You really took it many steps further Peter! you turned the CoCo to a Wii gaming machine, controlled by body moves! Let's write a game to be played like this
It was a whole lot of fun from begining to end playing around with the light sensor. If you had not made a video about that Usborne book I would have never stumbled upon it, so thanks again.
A great set of experiments... Brings back wonderful childhood memories of connecting things to the school's only computer & hoping it would still work afterwards... The enthusiasm you show is highly infectious ( in a good way ) , a delight to watch & listen to ...
Thank you very much for your kind words. If I'm to be honest at times I still hope that my systems will work after connecting my latest concoctions to them. ;)
@@8bitsinthebasement in the late 70s I was in secondary school with 1500 pupils & only 1 commodore pet 2001 8k computer between us for most of that time . We actually learned programming by writing out our code on a sheet of squared paper , 1 character per square. This was then sent to the local university where it was typed into punch cards before being run on the mainframe! If the code produced errors, the cards were sent back to you to find the card(s) with the error on & replace them by hand with a red card containing the corrections written by hand . The cards were then sent back to be reinput to the mainframe. Turn around time could be several weeks so it made coding & debugging very laborious. Don't think I ever got a single program to run 100% in the 2 years I was studying computer science o-level !!
@@Keeping_IT_Simple That's a great story, it's is the first time I've heard anything like it. Its amazing how much can change in such a short time when it comes to electronics and computers. I suppose It makes sense that the school had only one computer given the price of the things at the time, and it would have been hard to share one PET among 1,500 people. How you learned programming reminds me of how we learned languages at school, all grammar and very little conversation. In essence you learned to program by way of correspondence. Now that I think about it, it was not much different for me although I was finishing secondary school in the early 90's. We had 14 Apple Macintosh 2s (or something like that) for 350 students, which would have been just fine but for some unknown reason, only one 40 minute class per week. If we wanted to learn to program (or anything about computers in general) we had to figure it out for ourselves (which to be honest is probably more fun anyway).
Great video! I was hoping you would wire some sort of single button into joystick pin 4 to add flying into the game :) That is a really cool use for a light sensor.
I'm glad you liked it. The joystick idea came to me when I had almost finished the video. I tried it out honestly unsure that it would work. I was really surprised when it did and not only that, but it worked very well. I thought of adding a fire button but I think that this type of control system along with a game like Buzzard bait needs more an autofire setup (hold the button to flap continuously rather than button bashing). It would be easy enough to put together I suppose using a 555 timer. I may give it a shot and post an update. In any case I had a lot of fun with it. Thanks for watching and commenting.
That was great! Thanks for showing this experiment. I was surprised when you adapted it to work with a game which was a really cool idea. If there could somehow be X and Y sources of light, and flapping the arms controlling the fire button, we could have a complete interactive experience!
I thought about a two sensor config for movment across the two axes but I'm not smart enough to come up with a way of controling one axis and not the other. Something that may not be obvious from the video is that movement to the right is slower to begin than movement to the left. This would also apply on the Y axis (moving up would be a lot more responsive than moving down). The reason is that the sensor reacts to the presence of light much more quickly than its absence. Other than that main problem I see with the arm flapping is that somebody would most definitely call the men in white coats to take me away... LOL Thanks for watching AC ;)
This was a really fun project. The Coco "WII controller" is great fun but not at all practical. Still, I had fun playing around with it. You know that this works for a C64 too, maybe you could use it as a unique feature in your next game ;)
@@8bitsinthebasement That is actually not a bad idea, just as a proof of concept, make a game to fit that type of controller... that would be fun :) But maybe u can use it in your game on 2600 :)
It was 3 AM and everyone was asleep so I had to keep the volume of the TV down. But it could have went much, much higher. The sound level was at level 3 of a possible 100. So if I had wanted to I could have woken up the whole neighbourhood... Maby next time ;)
