[Coco] CoCo graphics adventures ... online?

[Andrew]

> Thanks!  Ok, now if I can talk to Mannequin who I think dabbles in PHP as 
> well.  This should not be that hard of a game to port to the web.  The 
> graphics themselves can be scaled and converted to JPEG quite easily, and 
> the program logic can very well be done in PHP and probably much easier.

Roger,

This is a great and interesting project you are taking on - I wish you 
the best of luck, and I hope it turns out the way you plan it. I am 
pretty sure I have a copy of the game as well (plus many other similar 
games in BASIC). I have always thought I would give a shot at such a 
thing, too - but I already have waaaaaay too many projects.

I am currently in the process of converting my own site over to PHP and 
MySQL. Actually, what I am currently doing is building a general purpose 
web application framework in which to build my website (and in the 
future, any other webserver-based application I can think up). I chose 
to do so over using one of the available PHP content management systems 
that exist mainly because I wanted to learn PHP and MySQL (I use MySQL 
as my backend, but since I abstract via PEAR::DB, I can in theory use 
just about anything for the backend as long as I take care to keep my 
SQL fairly ANSI standard).

One thing I have noticed, regarding graphics, that I haven't had time to 
play around with yet, is that it seems like in PHP there is a way to 
have PHP generate graphics itself via a set of "image functions":

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/ref.image.php

My interest in this library is more from a practical perspective - it 
seems perfect for building a custom graphing library with (ie, line, bar 
and pie charts, etc). If you take a look, you will notice that the image 
functionality encompasses just about everything you would need to 
convert BASIC code over to use it in PHP (with the possible exception of 
the DRAW statement, which would have to be emulated with a custom 
function in some fashion, plus liberal use of the PHP imagepolygon() 
function).

One thing to note is that these functions require that the server you 
are using has the GD (and other) packages installed to allow this 
library to work. If you have complete control over your server, this is 
no problem, but could be problematic if you are using a virtual hosting 
service who doesn't have it, depending on the provider.

I don't know what the speed of the image functions are - you might end 
up with a quick drawing system, or a system as slow as the original CoCo 
2, albeit with the loss of watching the drawing occur as it happens. I 
encourage you to investigate and play with this. While not as simple (or 
probably as fast) as capturing images from the original game and 
displaying them as GIFs or something, it does seem like it could be more 
authentic to the conversion.

Good luck, and let us know when you have a demo!

Andrew L. Ayers
Glendale (Phoenix), Arizona