The Colecovision Programmers Manual

[Captain Cozmos]

From Richard Drushel has parts that are really unreadable, especially in the Graphics Generation areas and appendices.

If anyone has an enhanced copy can you please share it.

I've been attempting to use Adobe but maybe it's my limited knowledge for enhancing 30 year old scanned documents that have major issues.

So far, what I have been able to do is convert as much to text, copy and paste then fill in the broken portions.

Although this kind of works I am finding that it may be easier and faster just to rewrite the paragraphs entirely while using Adobe to posibly enhance the text to a readable format in order to transcribe it.

This is a portion.

 

OLD_SCREEN is a buffer for saving the pattern names which are
overwritten in the process of displaying an object. These names
constitute a "background frame" which has the same X and Y_EXTENTs as
the frame of the object which is currently being displayed. The data
structure within OLD_SCREEN is the same as the data structure for a
frame with two extra bytes tacked on at the beginning. These bytes,
X_PAT_POS and Y_PAT_POS, indicate where in the pattern plane this
background frame belongs and are expressed in terms of pattern plane
positions. The next time the position or frame of this object is
changed PUT_OBJECT will restore the background frame to the display
and save a "new" background frame before placing the object on the
pattern plane.

 

You could barely read what it was before that.

So, I may redo the entire manual, put it into a PDF set then give it back to the community when it's completed.
So, if anyone wants to share what they have as long as it's better than the current archived version then please share to make it easier to complete the task.

This is how I got from A to B.
I started to work on Shamus DX.

I needed better pattern routines.
I could not find the info or read it from this book.  No one has examples.
I made my own routines but they are lacking in some features.

I disassemble games to find pattern routines.

Now I am enhancing the original book to understand the routines I found.

At this rate, I will never get anything completed.

 

O3 Cozmos

[Captain Cozmos]

Update....
I found a tool that is not ADOBE and converts these documents, at a slow pace, but recovers most everything that I need to fix the errors.
I have recovered a large portion of the graphics routines and how to use them.
I am starting with that first and you would be surprised how powerful they really are.

I have no idea how or why their use has been lost over time but I am bringing them back for everyone to use.

Edited September 16 by Captain Cozmos