Donkey Kong on CoCo 3

A conversion I wrote of Donkey Kong to run on a Tandy Color Computer 3... a 1.79Mhz 8-bit home computer from the 1980s.

For more information check out:
http://www.axess.com/twilight/sock/dk/index.html

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Donkey
• Kong
• CoCo
• Tandy
• Color
• Computer
• Sock
• Master
• Video
• Game
• arcade
• tandy
• trs-80

[WarpedTrekker]

Sock, what is the trick to getting sound and music playing without slowing down gameplay? The CoCo only has a DAC and no dedicated sound chip to offload cycles. I never understood how some games could play music and animate graphics at same time. Also no hardware sprites on CoCo!

I only knew how to program in BASIC on CoCo, and always hated playing sounds because you had to wait for sound to play to do something else.

[sockypoo]

The sound routine is written to use up as few CPU cycles as possible and runs off the FIRQ interrupt, which is triggered thousands of times a second. The game code runs as the foreground process, and gets interrupted frequently but each interruption is so short as to not be visibly noticeable.

BASIC ran the program and sound both as foreground process, so neither could run at the same time as the other. A bit of clever programming could have allowed the BASIC SOUND command to run off the FIRQ.

[nicodermcq]

I need to apologize. I called this out as fake, and now I have egg on my face. I tried this out in an emulator and I was totally wrong. It's almost hard to believe that a port could be SO perfect in every way. Something this accurate I don't think has been done on ANY console or for ANY system before. I'm am humbled. Please take my initial skepticism as the ultimate compliment.

[Petrander]

pokerjet: I does so on my CoCo3 and dozens if not more CoCo-fans have the same experience. So you must be doing something wrong. Or maybe it is your IQ after all?

[lezanderson]

When O When is someone going to make a New hardware Coco 3. Something like the single chip MSX ????  But better !!

[Luigi84289]

Best DK port. Coco 3 > Nes.

[nitturo]

are there people coding homebrews for CoCo/Dragon just like for zx-spectrum (google for 'freshbeep zxdemo' ) and msx (google for 'msxdev') ?

[navydave1]

@pokerjet I play this all the time on my 512K REAL Coco 3! Great job Sock! Ignore comments from people who dont know what they are doing.(Pokerjet). Contact Roy Justis, you can probably find his info over at coco3 dot com and buy one of his converter boxes to connect a coco3 to a current monitor. Once hooked up this RGB game looks exactly as it does on the vid. (sockypoo), when are you making another port. Cant wait to see another one if you have the time. I love maxing out the cap. of my Coco3!

[3gdosrsfs]

Excellent job socky poo.....screw the nay sayers. I wrote Gorf for the Jaguar from scratch and was accused of emulating it on the Jaguar. You will always have assholes that want to rain on your parade. It says much more about them than it does about you. Again, awsome job.

[iimustang]

Actually, the very last version of the Coco 2 did... and inverse video too (also known as the Coco 2B or Korean version). It is the white, full travel keyboard verison, and will sat Tandy (not Radio Shack) on the label on the top. You can test it out by hitting SHIFT-0, type some lowercase characters, and then run the following program:

10 POKE 65314,80:GOTO 10

[randomrodder]

Runs great on Vcc. Posted a video of it a month or so ago...