Donkey Kong - Near perfect port to a vintage console.

[fiscap]

Check out this clip from YouTube of a near perfect port of the original Z80 code of Donkey Kong to a vintage TRS-80 Color Computer 3.



When I first saw this, I really thought it was a fake and someone had posted a Mame capture instead. I decided to download the code from the poster's site and try it out for myself in the VCC emulator for the TRS-80 CoCo 3 (doesn't run on the MESS version). I was shocked to see how accurate it actually was, but even more impressed that this was running on a 1.78 MHz 6809 processor - keep in mind that the original Donkey Kong ran on a 3 MHz Z80 processor. It is without a doubt the best rendition of a classic arcade game on a vintage console/computer that I have ever seen - what this coder pulled off is simply amazing.

[CrazyKongFan]

Did it run pretty good on the VCC emulator? I did manage to get it to run on MESS, but it didn't run very well (it was sluggish and the sound wasn't very good) .

[fiscap]

It runs much better on VCC. I tried it on MESS and noticed the same thing you did with the sound. Definitely give VCC a shot.

http://vcc6809.bravehost.com/

[Level42]

That is impressive. There goes the Atari 8-bit version as the best DK port.....

[Turnarcades]

That is very good, though not the first time I've seen a classic reworked onto a classic platform - a dude did a port of NES Megaman onto the Atari 2600. Far from as good quality as the NES, but very playable and fast from what I saw. It's good that people are still pushing these older boundaries but makes you wonder why the original developers didn't try that little bit harder to achieve what today's hobbiests seem to achieve on a regular basis?

[Ummon]

Yeah, I tried it out, too in MESS and it works okay. My machine might be lagging, though. I can't get it to run from within VCC.

That is very good, though not the first time I've seen a classic reworked onto a classic platform - a dude did a port of NES Megaman onto the Atari 2600. Far from as good quality as the NES, but very playable and fast from what I saw. It's good that people are still pushing these older boundaries but makes you wonder why the original developers didn't try that little bit harder to achieve what today's hobbiests seem to achieve on a regular basis?

Well, I've read that sometimes ports were determined by the developers, but in any case weren't intended to be just like the original. In other cases, I bet it was various parts resources available, money being paid to the developer, degree of coding ability, and plain old imagination.

[Ummon]

I got it working in VCC. You have to read the 'Welcome to VCC' to find out that you have to load the disk image from the top menu at Cartridge>FD502 Drive 0.  For anyone who doesn't know how to coin up an all, I got this from Tafoid over at MESS:

The default controls for the coco/coco3 is the joystick is mapped to the numpad (8,2,4,6 - 0 is the button). Standard Coco only had one button controllers, using 0 will credit - again it will start your game.

[ChadTower]

It's good that people are still pushing these older boundaries but makes you wonder why the original developers didn't try that little bit harder to achieve what today's hobbiests seem to achieve on a regular basis?

Deadlines.  It's hard to write a masterpiece of assembly code when you are given 4 weeks.  And they were doing all of this stuff for the first time - not the 150,000th time.  They didn't have 20 years' worth of accumulated knowledge to use nor did they have premade libraries.