It's great that there's so much action in the Coco community both on the software and hardware levels. Joust and Defender are in fact transcodes. They take the actual arcade game's ROMs and work some machine code magic on them to make them play nice with the Coco 3 so that what you end up with is a more or less perfect arcade conversion for your Colour computer. Great machines these ;)
Hi Mr. Lurch, thanks for showing and playing my Joust and Defender conversions. It's a fun hobby of mine and I like to prove to myself that my CoCo from the 80's could do this. Also to think what it would have been like as a kid to be able to play these games at home on my CoCo 3. It makes me happy to find other people also enjoy seeing and playing the games running on the retro computer. Cheers!
I'd love to see some new games for the TRS-80 MC-10 (a.k.a. Matra Alice). That pipes game should be able to be ported to it, although trying to play it with a chiclet keyboard may be a bit clumsy.
I had that exact joystick back in the '80s for my Dragon 32. My childhood was spent in South Wales, so it was only natural. And that was the Old South Wales, not the New one. Rally SG (in case you didn't already know) is a modern conversion of Rally-X, an arcade game from 1980 by Namco.
Possibly something to do with the Commodore 64 power supply is notorious for going bad and damaging the computer. Maybe the CoCo didn't have that problem.
Sadly I was never a Tandy owner but I did use to play on the machine set up in my local Tandy shop when Tandy was still a thing back in England, mostly because Tandy was right next to a computer shop at the time where I bought my Amiga from, before that I was a Sinclair fan, but after Amiga it was a short hop to PC witch I've been using ever since, but the nostalgia is fantastic
Another great video as always! I would say I'm surprised that there's still such an active homebrew scene for the CoCo but it seems to be true of all of these old machines these days - and that's a wonderful thing. 😁
The CoCo has had a robust DIY ethic from the very beginning, at least in part due to the fact that it was largely snubbed by many of the big developers back in the '80s. Though Tandy did manage to arrange some high quality ports in the early days of the CoCo 3 from the likes of Sierra, Epyx, and Sublogic, there were few official arcade ports (Rampage being a very good exception), and the vast majority of CoCo 1 / 2 games were indie clones. (Some Frogger clones are arguably much better than the official Frogger port.) CoCo folks knew what the machine was capable of, having seen programs like CoCoMax / CoCoMax 3 and the OS-9 operating system. They knew that the machine's potential had not been fully tapped by the commercial offerings available at the time. And they knew that if they wanted software like what was available on the Apple 2 or the C=64, they would have to do it themselves. Now I think we're seeing people who grew up with the CoCo and have the skill (and time) to develop the software that could and should have been available for it in the '80s.
These are some of the best games I've seen on the Coco. I need to finish making a video (probably scart) cable for this which has been what's holding me up on using this system.. Anyway, thanks for sharing!
Wow! Both the Defender and Joust ports look and sound great! Do I dare say very close to arcade perfect? Pipes and Rally-SG look pretty good too. Not as awesome graphics and sound like the first two games, but they do look fun with decent gameplay which is what really matters. Digger III looks amazing! I had no idea the CoCo 3 was capable of such games. I don't own a CoCo 3 computer, but seeing these games makes me want to consider adding one to the collection. P.S. your beard is starting to look pretty epic!
Joust and Defender are both conversions of the original Williams sourcecode (both they and the Coco share the 6809 CPU), to run on the Coco 3's sound and graphics hardware. So they are basically transcodes, except with the same native CPU (unlike Donkey Kong, or Glen's old PacMan transcodes, which use code manually translated from a different CPU, like the Z80). So they *are* essentially running the original code.
@@martindejong3974 - Not quite; I believe the reference design included things like the SAM and VDG, neither of which are used on the Williams games. (Please correct me if I am wrong, but that is what I faintly remember).
Beard looks fine buddy, don't stress :) I've gotta say, it's a lovely looking machine. Being from the UK I've never seen a Tandy machine of any variety in real life.
Coco3, was a pretty huge upgrade from Coco2, looks like. Back in the day, I did not know this. I don't think these machines were well-marketed. RS had a confusing product line back then, and I think they were selling Tandy 1000s and Coco3s and Model 3s all at the same time?
