New Zealand Vintage Computer Forums

This maybe of interest to some people (especially Terry).

I have recently been making some Microbee game videos for YouTube as I noticed there really wasn't much Microbee stuff online. Once I started doing this I realized there were quite a few TRS-80 games that were ported for the Microbee including Penetrator, Galaxy Invasion and Cosmic Fighter. I believe the low-res graphics mode were almost identical between the two machines.

I have a weblink where you can see all my Microbee vids on one page. Some of the TRS-80 ports are at the bottom of the page:

http://web.mac.com/lord_philip/other_co ... games.html

Enjoy

Phil

Yes, they look (and sound) very similar! The Microbee obviously has higher-res graphics though as seen by the screens before the TRS-80 ports. Did it have a high-res graphic mode, or were these games made up of PETSCII-type on ANSI-type graphics? (in other words, characters).

The Microbee did have a high display resolution for it's time. you could program the 6545 (6845) for 640x270 (I managed x300 after tweaking a monitor if I recall correctly). The machines used PCGs, early models had 2K and later Premium models were released with 16K of PCG and expandable to 32K. Colour machines also had the same resolution but only 2 colours were possible for each screen character location which placed a limitation on the games.

The Lo resolution graphics on the Microbee are actually just the PCGs programmed up to make these. The TRS-80 had similar screen mapping to the Microbee which made it possible to bring these games over to the Microbee with some changes.

The Microbee was able to generate a 80x25 character display that made it a very good CP/M machine.

Stewart