Jeff's Coco Stuff!
Over a period of about two years, I produced 7 (6 plus a revision of one) titles for the Tandy Color Computer. I partnered with a friend and together we sold our wares through mail-order. We called ourselves "Oblique Triad"- a reference to the three decorative slanted color bars attached to the top of a Color Computer.
You can play Jeff's Coco games on your PC or Mac! (Well, at least some of them...) Click here for details.
Here's some details on the various titles:
(I must apologize for the quality of the screenshots... Most are scans of photos of actual coco monitors, and others are frame grabs from pirate copies running on one of the coco emulators.)
Caladuril, Flame of Light
This was my first published
adventure. An isometric 8-way scrolling adventure. This beastie ran in 64k on
the .89 MHz 6809 of the Coco 1 and 2. I recently ported the thing to the
palm-pilot. Check out the results (and a bunch more screen shots, artwork, story
detail etc.)
here.
The coco version was graphical, but relied on a natural-language (well, that's a bit of an overstatement) text input system to manipulate objects. You'd sidle up to an object using the graphical presentation, then type "Get Object" or some such command.
The storyline was a straight-forward magical dualist kind of thing. Battle between good and evil, fire and darkness. The hero is the descendent of an ancient god and heir to his bloodline's curse, as well as the all-powerful Shadowsword Caladuril, Flame of Light. Of course, there's a bad guy and his Morduril, Flame of Darkness to put a damper on things.
I had lots of fun adding little extras to Caladuril. I was in no hurry, and wrote the thing over about 3 years of nights and weekends. Iin this shot the stars twinkle and that sea-monster in the upper right glides across the waves.
The game was originally published by Diecom Products, but I re-published it under the Oblique Triad banner. Here's a link to the cover art.
Caladuril 2, Weatherstone's End
What's a good adventure
without a sequel? I re-wrote the engine for the more colorful Coco3, and built a
folllow-on storyline. I thought this effort wasn't quite as good as Cal1- I
relied on too many easy plot elements (count 'em 3 teleport mazes) and some of
the puzzles were kinda contrived.
The story had the same bad guy from Cal1 steal the powerstones- gems upon which are written the laws that govern the Universe. Kinda crucial to have those in a safe place, so off you go and get them back. (Don't worry- the Weatherstone doesn't actually end in this story- it looks like it does, but that was really a deceit arranged by The First.)
Here's a link to the cover art.
The Seventh Link
This is my best work on the
Coco, I think, if not the most original. This was a large-scale fantasy
role-playing game that imitated Ultima in style, but exceeded it in technical
implementation. The Seventh Link had large multileveled 3D dungeons (2 fps on a
1.8 MHz 6809!), 3D polygonal characters and a sprawling set of worlds, towns and
castles etc.
The 3D system was pretty advanced for 1989: The view was quantized to the four compass points. Dungeons were made up of a square array of blocks. The rendering code kept a pre-computed array of transformed corner points for each block in the view (since the four view directions were aligned with the axes of the block array, this resulted in just one array interpreted four ways). For each block in the view, I'd linearly scale the content in the three axes between the pre-computed corner points. The models contained within the blocks were represented by lists of polygons whose vertices lived in a 256x256x256 space. Most of the models were flat, but some had depth and could be rotated to align with the four principal directions by swapping coordinates. The shading was flat, of course, but I used some tricks to dither the available 16 colors into a few more shades.
The storyline was quite involved, and since it's never been spelled out in text, I'll summarize it here:
A few hundred years hence, humanity's first space probes to neighboring stellar systems start returning data. One system in particular looks promising, and a ship containing a few hundred colonists is dispatched on a one-way trip. When the crew awaken from cryosleep, they discover a proto-system: just a spinning disk of gas and dust, and not the verdant planetary jewel they had expected. The crew despairs: they cannot survive without a habitable planet. They attempt to extend their cryo-sleep technology, but the half-life of elements within the fluid they use to control ice crystallization limits their sleep to a billion years. Computer models indicate 4 billion years would be needed in order for a habitable planet to coalesce from the proto-disk, if at all. Now, the ship's drive engineer has a good idea: the ship is powered by a quantum black hole. The black hole is charged, and kept in place by titanic electromagnetic fields generated by currents in seven bands of superconducting wire. The engineer runs some simulations and figures that they should dump the black hole and its containment cage overboard- the ferocious gravity of the hole will accelerate the accretion process, and bring about a habitable planet in a mere .5 billion years! The crew execute this plan and indeed wake up to a habitable planet. 500 million years has been tough on their ship, and they crash-land, but mostly survive. Of course, over just a few centuries and generations, the crew's descendents lose their grip on technology and devolve into a medieval society, constantly at war with the semi-intelligent indigenous creatures. Time has not been kind to the superconducting cage at the center of the planet, and the currents are running dangerously low. If the black hole escapes, it will devour the planet in a few short years. Fortunately, the crew of the ship planned ahead, and buried seven re-charge stations around the planet. All you have to do, as player of the game, is find the missing seven energy packs and recharge all seven superconducting bands.
Here's a link to the cover art.
Overlord
OK,starting to go downhill. This is an admitted knock-off of a popular turn-based war strategy game for the Amiga. The AI is pretty dim- even for 1988- no A* path searching here- I wrote a floodfill routine to work out path steps for each battle element. It actually worked pretty well. The computer players were given a view of the whole board, and human players only got to see the parts they had already explored. The computer put up a pretty good fight with this advantage.
Those Darn Marbles
This is something like the
coin-op Marble Maze. I used the whole 512k of the upper-model Coco3 to use
hardware vertical scrolling on this one. The levels were rendered using a custom
(and very simple) ray-tracer then hand-tweaked in a custom paint program. I
added lots of extra static detail to the levels, mostly of a humorous nature.
This shot shows the "Planet of Enquirer Graffiti"- note the claim that Elvis is
buried here, and a reference to space aliens written on the side of the maze.
Your hero is that little round blue guy on the lower-right. He looks sad because
he's falling a sizeable distance. Those red things are oozing acid pools.
I had good fun with the sound effects on this one- I used Studio Works to sample a good set of noises, and wrote a routine that pushed out a sample on each interrupt so that sound didn't stall the gameplay (as they did on most other coco titles). It took a bit of effort to get the ISR overhead down to about 10% CPU.
Studio Works (and Studio Works Pro)
This was a digital sound recording and editing package. The coco had a 6-bit
A-to-D in its analog joystick ports and an 8 bit DAC on the output- adequate for
cheezy digitization. My business partner Dave was a bit of an electronics whiz-
he designed a ADC expansion pack that plugged into the coco and offered 8 bits
of ADC at up to 45kHz or so (that pack was what made Studio Works into Studio
Works Pro).
Studio works had some cool features. It could upload samples via a midi cable to and from digital synths (although we only got drivers for the Ensoniq Mirage working). Also, it could listen for midi events via the coco serial port and play back samples at the appropriate frequency. You could actually drive the coco from the synth. Cool!
