[Coco] Games that don't fit on floppies (was Super IDE vs. Drive Pak)

[Brian Blake]

On 11/15/2011 10:21 PM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 10:02 PM, Brian Blake<random.rodder at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> data throughput increases; the  making of very large games with lots of
>> digitized and sampled sounds only makes sense to me - I could be WAAYYYY off
>> on this...
> This recalls a topic that was recently discussed on the CoCo IRC
> channel.  We were talking about a new CoCo game that would benefit
> from mass storage, possibly only be practical with some form mass
> storage.  Some folks felt a CoCo game should run from standard CoCo
> floppies, or it wasn't a true (pure/proper/faithful/??) game.  Not
> sure what the proper word would be.. basically if it didn't run on a
> stock CoCo with FDD, it was sort of cheating.
Seriously?! I think that whole train of thought is absolutely 
ridiculous. People in this group have spent years trying to extend the 
CoCo past it's original boundaries, and now someone actually believes 
that if you don't have have something that runs on a stock CoCo with 
stock FD its cheating? That kind of thinking is dangerously old 
fashioned. Every retro group out there is looking for new ways to extend 
their systems well beyond what was possible in the '80's. Trying to 
re-constrain it now seems ludicrous...


> I wonder how other folks feel about that.  Where do you draw the line
> on what is right and what is not I guess.  It's a concept I struggle
> with in DriveWire a lot, where we can often do things either on the
> CoCo side or the PC side (and it's usually a lot easier to do them on
> the PC side, but it feels wrong).  There have to be some lines drawn
> somewhere I guess.

Not really, lines aren't necessary. You've made the app do what you 
wanted it to do. You graciously released it for public consumption, took 
input and ideas and expanded on the original. The decision is up to you 
to add functionality that you feel may be cheating - it's up to the user 
to decide if they want to use it in that manner, or if they feel it's a 
cheat...


> Personally, I think a game that requires mass storage is OK and "true"
> since there were mass storage options available in the CoCo's heyday,
> even if they never gained much popularity.  However, I can see the
> point that there have to be some limits or what you have isn't a
> "coco" anymore.
I'm throwing the bull$9!7 flag on this.. if it's running on a CoCo, 
regardless of what mass storage device is used, it's STILL a CoCo.

> It would have been impractical to release a game
> requiring anything beyond FDD back in the day I think, since the
> installed base was far to small to support software requiring anything
> more.. so maybe I'm wrong.  Anyway I thought there might be some
> interesting opinions on that in this group.
Actually, I think it was technically infeasible to introduce a game of 
other software that went beyond the limits.  People like Roger and Nick 
(and probably Steve) have fought with that for years - how to cram all 
5,000 features you want into a space that can hold 500. Been reading 
Rainbow a lot lately for a few articles I'm working on - from the clubs 
advertised, the CoCo had a pretty good installed base - but was always 
held back by Tandy, and without proper support from your parent company, 
well...

I remember AutoCAD 2.62 - installed it on my first PC - took 10 SD/HD 
floppies. The CoCo's OS couldn't handle programs like that, which is why 
we are stuck with vdisks to this day. If I'm right about Roger's plans, 
I can't wait to see how he accomplishes it. As I said earlier, I could 
be dead wrong...

I don't know if my opinion is interesting... hostile, maybe...