One of the all-time best ports of Donkey Kong on a 1980s home computer was a clone called Donkey King (later renamed to The King). Although we didn’t know this until years later, it was authored by Chris Latham, who also created the first CoCo game to require 64K – The Sailor Man (a clone of Popeye).

Last week, the gang over at CoCoTalk (the weekly video chat/interview show) started a game contest where everyone is invited to try to set a high score on some CoCo game. The first game chosen was Donkey King, which is quite fitting since it’s one of the greatest CoCo games ever. Unlike most (all?) other versions of the day, it features all four levels as well as the intermissions (see the Donkey King link above for screen shots). It also plays amazing well and is as frustratingly difficult as the arcade game it was based on.

For those interested in trying it out, you can go to the JS Mocha CoCo Emulator webpage (the Java Script version of Mocha, which was original a Java CoCo emulator). It is one of the games available there.

You will find it in the second column. Just select it then click Load Bin. It uses the right joystick, I believe, so you can select “Dual Key R” from the Joystick config and that will map that to the keyboard – Arrow Keys and Space Bar (to jump).

If you want to hear the sound effects, you have to checkbox the “Sound” option in the lower right of this screen.

Give it a try and see what you think.

Until next time…