Retrospectiva Competition

[Rink]

Don't know if you've seen this - they seem to have forgotten us Dragon folk - but there's an 8-bit competition running until April next year.

http://rsp.retrocomputacion.com/

From what I can gather, it would be fine to enter Dragon stuff (and I think at least somebody should) but it'd probably be worth dropping the organisers a quick message and double-check that they'd be fine with entries for the little Welsh beastie.

Unfortunately my current project is in machine code but I might think up a new idea and enter a BASIC program. Most likely for the Dragon but possibly the Apple //e.

[Alastair]

From what I can gather, it would be fine to enter Dragon stuff (and I think at least somebody should) but it'd probably be worth dropping the organisers a quick message and double-check that they'd be fine with entries for the little Welsh beastie.

The rules state "Original games for any 8-bit platform(*), the game should be written in BASIC language. (*) As an exception to this rule, we allow the submission of entries for the TI-99/4" so Dragons should be fine. Besides, it's a Spanish site why would they reject a Eurohard computer?

[Rink]

Good point.

I have one idea, but it's not exactly original. It'd be great to see a Dragon program win it, so I'm hoping some of the forum folk here decide to have a crack at it as well.

[daftspaniel]

Sounds like good fun - I'll be doing something if I can come up with an idea

[jgerrie]

I've submitted a set of programs I originally made for the TRS-80 MC-10, and have now ported them also to the Coco and Dragon. See the Retrospectiva game competition site to download:
http://rsp.retrocomputacion.com/games-j ... andy-coco/
I've also have now made Coco/Dragon versions of a bunch of programs that I ported to the MC-10. They can be found at my own web page in the file JGGAMES5.DSK located at:
http://www3.ns.sympatico.ca/jimgerrie/jsoft.html
Any feedback would be much appreciated.

[zephyr]

Thanks for sharing, Jim! BTW, you forgot the mention the new game "Pipe Frenzy" that you wrote for the CoCo Coding contest.

[jgerrie]

Yes, there's a version of Pipe Frenzy on the JGGAMES5.DSK. However, it is still a bit of a work in progress. There are several problems with game play and compatibility across all the Coco models that I'm working on. See my blog for updates. I'll be releasing a new version of it soon.

Blog:
http://jimgerrie.blogspot.ca/

[jgerrie]

I have just submitted a new version of JGGAMES4.DSK with all my entries to the Retrospectiva competition contest organizer. I have been working on all of them to make sure the key scan routine, which uses the key rollover table (peeks 338-345), is compatible with the coco 2. For some reason this routine works slightly differently for the coco 2 (at least for my late model) than it does for the coco 1 and 3 (which both of which reset the values of the table to 255 automatically when no key is pressed). The updated Coco virtual disk should be put up soon.

From what I see from using xroar, it doesn't seem the Dragon suffers from this problem. I'd be interested if someone could transfer the programs to Dragon and see if they work.

Enjoy.

[sixxie]

I've not tried it on a real Dragon (no time this morning), but I've verified the CoCo issue in XRoar - in fact, everything seems to work as expected until Color BASIC 1.2 (i.e., 1.0 and 1.1 are fine - does version 1.2 mark the transition to the CoCo 2?).

Edit: ah, looks like you have a complete answer on the coco list already

[zephyr]

The truth is that Tandy modified the keyboard routine slightly for v1.2, and added the following extra code at the start. This was done in an attempt to speed-up BASIC when no keyboard input was required. They quickly realised that this caused problems for existing BASIC software that read the keyboard by peeking the rollover table. The extra code was then removed for the CoCo 3.

Code: Select all

   CLR	PIA0+2	CLEAR COLUMN STROBE
	LDA	PIA0	  READ KEY ROWS
	COMA		     COMPLEMENT ROW DATA
	ASLA		     SHIFT OFF JOYSTICK DATA
	BEQ	$A244	 RETURN IF NO KEYS OR FIRE BUTTONS DOWN