[Coco] Kicking the Z-80 butts...

J Arcane jarcane at gmail.com
Tue Apr 28 15:25:28 EDT 2015


Video is absolutely the limiting factor with the CoCo, or at least video
and sound. The 6809 powered some very high quality arcade games in its day,
but the CoCo lacked a dedicated sound synth, and the graphics support lacks
the built in sprite and scrolling modes that hardware like the C64 had. So
you have a very powerful processor, but that processor has to do a lot more
of the work running a game than it does on something like a C64 or one of
Konami or Williams' boards.

Mind you, a few folks nonetheless have managed to squeeze some great things
out of it anyway (NickM's stuff, Sock Master, Dynasprite, and so on), but
it does seem few and far between the stuff that ever really wowed one's
socks off. :(

On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 9:28 PM, Gustavo Ranaur Schoenaker <
ranaur at ranaur.net> wrote:

> Really amazing.
>
> The more I know the 6809 the more I think the problem with the chip was no
> t the processos, but the 6847. Maybe it was the reason Tandy made the GIME
> chip on CoCo 3. Video is really the upper limit of the plataform. At those
> times the video chip make a huge difference.
>
> Nice job Luis!
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 2:34 PM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
>
> > On Tuesday 28 April 2015 09:35:20 Mathieu Chouinard wrote:
> > > speaking of wordstar
> > > I found this last night:
> > > http://wordtsar.ca/
> >
> > Interesting, for wordstar fans.  I've never used it, dynastar yes.
> > >
> > > On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 9:24 AM, CoCo Demus <retrocanada76 at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> > > > That's why MC6809 is the king of 8-bit processors:
> > > >
> > > > https://youtu.be/Ysn7Na60ZGA
> >
> > Thats plumb amazing.
> > [...]
> > Cheers, Gene Heskett
> > --
> > "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
> >  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
> > -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
> > Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
> >
> > --
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> > Coco at maltedmedia.com
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> >
>
> --
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