It's a new day, it's a new game...

Far from finishing Donkey Kong or Lode Runner, I haven't touched any port nor any hardware project since the birth of my son in February.

Donkey Kong is waiting on the Neo Geo Flash Cartridge, which is laid out and ready for review but I currently don't have the funds to produce the prototype so it's on ice temporarily.

Similarly Lode Runner is waiting on the Coco Flash Cartridge, which I haven't even started.

So in order to get back into the swing of things, I've decided to start work on a new port to get me enthused. The target platform is, once again, the Coco 3. At this stage I'm not prepared to divulge the source machine (except to say that it's not the Apple II this time), nor the game itself, but suffice it to say that it was a landmark title in the day, specifically for its graphics.

I've been impressed with this title since I first read about it, and have had the idea of porting it for quite a while, despite the fact that I've never seriously played it. No doubt that will change during this process. Somewhat fortuitously the game has been disassembled to some degree and the data structures reasonably well documented, though work on it seems to have halted over a decade ago.

I'll say no more about it at this time, until I'm absolutely certain that a port is feasible (I'm fairly sure it is) and I have some eye candy to show off. Tonight was the maiden session and I've loaded the program image into a RAM array on the PC and wrote code to dump the data structures purely to familiarise myself with them.

The plan is to render the screens on the PC, and then start actually porting the code - which includes documenting the original platform source - to the point where I can do the same on the Coco 3.