[Coco] PopStar Pilot - Another chapter added

[Richard Goedeken]

I'm impressed that people are using Amigas for Coco development work.  I have 
a sweet A1200 setup but have never written any software for the Amiga and am 
not familiar with the tools.  So I'm using a modern linux PC with MESS as my 
main dev platform for DynoSprite, and only using the real Coco 3 for testing. 
  Even doing the software development on the coco would be extremely painful. 
  If my sprite compiler were ported from Python to BASIC it would probably 
take days for one run :)

Richard

On 09/05/2013 06:40 AM, Steve Bjork wrote:
> Bill,
>
> Any game developer will use the best tools at hand.  When I started writing
> game for the CoCo, the first programs I created the tools needed.  I wrote
> Micro-Painter long before my first CoCo game, Popcorn.
>
> But soon I was limited by the hardware systems of the CoCo and needed better
> hardware.  First, the Amiga was setup for doing some graphics, but mostly
> sound work.  The real help was IBM PC with the memory and speed that I needed
> to create the graphics system for the more modern games for the CoCo. From
> Character based screen maps to libraries of object based sprites system, the
> PC had the storage and power to get the just done.
>
> Yes, I still used a CoCo to create the code using my own assembler.  (It was
> using my hard drive OS system.)  But that was only 5K to 6K of a 32k ROM
> pack.  If the code was any larger, there would have been a need to use a PC to
> write the code.
>
> If I was going to write a CoCo game today, I would use a PC from start to
> end.  The 3-d graphics programs would help make the sprite object look more
> real.  In Donkey Kong Country for the super NES (1994), they use pre-rendered
> 3D graphics (a first) to improve the overall graphical look.  Some 20 years
> later, this is more or less the standard for games on graphics system without
> real time 3-D graphics system.
>
> There are so many other reason why not to use the CoCo in creating the
> graphics.  From Limit memory and color palette, it's just too hard to use a
> CoCo for this type of work.  Why make more work for yourself when there are
> better systems and tools out there?
>
> Steve