> data throughput increases; the  making of very large games with lots of
> digitized and sampled sounds only makes sense to me - I could be WAAYYYY off
> on this...

This recalls a topic that was recently discussed on the CoCo IRC
channel.  We were talking about a new CoCo game that would benefit
from mass storage, possibly only be practical with some form mass
storage.  Some folks felt a CoCo game should run from standard CoCo
floppies, or it wasn't a true (pure/proper/faithful/??) game.  Not
sure what the proper word would be.. basically if it didn't run on a
stock CoCo with FDD, it was sort of cheating.

I wonder how other folks feel about that.  Where do you draw the line
on what is right and what is not I guess.  It's a concept I struggle
with in DriveWire a lot, where we can often do things either on the
CoCo side or the PC side (and it's usually a lot easier to do them on
the PC side, but it feels wrong).  There have to be some lines drawn
somewhere I guess.

Personally, I think a game that requires mass storage is OK and "true"
since there were mass storage options available in the CoCo's heyday,
even if they never gained much popularity.  However, I can see the
point that there have to be some limits or what you have isn't a
"coco" anymore.  It would have been impractical to release a game
requiring anything beyond FDD back in the day I think, since the
installed base was far to small to support software requiring anything
more.. so maybe I'm wrong.  Anyway I thought there might be some
interesting opinions on that in this group.