REALM OF DOOM ANIMATION
Forest of Doom a retro success!
If you had told 14 year old ME that the D&D style game I was hacking together on the original 4K TRS-80 Colour Computer would one day sell well over 100 copies I would have been thrilled to no end! Yeah, it took 40 years to get to that point, but STILL!
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Real Hardware testing on Coco3 and Coco2
Most of the recent development for Forest of Doom has been on a Coco3 emulator with occasional tests on a real Coco3.
Today, I setup a Coco2 (and was horrified by the quality of the video output…but that is the Coco2 for ya) and found Forest of Doom running just fine!
Teaser Trailer Two: Forest of Doom
Teaser Trailer One : Forest of Doom
Another DEATH screen
“The Medusa’s ugliness turns you to STONE!”
Continuous music idea nixed
After converting some routines into Machine Language I tested the CoCo2 music player by Simon Jonnason. Unfortunately, the game performance, while slightly better, was still not sufficient. Had this been a CoCo3 game it would have been easy, and while it is tempting to move to the CoCo3, I want to leave Forest of Doom as a CoCo1/2 game as it was originally designed.
I will still use the ML routines already created, but will move on with bug fixes and maybe a couple more features (yeah…feature-creep)!
Machine language routines using Structured Code!? On a CoCo?!
In January 1985, T&D Subscription Software mailed out a cassette (#31) with my game GRID RUN (super thrill for me to see my game distributed!) . On that same cassette was something called “Structured Compiled Language”, which boasted BASIC-like syntax and would compile to the “Holy Grail” of MACHINE LANGUAGE!
I was initially excited, but when I tried it out the limitations (no string manipulation, no negative numbers, etc) discouraged me from pursuing it any further.
Fast forward to 2017, I was considering writing some Machine Language routines for Forest of Doom and I remember SCL. Fact is, I didn’t know anything about Structured Programming in the 80’s, but having since studied it in University and worked for about a decade full-time as a Computer Analyst / Programmer, I could see the benefit of SCL over Assembly Language.
SCL has its limits, but I can bang out some human readable code in a short period of time, and even tweak the compiler (written in BASIC) to suit my needs!
I seem to have off-loaded a tedious and slow bit of BASIC code, used for navigating the Adventure Map, into a Machine Language routine. The game was OK in BASIC, but this creates the possibility of incorporating some music playing code from Simon Jonassen!