As requested, here's Chatty Cathy's (aka, Bill Loguidice's) casual, single take look at the official TRS-80 versions of Frogger and Zaxxon, shown on a 128K TRS-80 Model 4 with a black and white monitor. Of course I talked too long yet again, so yet again it won't fit on Youtube.
As a sequel of sorts, I have more casual iPhone photos of boxed Dragon (Tano Dragon, Dragon 32/64) software, as well as TRS-80 software, including an improbable official conversion of Sega's classic Zaxxon arcade game. See below:
Today's casual iPhone photos are of the boxes for SubLOGIC's Flight Simulator II, by Bruce Artwick and Matt Toschlog for the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 3, and Activision's Aliens: The Computer Game by Steve Cartwright, among others, for the Apple II. We of course had the pleasure of interviewing Mr. Cartwright along with David Crane for the upcoming feature film documentary, Woot!: The Videogame Revolution. The photos:
Today's casual iPhone photos, which are a real mixed bag (shown below): Konami's Nightmare Creatures II (2000) for the Sega Dreamcast, id's The Ultimate Doom (1995) with Episode IV: Thy Flesh Consumed for the Apple Macintosh, and Tandy's Monster Maze (1983) for the Radio Shack Color Computer.
Classic computer, meet arcade Donkey KongWhile it's amazing to consider, it looks like through a combination of emulation, compensation and flat-out clever programming tricks, Nintendo's arcade version of Donkey Kong has been replicated on Tandy/Radio Shack's TRS-80 Color Computer 3 (CoCo 3). All that's required is 512K and a disk drive. It's really an amazing story and well worth checking out for all fans of programming and classic technology. As we've seen time and again, where there's a desire to make something happen, there's almost always a way to do the "impossible". Thanks to L. Curtis Boyle for the heads-up on this fascinating bit of news!
Check out "Sock Master's Donkey Kong Emulator for CoCo 3" for the full story and "Press Play Then Any Key - Revisiones - Donkey Kong" for comparative screenshots of many of the Donkey Kong translations for home systems.
Thexder for the Color Computer 3 (Sierra On-Line)As fans of Tandy's venerable and mostly underappreciated Radio Shack Color Computer (CoCo) line of computers know, finding much information on the Web about their beloved system line - particularly in regards to games - is a tough proposition. As opposed to the more popular home computers that were the CoCo's contemporary competition, like the Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 (C-64), it seems that much of the focus these days on the systems is more from a hacking/programming perspective (thanks to the ability to use the powerful "OS-9" operating system) than from a gaming standpoint. This also is no doubt due to the simple fact that the early CoCo machines - the Color Computer 1 and Color Computer 2 - weren't particularly conducive to great gaming, with a rather garish 4 color pallet for most games and single channel sound (though there was limited support for speech/sound expansion cartridges and of course the usual programming tricks to get more out of the stock system). While the backwards compatible Color Computer 3 had mostly rectified the situation by becoming a "super 8-bit" (faster processor, more memory, more colors), with performance similar to the early Apple IIgs and Atari ST computer lines in many cases (though still single channel sound!), it was never a premiere entertainment platform.