Great Hierophant
Veteran Member
The Tandy Color Computer 3 received official releases of King's Quest III and Leisure Suit Larry, and they look and run almost identically to their IBM PC counterparts. Because the CoCo series only have a 6-bit DAC, the music output from a CoCo is PC-speaker quality on the official ports. Also, outputting sound to the DAC is rather CPU intensive so the official AGI engine for the CoCo never plays sound while animation occurs on the screen. Even an IBM PC can manage animation and sound at the same time.
While Sierra only officially ported these two games, the CoCo community has ported the rest of them and made them all friendlier to larger storage devices than the official 157.5KiB CoCo disk format. A cursory review of these ports suggest that they simply used the official engine and tweaked it to work with the data files from the other games' PC versions and called it a day.
But has there been any more ambition than this? Tandy released the Speech/Sound cartridge which contains an AY-3-8913 sound chip. The 8913 is quite capable of doing justice to the three voice music and sound effects that the AGI engine supported. The music and sound effects were originally designed for the SN76496, which the 8913 can eclipse in almost every way. Unfortunately, Sierra could not use it because of a design flaw : the cartridge fails to work in the CoCo's 3's high speed mode, being designed for the CoCo 2 which only supported low speed mode. However, the Speech/Sound cartridge can be modified without too much difficulty to work with the CoCo 3's high speed mode.
The Tandy CoCo 3 would make a great, fairly compact AGI adventure game playing device if this one remaining flaw was addressed. Has there been any effort to do so?
While Sierra only officially ported these two games, the CoCo community has ported the rest of them and made them all friendlier to larger storage devices than the official 157.5KiB CoCo disk format. A cursory review of these ports suggest that they simply used the official engine and tweaked it to work with the data files from the other games' PC versions and called it a day.
But has there been any more ambition than this? Tandy released the Speech/Sound cartridge which contains an AY-3-8913 sound chip. The 8913 is quite capable of doing justice to the three voice music and sound effects that the AGI engine supported. The music and sound effects were originally designed for the SN76496, which the 8913 can eclipse in almost every way. Unfortunately, Sierra could not use it because of a design flaw : the cartridge fails to work in the CoCo's 3's high speed mode, being designed for the CoCo 2 which only supported low speed mode. However, the Speech/Sound cartridge can be modified without too much difficulty to work with the CoCo 3's high speed mode.
The Tandy CoCo 3 would make a great, fairly compact AGI adventure game playing device if this one remaining flaw was addressed. Has there been any effort to do so?