Pac-Man on CoCo 3

[freeforfreebogus]

Wow... I don't remember that game back when i had the coco3

[kurisux]

This is absolutely incredible, considering the machine.

If people could squeeze such out of today's' machines, imagine the possibilities.

Then again, with Pac-Man, WTF else would you need?

[clownhorse]

I'll do some math.

There's 1 pacman and 4 ghosts onscreen. that's 5 sprites.

5 sprites x 16x16 pixels = 1280 pixels

2,000,000 cycles per second. 60 frames per second.

2,000,000 cycles / 60 frames = 33,333 cycles per frame

33,333 cycles / 1280 pixels = approx 26 cycles per pixel.

Every pixel has to be rendered in less than 26 cycles!

[baarbear]

The Coco 2 was my first computer and it and the Coco 3 served me well for over 10 years. It was a remarkable little machine. Third party developers like Tom Mix and Gimmesoft made it soar!

[atarileaf]

Wow. Aside from Atari, the Coco was my biggest geek toy in the 80's. I would have loved this pacman back then.

[m1omg]

i wrote the comment twice as it didnt appear at first delete the second comment

[m1omg]

tandy INTETIONALLY neglected coco 3 to boost tandy 100 pcjr compatible sales

And it actually HAS HW graphics, it dont use the original coco 1/2 graphics chip but a dramatically more powerful GIME chip

the original plan for it INCLUDED 256 COLORS SUPPORT but they cut it down to 16 colors to not hurt tandy 1000 sales.

[m1omg]

the tandy intentionally neglected coco 3 to boost its pcjr compatible tandy 1000 sales, the original design for Coco 3s GIME chip (dramatically more powerful than the poor vieo controller that did 128 x 192 in 4 colors in coco 1/2) was supposed to do 256 COLORS!!!!!!!!

[allenhuffman]

Just think of how much this could have sold if it came out in 1986 with the original CoCo 3...

[manonpiano]

That´s saaaad to see how much a COCO was able to do with some effort and the poor development it had in it´s times.

[m1omg]

not just poor, VERY poor

with 14 real coco 3 titles, the rest was just coco 1/2 soft running on coco 3

read my comment in the donkey kong coco 3 section

[mast3rbug]

I have made CoCo games in the past. This is possible

[cbmeeks]

I doubt it. The CoCo3 had no hardware sprites so everything you see is in software. Plus the audio is just a DAC which means it needs some CPU to drive it.

[BigFan71]

software sprite engine utilizing the GIME chip = workaround.

The real issue was the CPU power required to do DAC + CPU generated sound. The CC3 could do amazing audio and great graphics, but because Tandy chose to remove the synth chip that was in the original hardware spec, it struggled to do both. The CC3 with the synth chip cost less to manufacture than the CoCo2, but Roach was afraid it would kill the T1000 sales.

[FullMetalEd1342]

can these games be made by using the built in BASIC compiler?

[taradfong]

Maybe, if you first wrote it in assembler and just use Basic to jump to the start of code address and run it.