Shady dealings

I've had no luck getting my Coco 3 hooked up to anything other than the lounge room TV; none of my monitors like 50Hz composite and I can't get my fancy pants video converter to recognise the Coco RGB output either (though that's entirely my fault, I haven't modified the software to do it yet!) So no pictures of Knight Lore running on real hardware just yet unfortunately.

During the development of Knight Lore I've referenced many different resources on the net, one being the Knight Lore Walkthrough, ZX Spectrum video found on YouTube. A similar video by the same author caught my eye; Knight Lore (Graphics Mod) Walkthrough, ZX Spectrum. A chap by the name of Mick Farrow enhanced the original ZX Spectrum graphics back in 2002, adding more shading (via dithering) and sharpening the outline of some sprites. Unable to locate a binary of this version, I contacted both the video author and then eventually Mick himself, and received helpful responses from both - thanks again guys!

I received a .TAP file first, but couldn't for the life of me work out how to execute it in MESS. Before resorting to asking for help, Mick sent me a .Z80 which I had running in MESS a few moments later. After giving the game a quick spin, I restarted MESS with the debugger enabled, and dumped the entire 64KB to a binary file.

During development I wrote a utility that read the .SNA file and (besides a lot of other things) produced a text file with C data declarations (with nice names) for all the data structures in the game, figuring it would come in handy for the other filmation games as well (it did/will). When I started on the Coco3 port, I extended the utility to also produce a 2nd text file with the respective ASM data declarations. I had to add literally 3 lines of code - to instead read the above-mentioned 64KB memory dump of Mick's version - and seconds later had the modified graphics ready to compile/assemble. And as it just so happens, the sprite data resides in a separate .ASM file that is .included in the main .ASM file, so using alternate graphics is a matter of simply .including a different file. And now with a build option using a .define it's very easy to select which version to build.

So as of now, the Coco3 port has two build options - Original or Mick Farrow graphics. And to give you a taste of what they look like on the Coco3, I've got a couple of screen shots.

The splash screen, with an acknowledgement to Mick

A sample of Mick's shaded and sharpened graphics

I should hasten to add that Mick was nice enough to grant me permission to use his graphics mods. A Coco3 cartridge with at least 128KB capacity could theoretically contain versions with Original, Mick Farrow and Amstrad CPC graphics! It will be equally as trivial to add them to the C ports (Amiga, Neo Geo) as well (binaries will support all graphics options in the one build).

But for now, I should start looking at Coco joystick support!

UPDATE: I have one, really crappy, photo of Mick's graphics running on a real Coco3!