[Coco] Help with The Magic of Zanth for CoCo 3

[CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts]

 Yes. I understand what you're saying. From a historic point of view,
it does reflect the technology of the time.

And the multipak was great for techie types who wanted to have the
slots for their hardware add-ons.

I just always thought there was a nicer and more elegant way of doing
it.

The Apple II did cost more... but it also had the expansion slots. If
you compared an Apple II, with disk drive to a CoCo, it would have to
be a CoCo with disk drive and multipak. I don't know what US pricing
was back then but a CoCo definitely hit you over $1000 then. Of
course, you didn't have to buy the multipak and the CoCo was usable
with cassette and ROM paks which made it cheaper initially.

Nick

----- Original Message -----
From: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" 
To:"CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" 
Cc:
Sent:Sun, 11 May 2014 17:51:50 -0400
Subject:Re: [Coco] Help with The Magic of Zanth for CoCo 3

 *I'm still looking for help with the beginning of the game*, but to
respond
 to Nick for a moment... I think it comes down to either having an
affinity
 for classic synthesized speech or not. I always loved the sound of it
and
 still do. I seek out such options for my collection for every
platform
 possible. In fact, I wish it was easier to make more games -
particularly
 text adventures - talk. It just adds something very era-specific to
the
 experience that can't really be matched today. Today it's no big deal
to
 have speech in games; that speech though is "real" speech, not
generated
 on-the-fly. Certainly there were better solutions even in the classic
era,
 but the ones that sounded better were generally limited to a small
amount
 of phrases versus "unlimited" speech like you hear in the Zanth game.

 The expansion interface is clunky, agreed, but then these mass market
 consumer systems generally weren't meant to be internally expandable.
Costs
 had to be saved somewhere. It's hard to compare an Apple II, which
cost
 well north of $1000 to a CoCo or Commodore 64 that cost well south of
$500.

 ===================================================
 Bill Loguidice, Managing Director; Armchair Arcade,
 Inc.
 ===================================================

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