[Coco] Building NitrOS-9 on Mac OS X

[Allen Huffman]

> On Jan 22, 2015, at 10:07 PM, nickma2 at optusnet.com.au wrote:
> 
> I use to think that in the 80's but I began having doubts what I saw
> what Steve Bjork was creating under OS-9.
> 
> Nothing he created under OS-9 was anywhere as good as what he created
> before without it. He also continued to write games outside of OS-9.
> That told me that OS-9 was an inferior environment for games that a
> game developer would not use it and didn't offer the performance to
> create arcade quality games.

True -- that's why even today Apple's iOS introduced a "METAL" layer to let gamers get closer to the hardware. There will always be an advantage there, but sadly, all the RS-DOS stuff wouldn't run from my hard drive back then, or from 40 track disks, etc. so I ended up not buying any of it. I guess it's like the power of writing DOS apps versus on top of Windows.

Games like King's Quest and some of the others sold by Radio Shack were far more elaborate than most -- it would have been neat to see what some programmers who actually knew the CoCo could do, versus folks just porting to an API on top of OS-9.

As soon as I figure out how to record, I want to show you the demo that prompted me to write my space invaders. Multi layers of scrolling stars, and a "spaceship" that fired machine gun shots. Someone who actually knew how to write games could have done something neat with it.

		-- A