DragonFire
Alternative title: "Dragon Treasure" -- Zellers title
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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The king's treasures have been stolen! As the daring young prince, your goal is to recover them all. The treasures are being kept in various castles, each one guarded by a fire breathing dragon. Each level in the game has two parts; first you will need to cross the castle's drawbridge. You will have to jump and duck the dragons fireballs as well as avoid flying arrows to reach the other side! In the second part you need to collect all of the treasures on the screen and make it to the exit while avoiding the dragon who runs across the bottom of the screen. The dragons on each level have different patterns of movement and firing, and as the levels progress will become faster and trickier.

Trivia

Dragonfire is the only commercial game sold by Radio Shack (and one of very few commercial program for the TRS-80 Coco period) that combined two different hi-res screen modes at once to squeeze more colors out of the screen. Using intricately timed programming during the drawing of each horizontal scanline, Frank changed the screen mode up 5 times per scanline to get the extra colors (8 real colors at once) instead of the usual 4 that other games used. Considering that there are 11,520 scanlines per second (60 Hz refresh), and the CPU only had 895,000 cycles per second, it is quite an amaziing feat. This broke a bit on the Coco 3, as the time was slightly different, and a patch was required to fix it.

Alternate Titles

"Dragon Treasure" -- Zellers title
"Dragon Fire" -- TRS-80 CoCo title

http://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/dragonfire
