Author: David Bear

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! http://fod.gracenote.ca

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!

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 […]

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 […]