Awesome

ROBOTRON_CoCo3

My conversion of the original ROBOTRON ROMs for the TANDY Color Computer 3

I recently started looking at CoCo programming again and even took a look at the ROBOTRON code but I don't have any motivation to work on it at this point. It is just about complete, it has some audio samples working but needs some tweaking.   The main thing I was fighting with the game was some slow downs that occur in the game when there are tons of enemies firing at you. It doesn't exactly seem like it's a problem with the CoCo 3 drawing the sprites, as it seems to slow down and then speed up even when the same amount of shots are on screen. It might be some code that is looping more at certain times when the enemies are firing or something else. I've done many things to try to figure it out but I decided it's going to have to be like that.   ROBOTRON was never my favourite game. My hope when starting to work on the game was that since the hardware is exactly the same as Joust that I could get the game going and move on in a relatively quick time frame. Unfortunately that wasn't the case. I've always enjoyed the game and I have very fond memories of it. When I was young my best friend and I would go to the arcade and my friend would play ROBOTRON and I would play Defender. So it was never MY game. I don't have the drive to continue working on the game for the CoCo. This is a hobby and it's supposed to be fun. But ROBOTRON at this point just feels like frustrating work so I've decided I'm not going to work on it anymore.   Since it is pretty much playable and the CoCo community might enjoy playing it the way it is, I've decided I might as well put the game on the internet and let people have some fun with it. Plus CoCoFest is happening in another week and a half so why not...   The game load screen says it's version 0.5 but that's based on my source code I'm up to file number 52. Really the game should be version 0.9 as it's completely playable with just a few graphic glitches and the slow downs I mentioned above and the audio routines needed tweaking and more samples need to be added. The DSK image of the game is available on my GitHub page and I'll upload it to the CoCo Archive.   To play the game just type RUN"ROBOTRON

Press 5 to insert Coin, 1 or 2 to start a one or two player game.

Joysticks are required