DEVELOPER:  Mark McDougall (tcdev)           GENRE:    Arcade Maze

PLATFORM:  Tandy Color Computer 3           LANGUAGE: Assembly

NOTES FROM THE DEVELOPER: 

A few years ago, after somewhat semi-successful attempts at 'hacking' Space Invaders to run on the TRS-80 Model 4, I started to look for a game that would be suitable for similar treatment on the Coco. I can't recall now whether or not Sockmaster had released his Donkey Kong port before I had started, but regardless it was also a driving force. 

I was looking for a 6809 game that ran on hardware as similar to the Coco as possible, to minimise the effort required in 'hacking' the game. The 1982 Stern/Konami game 'Tutankham' just so happened to fit the bill - almost perfectly. A 6809 game, with bit-mapped graphics that almost fit the Coco hardware perfectly, even runs completely 'in-place' in the Coco memory map. In fact, it wasn't much work at all to patch the arcade ROMs and see the game running on the Coco3! 

After patching interrupts and inputs, palettes and circumventing some checksum calculations, the game is all-but-playable. But you see, there's one last feature that I hadn't quite worked around just yet... 

Tutankham runs on a vertical (rotated) monitor, and had horizontal scrolling hardware. So, *all* I need to do now, is rotate the graphics, add the scrolling, and the original arcade Tutankham should be perfectly playable... simple - right? 

And here the project has lay dormant for a few years. It seems it won't be possible to simply patch the ROMs at load time - it will most likely require some re-assembly of the source code. Fortunately, I have disassembled most of it. I thought I had a freely-relocatable source file, and had actually managed to rotate the text already, but not long after that I ran into problems re-assembling and the game stopped running. 

Hopefully, with a fresh approach I can get further this time.