May 10, 2015
Welcome to the Floppy Days Podcast. My name is Randy Kindig and I’m your host. This is an interview-only episode of Floppy Days. I was recently at Vintage Computer Festival Southeast 3.0 in Roswell, GA, and I had a chance to sit down with John Linville. John is a legend in the Tandy Color Computer circles and has produced a cartridge for the CoCo containing a fun game called Fahrfall. This is an exciting development for the CoCo community and John tells us all about it.
Links
Internet Archive link, where you can play Fahrfall - https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_coco_fahrfall
Fahrfall blog - http://fahrfall.blogspot.com/
John’s Other Blogs - http://vdgtricks.blogspot.com/, http://retrotinker.blogspot.com/
Most up-to-date Fahrfall gameplay video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gc3iKXOxUH8
A slight correction - you can fool the GIME into supporting the graphics portion of the higher semi graphics modes (SG6/8/12/24), but you lose the text portion. This is done by changing the GIME register that sets how many scanlines per character. You do this by a POKE for EXECing the game. Depending on the mode you want to emulate, POKE &HFF9C,x where x is:
Mode POKE value
SG6 7 (64x48)
SG8 8 (64x64)
SG12 9 (64x96)
SG24 10 (64x192).
Using this you can play Fahrfall... but you won't be able to see your score. (This works on other games I have tested as well, like Pac-Tac, Protectors II, etc.).