Date: Mon, 04 Apr 2005 08:00:03 -0700 (PDT) From: "David W. Clark" Subject: Re: Intracolor games To: "L. Curtis Boyle" Cc: bradgrier@cox.net Hi Curtis, I like your website. I wrote Colorpede, Robotack, Candy Co, and Grand Prix. Yes, I am an engineer. I have an undergrad in Mechanical and a masters in Electrical. In 1981, I was building an EPROM blaster at home. I decided to get the CoCo to control the burner. I got deep into 6809, and decided to write some software. Then I tried my hand at video, and Centipede was the natural choice. I was unhappy with the fact that no CoCo games had a black background like the arcade versions. So I experimented with the video chip until I discovered a black background mode. Then things took off. It took me 9 months in the evenings to write Colorpede. I remember that I didnÕt have a good random number generator routine, so I simply read the bits in the ROM chips and masked them in order to populate the screen with mushrooms. After writing it and sales taking off, I quit my job as an engineer and wrote games full time. I had 6 other people working with me. Our mission was to make arcade games that looked and played as much like the original version as possible. We also wrote for the Atari 800. Each evening we would order pizza and Pepsi, and write assembler. We were nerds and life was good. I really enjoyed attending Rainbow Fest in Chicago. It was an honor to meet people who purchased our games and gave us positive feedback. When I wrote Robotack, we rented the arcade game and hired a high school kid to play it while we video taped the screen. He got to the top levels. We studied the gameÕs technical documents and got an idea for a pseudo screen were we could detect collisions. That was incorporated in all our future games. Under contract from Atari, Don Sherry and I wrote Robotron for the Atari 5200 which looked amazingly like the real thing. But just as we were nearing completion, Atari decided to go with one of their in house developed Robotacks. Too bad, theirs looked terrible. After we put out Robotack for the CoCo, Williams Electronics wrote us a cease and desist letter. I decided to pull the game to avoid a law suit. George Harris wrote an incredible version of PacMan for the CoCo, but half way through I decided not to put it out for the same reason. Instead, I had him develop an original game, which never made it to market. Candy Co was an original game idea. It was technically very good, but it took too long to write and it took too much memory. And it was not what people were looking for. We should have stuck with arcade look a-likes. Grand Prix was an attempt to do something besides shoot-em-up. All of our sound effects were written by an engineer that I worked with, Bob Miller, who also had a band. He did the original music for Candy Co. His sound affects for the Atari Robotron were identical to the arcade. The womanÕs voice in the intro of Candy Co was that of my fiance. Since I was going to get married, and sales were declining, and I was tired of working 112 hours a week in my home, I went back to the work world. I went with a computer consulting corporation, and am currently a J2EE architect. I have fond memories from the days of the CoCo. Thanks to the emulators, I am able to see these games again, more than 20 years later. Keep up the good work. David Clark --- "L. Curtis Boyle" wrote: > Hi, your email address was forwarded to me by > Brad Grier. I host the > TRS-80 Color Computer games site > (http://nitros9.stg.net/coco_game_list.html), and > have been wondering for > years who the original author(s) was of the > Intracolor games. I remember > when the first ads for Colorpede (and later, > Robotack) came out, it said > that they were "Engineer designed"... were you an > engineer at the time? > Is there any other stories about the development of > your games that you > would like to share? What all games did you do... I > know Brad had > mentioned that you wrote Colorpede, Robotack and > Candy Co... IntraColor > also released Grand Prix; was that one of yours? Was > Intracolor a one man > shop? > Sorry for all of the questions, but one more: > Would you be willing to > have your games put up for download? And, (ok, one > more), would like a DSK > image with all of your games on it for one of the > emulators? > > > -- > L. Curtis Boyle Date: Mon, 04 Apr 2005 19:07:18 -0700 (PDT) From: "David W. Clark" Subject: Re: Intracolor games To: "L. Curtis Boyle" Cc: bradgrier@cox.net Curtis, I sold or gave away or threw away everything CoCo a long time ago. Sure, it is ok with me for you to put the games on the website. Good luck with your site. David Clark --- "L. Curtis Boyle" wrote: > On Mon, 04 Apr 2005 08:00:03 -0700 (PDT), David W. Clark wrote: > Thanks for all of your info... I will have some > updates to do on the > website! It's too bad some of the games got > cancelled/changed... I would > have liked to have seen them! (Or, did any survive > that you could send?) > Also, would it be ok for me to put your games > up on the website for > download, and to make a 'David Clark' DSK collection > image as well? > > > -- > L. Curtis Boyle >