Status Update

Nothing ground-breaking yet but I am working on getting the Status portion of the screen rendered, which is done every iteration of the main game loop.

The main reason for this update though is to mention a recent discovery and the idea for a port that it subsequently spawned. Volcano Hunter was a TRS-80 Model I game that I played for many, many hours back in the day, even writing a utility to facilitate printing the game map - over 200 screens - on our Epson MX80 printer. The author had a web page about it quite a few years ago, but he never responded to my email and it subsequently disappeared.

Whilst browsing the AtariAge forums yesterday though, I came across a post about it and whilst Googling it, I discovered the author has - in 2011 - created a Facebook page for it. Not only that, but he seems to still be quite fond of the game, creating a playable online version, and printing themed T-shirts and keyrings.

That got me thinking again about an idea I've had for a while, namely porting a TRS-80 game to another machine besides the Microbee. Sure, the Coco would be nice, if possible, but what would really be cool in my opinion would be a very unlikely target - the Neo Geo! I'd dismissed the idea in the past as being not practical, but lately I've done some more thinking about it and I'm sure it can be done.

Anyway, whilst Volcano Hunter is out of the question for now, I've thought about doing a quick proof-of-concept port just for fun; something quite small, and ideally something I already have the source code for. Right now I'm thinking Tandy Invaders would be a good candidate!