[Coco] Missing the days of BASIC

[Allen Huffman]

I have spent two different evenings up past 4am typing away in BASIC on my CoCo. I forgot how exciting this was back when it was all new. Sadly, I have gotten sidetracked from my goal of backing up all my floppies and writing a utility to do that. Last night, I spent hours doing different BASIC tricks for a possible 4K submission. I have a nice space invaders engine I have been toying with, and a Pac-Man.

The Pac-Man is interesting. I had started writing a Pac-Man for the Arduino last year:

http://subethasoftware.com/2014/02/09/arduino-pac-man-project/ <http://subethasoftware.com/2014/02/09/arduino-pac-man-project/>

You can hook up two resistors and an RCA jack, and using software tricks the Arduino can generate a low-resolution black and white display. The Pac-Man maze I did for it would git on the CoCo block graphics screen horizontally, but not vertically, so I decided to make the game scroll up and down. I don’t know if I will finish either of these, but it’s so much fun to play.

“Back in the day,” I would spend endless hours trying to figure out how to do something, then once I did, I moved on. I read in Rainbow about high speed GET/PUT graphics on PMODE screens. There was an article that explained how much faster it was on even byte boundaries, so I worked and worked until I had routines that could quickly move around a spaceship. Then I never did anything with it.

I hope I can find all those bits and pieces.


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Allen Huffman - PO Box 22031 - Clive IA 50325 - 515-999-0227 (vmail/TXT only)
Sub-Etha Software - http://www.subethasoftware.com - Established 1990!
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