Coco Nutz! Vol 3 Issue 2, May 2007.pdf - TRS-80 Color Computer ...

CoCoNuts! May 2007 Volume 3 Issue 2
T H E L I F E A N D T I M E S O F T H E C O L O R C O M P U T E R
The real Donkey Kong
on a CoCo? NO WAY!
As many of you already know I went to the fest this year
with a very special purpose. I was going to debut the
newest and most amazing project by none other than the
great Sockmaster!
Nick, John and I kept people waiting in the chatrooms on
coco3.com. I was the main person to blame for all the
torture amongst the others in chat. Two weeks before
the release of John's secret project Nick and I would
drop little hints.
There was a lot of discussion as to what John's latest
project could be. Some thought it was a graphics editor
others thought it was a game.
No one guessed that it was something so awesome.
This game wasn't just a recreation but the actual game
ported over to the CoCo3 with 512k ram. Most of you
now want to know just how this all happened. Here is
what John had to say.
“...true emulation, the CoCo would have
had to have been several times faster and
more powerful than the arcade game. ”
Mary: What inspired you to do this?
John: I've been wanting to do
something really neat on the CoCo
for some years now, but I've never
had the free time that I would need to
do something really big. When some
free time actually presented itself - I
decided to use it! I hadn't really
decided what I would do at first,
except that I wanted to do something
that had never been done on the
CoCo before. That part is important
to me. After thinking about it a bit, I
finally settled on a game.
Mary: Why did you choose Donkey
Kong instead of a different arcade
game....
John: I had made a short list of about
5 arcade games that would be
interesting to do on the CoCo. I
didn't want to do something too easy.
I didn't want to try something that
turned out to be impossible after all.
I didn't want to do a game that had
already been done too many times on
the CoCo. I wanted to pick a game
that would look impressive on the
CoCo.
After weighing all sorts of details
Donkey Kong came out on top of the
list.
Mary: What was your fist step in
looking at how to do this?
John: First, find out everything you
can about the original arcade game
and hardware. See what it's capable
of doing and then try to figure out how
to get the CoCo to do the same thing.
Mary: You did this via an emulator
right? What kind of emulator?
John: Not exactly. To do true emulation,
the CoCo would have had to
have been several times faster and
more powerful than the arcade game.
There are lots of emulators on the PC
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now specifically because it's several
thousand times faster than these old
games were. The CoCo on the other
hand is from the same era as these
arcade games. It *isn't* several times
faster or
John: The trick is to emulate only
the parts of the hardware that is
within the capacity of the CoCo to
emulate, and the hardware must be
emulated because it simply does not
1982 version of Donkey King by Chris
Latham for a 32k CoCo.