Sock Master's CoCo Demos Page

Click here to see a video of Demo 1 This is the program that started it all, so I'll try to give a little bit of history about it. DEMO #1 was one of the first machine language programs that I put together shortly after getting my hands on the Motorola 6809 tech specs from a library in 1989. Before that, my machine language programs were either tiny, or generated by a compiler language. It's not actually the first demo I made, but it's the first one I released.

Next thing I knew, the BBS I was running was getting calls from CoCo people all over North America! Within two weeks, the program had spread almost everywhere and everyone wanted to know more about it. Folks wanted to know if it was okay to run the demo in their stores, or if I could make special versions with different text to be used as a store demo... etc...

You can't see exactly what it does from the snapshot - The demo featured MORE than 16 colors on the screen, It had graphics filling the entire screen, even within the border. The title graphic had warping/waving effects going through it, and it also had rainbow colors moving all over the screen and had a line of scrolling text at the bottom of the screen. Everything got updated 60 times a second! Nothing like it had ever been made for the CoCo - this was the sort that was only seen on the Amiga or Atari ST computers.

Click here to see a video of Demo 1 in action!

Update: This vesion of DEMO.BIN now also runs flawlessly with a 6309 and/or 2Megs of RAM.


Click here to see a video of Demo 2 I made an unfinished 'Demo #2' later on and some other people made a few demos of their own, but the CoCo never really managed to get a demo scene. Demo 2 had colorful scaling and scrolling text going upwards across the screen.

Someday I'd like to make another one - Demo 1 is nice, but I could certainly do better now.

Click here to see a video of Demo 2 in action!

I've also added the unfinished DEMO2 to download, which is also 6309/2Meg friendly now.


Click here to see a video of Boink bouncing ball demo The next famous demo was the Boink Bouncing ball demo. There have been other bouncing ball demos made, but all except one other simply had black backgrounds. The reason for black backgrounds is because to make the ball bounce, all the demos did was relocate the memory address of the screen. This one pulled a bunch of tricks out of the hardware hat and incorporated them in the demo:

1- The background does not move, and by itself has 16 colors in it.
2- The ball in front of the background is large and has 12 colors in it.
3- The ball casts a shadow (composed of 9 colors) over the background.
4- There is a non-moving section of text at the bottom that has 20 colors in it.

The real magic is that not a single thing is being redrawn while the demo is running - and the CoCo does *not* have multi-plane graphics! Also, it displays all those colors using the 16 colors graphics mode.

Click here to see a video of Boink Bouncing Ball demo!


Click here to see a video of Moon demo A while later, I was trying out some ideas for a possible game on the CoCo. The game never happened (not yet anyway!) but there is at least a demo of the graphics routines.

This demo uses the GIME's hardware scrolling to scroll not one, but four areas of the screen. On top of that there are sprites being drawn - which becomes a pain because every line of the screen could potentially be located in different areas in memory. Anyway, it looks very nice and could make a great game eventually.

Click here to see a video of Moon demo.


Files to Download

DEMO.BINDownload my old 'Demo #1' program
DEMO1.GIFSnapshot of CoCo Demo #1
DEMO2.BASDownload 'Demo #2' loader (Binary BASIC file)
DEMO2.BINDownload 'Demo #2' program (needs loader)
BOINK.BINDownload 'Boink' Bouncing Ball (Binary Executable)


Click here to return to Sock Master's page.
I can be contacted by e-mail at the following address: sock@axess.com.