August 31st, 2020, and it’s finally happened, the first Color Computer game I’ve written in 30+ years is now deemed “complete enough” to freely distribute to the 1’s of 2’s of people who may actually take a look at it. It’s been a long road with lots of procrastination, but, somehow, I finally finished Phase One of what will hopefully be a long string of on-going versions for the CoCo, Dragon, other Vintage, and even modern systems.
There are far too many people to thank and name for the inspiration and support they’ve provided me and the community over the years, so let me start by thanking a few specific people who’ve help create, or contribute to, tools that have been used for the development of this program.
Paul Thayer gave me a graphics editing tool that I used to create the images used in the game, which allowed me to just save and load that graphics data directly onto the CoCo graphics page and GET it all into memory.
John Strong and his disk tool were the holy grail solution I needed to be able work on and edit the source code, without that, this game wouldn’t have happened.
John also generously created a number of assembly language routines that he gave me to use to help speed up the game, but ultimately, I decided to release an updated to the last version I had, before those changes, which is 100% BASIC and 100% all my code and creation, so, for better or worse, this is my project, and my product, I’m 100% to blame or praise depending on how you feel about it.
Ciaran Anscomb who created the Xroar emulator for the Dragon and Color computers was very quick to respond to a request to ask for help in creating a Dragon version of my disk image, which he promptly did, and gave me a hybrid DSK image that has been tested on an emulated Dragon in Xroar and an emulated CoCo 2 in MAME, thank you for all you’ve done, and especially for this.
David Ladd and Tim Lindner for continuing to find and fix bugs in MAME as well as request and add new functionality and features to make Coco emulation more robust.
Allen Huffman, James Diffendaffer and L. Curtis Boyle for helping me understand the concept of optimizing BASIC to best exploit the actual interpreter, which has hopefully allowed this game to seem “pretty decent” for being in BASIC.
Steve Bjork for all of his help in getting myself and everyone else to have some basic understanding on how the CoCo CPU and Assembly language work, in addition to being an inspiration for creating countless amazing arcade quality games on the CoCo.
Again, there are so may people to be appreciative of, I simply can’t remember or name them all, but I appreciate all of us crazy CoCo nuts.