J Arcane
11-17-2009, 02:29 PM
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v644/J_Arcane/runhistory-1.gif
First, a Preamble
In February of 1962, a handful of MIT students with far too much time on their hands, created a game about two spaceships shooting each other on an oscilloscope, and captured the minds of countless generations in the process, essentially leading to the creation of both computer and console gaming as we know it today.
In the 47 years since that time the world of computer gaming has prgressed from vector triangles to pixels to polygons, but sadly, it has left a good many great games in the dust in the process.
It is the goal of RUN"HISTORY to revive these ancient classics, through the magic of the internet and emulation technology, and teach a whole new generation of gamers how to once again play these forgotten games on modern Windows computers. So without further ado, I bring you:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v644/J_Arcane/doubleback_intro.gif
Image courtesy of L. Curtis Boyle (http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/)
doubleback
1982, Tandy, Dale Lear
The Color Computer 3 (or CoCo3, in internet parlance) was my first computer, the object that brought me into the world of computer gaming for the first time, courtesy of a handful of old cartridges and copied discs from Rainbow magazine.
Among them was doubleback, a deceptively simple game written for the original CoCo 1, about drawing loops around things to make them disappear. The joystick controls an onscreen line, almost like the classic snake game, except this time, it's actually your goal to meet with your own tail, looping around objects on the screen while avoiding colliding with them. Loop one object, get it's points. Loop multiple objects, and their point values multiply. A clever player can get a lot of points with a good loop, but it gets harder to avoid collision.
It's a simple game, but great fun. So now on to how to play it!
Step 1: You're going to need an emulator, of course, and for the purposes of this tutorial, that's going to be Vcc, which you can find here. (http://vcc6809.bravehost.com/) Click to the download page, and download the links "Vcc 1.40 Installer" and "Preinstalled Hard Disk image (this needs work)".
You'll wind up with an executable (SetupVcc1.40.exe), and a .zip file (nitros9.zip).
Step 2: Install the emulator! This is pretty straight forward, run the .exe, follow the onscreen prompts to tell it where and what to install. You may wish to uncheck the "Register File Types (QuickLaunch)" option. This option enables you to run CoCo cartridge files directly from the file, however, the extensions used (.bin, .rom, .pak) are relatively common ones used for a number of other programs, from CD images to Quake data files to OS ROMs for other emulators, so it could conflict with other apps file associations.
Step 3: Unzip the disk image! This is a standard .zip file, which should be openable without any additional software on Windows XP and later as if it were a standard folder. Inside the folder you'll find a file called "Nitros9.vhd". Drag this somewhere you'll be able to find it later, like say, a newly created folder for CoCo games.
Step 4: Run the emulator. It should've made a shortcut in your start menu so long as you left that box checked in the installer. By default, you'll be greeted with the friendly green and black of an Extended Disk Basic prompt, but we need to change things a bit to get at our game now.
Step 5: Configure your emulator. We need to get things ready to play. On the menu, click to Configuration > Config. This'll bring you a tabbed dialog with lots of settings to monkey with.
Step 6: The first one we need to change is the monitor type, so click the Display tab, and you'll see a box called [F6] Monitor Type. Click the radio button for Composite (if you've done it right, the picture of the monitor will change to a picture of a rabbit-eared TV with a test pattern).
Step 7: Configure the joystick. I highly recommend playing this game with an actual joystick or gamepad with an analog stick. Mouse and keyboard are also supported options, but the mouse emulation is poor in Vcc, and the keyboard too stiff to get the response needed to play this game well.
With the Vcc Options window still open, click to the Joysticks tab. Here you can set the options for what sort of control you like to use for the left and right sticks. doubleback defaults to the right stick for the first player, so this is the one we want to focus on.
If you're following my advice, click the Joystick radio button in the Right Joystick Input box. From the drop down box to the right, you should get options for any DirectInput devices detected on your system, select the one you want to use.
Otherwise, you can click the Mouse or Keyboard options. The mouse option will use the movement of the mouse to emulate the movement of the stick, with mouse button 1 serving as button one of the emulated joystick (a few games also support two button joysticks, the second joybutton will be mouse button 2). The Keyboard option allows you to set what keys you wish to use to emulate left, right, up, and down, as well as buttons 1 and 2.
If you plan to play two player with a friend, you'll also want to set up the left side.
Step 8: Now it's time to load our hard disk image. Save your Vcc options by clicking Apply, then OK on the Vcc Options window. Now in the main menu at the top click Cartridge > MPI Config. You'll get a dialog box with a whole lot of text, and a slider in the lower right. This is the Multi-Pak Interface, a device that allows the CoCo to have more than one cartidge plugged in at once, and switch between them. We need the one in Slot 3, the hard disk interface, so slide the slider switch over to option 3. Once you've done that, click OK.
Now, on the menu, click Cartridge > HD Drive 0 > Insert. This will bring up an Open dialogue, point it at the location you saved your Nitros9.vhd file from earlier.
Step 9: Restart the emulator. We've changed the disk interface cartridge in the previous step, and this isn't something the CoCo likes to do on the fly, so we need to reset the emulator. In the menu, click File > [F9] Hard Reset. This will restart the emulator and you'll get a new prompt, with a lot more words on it.
Step 10: Now, finally, to load the game! Since BASIC isn't really written to handle hard drives, the size is emulated by the ROM as multiple ones for each directory, and we need to point it to drive with our game on it. At the prompt, type DRIVE 5 <enter>. To make sure we got to the right one, type DIR <enter>. You'll get a two column list of the drive's contents. In the right column you should see an entry that says "D BACK BIN 2", and that's our game! Now to run it, we type LOADM"D BACK"<enter>, then once the prompt returns type EXEC<enter>. The game will start, and you'll should see the image above draw itself on the screen.
Step 11: Play the game! Took a bit of work to get here, I'll admit, but you've made it! Move the joystick left and right to select the number of players you want for the game, and click button 1 to confirm. Now you're playing. Use the stick the move the head of the line. How fast you draw is based on how far you push the stick. The line will slowly undraw itself from the other end as you go, putting a certain limit on how long the line can get and how much it can encircle as a result, so keep that in mind when trying for big combos. If you collide with an object, you die. You have three lives, tracked by the little bars at the top of the screen.
Where to Go from Here: After you're done drawing lines around things, you can poke around more on the preinstalled hard drive, there's quite a few other games there. Drives 5 through 15 contain various games from the past and even some more recent developments. The DRIVE command mentioned in step 10 will jump you between drives, DIR will show the contents of the drive you're in. Use the LOADM"<filename>" command for filenames ending in BIN, followed by EXEC if the game doesn't automatically start. Use RUN"<filename>" for games ending in BAS. Handy tip for finding your way around: If you see just a bunch of BIN files, assume it's meant to be loaded directly, if it's a bunch of BINs with a couple BAS files, it usually means the BAS file is a loader, and you'll want to run that first.
Also, if you load up a game and for some reason it's all in black and white, it means Vcc has reset your monitor type to RGB, which most of the older CoCo 1/2 games don't really like (RGB monitor support came with the CoCo3). You can change that in the options like before, or just hit F6 to quickly swap between them. rule of thumb is, if the game's designed for the original CoCo 1/2, run in composite mode, if it's for the CoCo3 (usually obvious because it'll be a lot prettier ;) ), run it in RGB mode.
You can also find some other game cartridge files on the Vcc site, as well as L. Curtis Boyle's site linked under the image above. MaltedMedia's FTP (ftp://maltedmedia.com/coco/) also has quite a few old manuals and docs for the CoCo. CoCo3.com (http://coco3.com) is pretty much the center of the scene these days, there's also a mailing list, but I'm not sure where it's hosted these days.
Compatibility Notes: I chose Vcc for this tutorial because of the ease of setup, and the lack of requirement for a CoCo3 OS ROM, as well is it being the only dedicated Win32 emulator. Unfortunately, the fact that it emulates this ROM instead of using the original code, and the fact that it's relatively new software, means it's not as compatible as it could be, and some games either don't work or experience graphical or input glitches. If you have access to a real 16-bit DOS environment (not an emulator like DOSbox or Bochs, they perform too poorly), you can also try David Keil's (http://www.discover-net.net/~dmkeil/coco/coco3.htm)or Jeff Vavasour's (http://www.vavasour.ca/jeff/trs80.html#coco3) emulators. MESS contains a more complete emulation, but will require a set of CoCo3 ROMS, and MESS' interface is much more obtuse. I may cover it in a future show however, as it's a rather handy tool for emulating many classic systems.
Of course the best, and most compatible way to run games like these is with the real hardware, and Cloud9 (http://www.cloud9tech.com/) still has original Color Computer 3s for sale for as little as $40, and they can even upgrade it to a faster processor and bigger RAM for you and a hard drive or Flash interface for storage, as well as sell you a DVD to teach you how to program in CoCo3 Basic.
Here's to what I hope will be many hours of rewarding computing on one of my favorite pieces of hardware.
First, a Preamble
In February of 1962, a handful of MIT students with far too much time on their hands, created a game about two spaceships shooting each other on an oscilloscope, and captured the minds of countless generations in the process, essentially leading to the creation of both computer and console gaming as we know it today.
In the 47 years since that time the world of computer gaming has prgressed from vector triangles to pixels to polygons, but sadly, it has left a good many great games in the dust in the process.
It is the goal of RUN"HISTORY to revive these ancient classics, through the magic of the internet and emulation technology, and teach a whole new generation of gamers how to once again play these forgotten games on modern Windows computers. So without further ado, I bring you:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v644/J_Arcane/doubleback_intro.gif
Image courtesy of L. Curtis Boyle (http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/)
doubleback
1982, Tandy, Dale Lear
The Color Computer 3 (or CoCo3, in internet parlance) was my first computer, the object that brought me into the world of computer gaming for the first time, courtesy of a handful of old cartridges and copied discs from Rainbow magazine.
Among them was doubleback, a deceptively simple game written for the original CoCo 1, about drawing loops around things to make them disappear. The joystick controls an onscreen line, almost like the classic snake game, except this time, it's actually your goal to meet with your own tail, looping around objects on the screen while avoiding colliding with them. Loop one object, get it's points. Loop multiple objects, and their point values multiply. A clever player can get a lot of points with a good loop, but it gets harder to avoid collision.
It's a simple game, but great fun. So now on to how to play it!
Step 1: You're going to need an emulator, of course, and for the purposes of this tutorial, that's going to be Vcc, which you can find here. (http://vcc6809.bravehost.com/) Click to the download page, and download the links "Vcc 1.40 Installer" and "Preinstalled Hard Disk image (this needs work)".
You'll wind up with an executable (SetupVcc1.40.exe), and a .zip file (nitros9.zip).
Step 2: Install the emulator! This is pretty straight forward, run the .exe, follow the onscreen prompts to tell it where and what to install. You may wish to uncheck the "Register File Types (QuickLaunch)" option. This option enables you to run CoCo cartridge files directly from the file, however, the extensions used (.bin, .rom, .pak) are relatively common ones used for a number of other programs, from CD images to Quake data files to OS ROMs for other emulators, so it could conflict with other apps file associations.
Step 3: Unzip the disk image! This is a standard .zip file, which should be openable without any additional software on Windows XP and later as if it were a standard folder. Inside the folder you'll find a file called "Nitros9.vhd". Drag this somewhere you'll be able to find it later, like say, a newly created folder for CoCo games.
Step 4: Run the emulator. It should've made a shortcut in your start menu so long as you left that box checked in the installer. By default, you'll be greeted with the friendly green and black of an Extended Disk Basic prompt, but we need to change things a bit to get at our game now.
Step 5: Configure your emulator. We need to get things ready to play. On the menu, click to Configuration > Config. This'll bring you a tabbed dialog with lots of settings to monkey with.
Step 6: The first one we need to change is the monitor type, so click the Display tab, and you'll see a box called [F6] Monitor Type. Click the radio button for Composite (if you've done it right, the picture of the monitor will change to a picture of a rabbit-eared TV with a test pattern).
Step 7: Configure the joystick. I highly recommend playing this game with an actual joystick or gamepad with an analog stick. Mouse and keyboard are also supported options, but the mouse emulation is poor in Vcc, and the keyboard too stiff to get the response needed to play this game well.
With the Vcc Options window still open, click to the Joysticks tab. Here you can set the options for what sort of control you like to use for the left and right sticks. doubleback defaults to the right stick for the first player, so this is the one we want to focus on.
If you're following my advice, click the Joystick radio button in the Right Joystick Input box. From the drop down box to the right, you should get options for any DirectInput devices detected on your system, select the one you want to use.
Otherwise, you can click the Mouse or Keyboard options. The mouse option will use the movement of the mouse to emulate the movement of the stick, with mouse button 1 serving as button one of the emulated joystick (a few games also support two button joysticks, the second joybutton will be mouse button 2). The Keyboard option allows you to set what keys you wish to use to emulate left, right, up, and down, as well as buttons 1 and 2.
If you plan to play two player with a friend, you'll also want to set up the left side.
Step 8: Now it's time to load our hard disk image. Save your Vcc options by clicking Apply, then OK on the Vcc Options window. Now in the main menu at the top click Cartridge > MPI Config. You'll get a dialog box with a whole lot of text, and a slider in the lower right. This is the Multi-Pak Interface, a device that allows the CoCo to have more than one cartidge plugged in at once, and switch between them. We need the one in Slot 3, the hard disk interface, so slide the slider switch over to option 3. Once you've done that, click OK.
Now, on the menu, click Cartridge > HD Drive 0 > Insert. This will bring up an Open dialogue, point it at the location you saved your Nitros9.vhd file from earlier.
Step 9: Restart the emulator. We've changed the disk interface cartridge in the previous step, and this isn't something the CoCo likes to do on the fly, so we need to reset the emulator. In the menu, click File > [F9] Hard Reset. This will restart the emulator and you'll get a new prompt, with a lot more words on it.
Step 10: Now, finally, to load the game! Since BASIC isn't really written to handle hard drives, the size is emulated by the ROM as multiple ones for each directory, and we need to point it to drive with our game on it. At the prompt, type DRIVE 5 <enter>. To make sure we got to the right one, type DIR <enter>. You'll get a two column list of the drive's contents. In the right column you should see an entry that says "D BACK BIN 2", and that's our game! Now to run it, we type LOADM"D BACK"<enter>, then once the prompt returns type EXEC<enter>. The game will start, and you'll should see the image above draw itself on the screen.
Step 11: Play the game! Took a bit of work to get here, I'll admit, but you've made it! Move the joystick left and right to select the number of players you want for the game, and click button 1 to confirm. Now you're playing. Use the stick the move the head of the line. How fast you draw is based on how far you push the stick. The line will slowly undraw itself from the other end as you go, putting a certain limit on how long the line can get and how much it can encircle as a result, so keep that in mind when trying for big combos. If you collide with an object, you die. You have three lives, tracked by the little bars at the top of the screen.
Where to Go from Here: After you're done drawing lines around things, you can poke around more on the preinstalled hard drive, there's quite a few other games there. Drives 5 through 15 contain various games from the past and even some more recent developments. The DRIVE command mentioned in step 10 will jump you between drives, DIR will show the contents of the drive you're in. Use the LOADM"<filename>" command for filenames ending in BIN, followed by EXEC if the game doesn't automatically start. Use RUN"<filename>" for games ending in BAS. Handy tip for finding your way around: If you see just a bunch of BIN files, assume it's meant to be loaded directly, if it's a bunch of BINs with a couple BAS files, it usually means the BAS file is a loader, and you'll want to run that first.
Also, if you load up a game and for some reason it's all in black and white, it means Vcc has reset your monitor type to RGB, which most of the older CoCo 1/2 games don't really like (RGB monitor support came with the CoCo3). You can change that in the options like before, or just hit F6 to quickly swap between them. rule of thumb is, if the game's designed for the original CoCo 1/2, run in composite mode, if it's for the CoCo3 (usually obvious because it'll be a lot prettier ;) ), run it in RGB mode.
You can also find some other game cartridge files on the Vcc site, as well as L. Curtis Boyle's site linked under the image above. MaltedMedia's FTP (ftp://maltedmedia.com/coco/) also has quite a few old manuals and docs for the CoCo. CoCo3.com (http://coco3.com) is pretty much the center of the scene these days, there's also a mailing list, but I'm not sure where it's hosted these days.
Compatibility Notes: I chose Vcc for this tutorial because of the ease of setup, and the lack of requirement for a CoCo3 OS ROM, as well is it being the only dedicated Win32 emulator. Unfortunately, the fact that it emulates this ROM instead of using the original code, and the fact that it's relatively new software, means it's not as compatible as it could be, and some games either don't work or experience graphical or input glitches. If you have access to a real 16-bit DOS environment (not an emulator like DOSbox or Bochs, they perform too poorly), you can also try David Keil's (http://www.discover-net.net/~dmkeil/coco/coco3.htm)or Jeff Vavasour's (http://www.vavasour.ca/jeff/trs80.html#coco3) emulators. MESS contains a more complete emulation, but will require a set of CoCo3 ROMS, and MESS' interface is much more obtuse. I may cover it in a future show however, as it's a rather handy tool for emulating many classic systems.
Of course the best, and most compatible way to run games like these is with the real hardware, and Cloud9 (http://www.cloud9tech.com/) still has original Color Computer 3s for sale for as little as $40, and they can even upgrade it to a faster processor and bigger RAM for you and a hard drive or Flash interface for storage, as well as sell you a DVD to teach you how to program in CoCo3 Basic.
Here's to what I hope will be many hours of rewarding computing on one of my favorite pieces of hardware.