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Coleco Chameleon .... hardware speculations?


phoenixdownita

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None of this bullshit story adds up.

What are the chances that Mike just went and dug up a boogeyman from the past, and paraded him around as the ultimate evil? Its not like this scam artist from 15 years ago is going to come back and defend his honor. Mike didn't think to google him prior to his dealings, but in the last month had that epiphany? My money is on Mike spending the last month googling old group posts to find someone to throw under his bus, who no one would bother to track down and check with. Sean Robinson is the perfect boogeyman. Many of the old timers have dealings with him, and can empathize. Too bad Sean Robinson disappeared years ago, and is now just a fictional character in Mike's absurd story.

Also, why did the facebook pictures showing the false prototype get deleted ~10 minutes after the DVR capture card was revealed on AtariAge? If Mike was a victim of the scam, he was quite responsive in helping cover it up. Also, during the Toy Fair incident, there was plenty of Facebook assurances that the prototype wasn't an SNES mini. Additionally, photos were being deleted as users here exposed various parts of this fraud.

Mike is trying to protect his name, by throwing a fake character under the bus. Anyone who believes him, well, I've got a bridge to sell, I'm trying raise 3 million on Kickstarter Indiegogo. I hope we can at least get one more Nostalgia SH-IT video out of this. Maybe he can claim Bernie Madoff was actually his engineer.

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Let's say what Mike said is true. He didn't do his due diligence and check out this Sean guy. That is the biggest problem I have with all of this. If what he said is true, I hope he gets all his money back. At this point, I just can't buy it.

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Sean Robinson is not a fake character. He was extremely active in the Pac NW until just recently. He pulled this exact same scam with an SD card reader that he 'developed' for the c64 with the Commodore Conputer club in Portland. He also scammed several local stores out of money for promised goods that were never delivered, as well as promising repro carts or homebrew hardware for trades for valuable games, which never materialized. He promised to deliver unreleased prototypes to two different people as well. Each time he blamed the other person. He was also banned from several game conventions.

 

I am not going into more detail than this. This situation effects several close friends, and is a very sore spot with some of them, and it directly effects them. I will leave it to them to speak further if they choose to.Not my place to give specificsy, basically.

 

I have no idea if this Mark guy is just as culpable. He may very well be.

 

But I can say that Sean is real, and certainly not some figment from '15 years ago'.

Edited by Lord Thag
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Sean Robinson is not a fake character. He was extremely active in the Pac NW until just recently. He pulled this exact same scam with an SD card reader that he 'developed' for the c64 with the Commodore Conputer club in Portland. He also scammed several local stores out of money for promised goods that were never delivered, as well as promising repro carts or homebrew hardware for trades for valuable games, which never materialized. He promised to deliver unreleased prototypes to two different people as well. Each time he blamed the other person. He was also banned from several game conventions.

 

I am not going into more detail than this. This situation effects several close friends, and is a very sore spot with some of them, and it directly effects them. I will leave it to them to speak further if they choose to.Not my place to give specificsy, basically.

 

I have no idea if this Mark guy is just as culpable. He may very well be.

 

But I can say that Sean is real, and certainly not some figment from '15 years ago'.

Seriously, the fact people are jumping in about this Sean guy is the exact thing that Mike is hoping for. He has thrown a piece of meat into a den of hungry wolves and is sitting back to watch as everyone tears into someone else.

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I hope we can at least get one more Nostalgia SH-IT video out of this.

 

If Mike keeps up with this ridiculous story any longer and the old team keeps deleting their videos, then I predict that people in the future will mistakenly believe that those Nostalgia S.H.I.T. parody videos are authentic.

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OK found my old post:

I wonder if I misheard Shawn for Marshall .... now back to listening to that podcast ... sigh!!!

http://www.retrogamingroundup.com/roundups/2016/RoundUp099_2016.03.04_128k.mp3

 

Around 27:20-27:40 but it still sounds as Marshall Lee to me so red herring there. Still so close .... mmmmhhh!!!

 

BTW someone exists listen to Piko from 1:01:00 to 1:08:00 in that interview, not sure who he is but someone else is there, and Mike is still guilty.

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Oh I don't doubt this Mike guy may be using Sean as a way to divert attention.... But this scam is *exactly* the same as the ones Sean pulled up here. I have no doubt he was involved. It's too similar.

 

But for things to get as out of hand as the Chameleon project did just means it was more than JUST Sean's hardware shennanigans most likely.

 

All of the social media nonsense, pulled pictures, promises etc... that wasn't Sean.

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Seriously, the fact people are jumping in about this Sean guy is the exact thing that Mike is hoping for. He has thrown a piece of meat into a den of hungry wolves and is sitting back to watch as everyone tears into someone else.

 

Alright, you've said this six times, how about you let people talk.

 

..Al

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I can believe Mike was taken for a ride, but also its obvious Mike was not 100 percent honest during the situation. Too many holes in the story, even if this guy was scamming Mike, why didn't Mike do his homework before signing checks and making promises? And what about all the BS that happened BEFORE this other dude got involved?

 

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G530A using Tapatalk

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Sean Lee Robinson story doesn't smell right

Why did he pay 2500 for a Intellivision and Amiga FPGA core, which was supposedly a finished product and he didn't have it demoed or tested at the very least???

Why did Mike post those pictures of the HD Capture when he admits they looked faked???

"nor was ever given an address where he lives or works" ,does anyone pay a work for hire without knowing this information??

"let him and Steve work together on this without my interference", so Steve Woita is to blame for this mess, as he clearly has the resume for both hardware and software development, and was supposedly working with Lee??? Do we know if Steve Woita was really working on this project after John left, or that he seen's Lee work???

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I believe Mike was taken by this Sean guy. It's just another example of the countless bad decisions that Mike has made throughout this disaster of a project. If anything, it makes Mike look worse than he already does.

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Wow mike thats pretty long winded story.

I think that its bad that he got gyped by that sean guy was his own fault being too trusty.

first and important rule of business, is trust no one, if a person is working on product for you

you have to insist and seeing progress work and talk in person.

As well as do a background check on the person before handing out cash.

 

heres a question what will Atari age do with the jag tooling, is it just the cart shells or is both the console and shells, its obvoius they can prod do cart shells for new jag homebrews

but I don't know about the console shell.

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Sean Lee Robinson story doesn't smell right

 

Why did he pay 2500 for a Intellivision and Amiga FPGA core, which was supposedly a finished product and he didn't have it demoed or tested at the very least???

Why did Mike post those pictures of the HD Capture when he admits they looked faked???

"nor was ever given an address where he lives or works" ,does anyone pay a work for hire without knowing this information??

"let him and Steve work together on this without my interference", so Steve Woita is to blame for this mess, as he clearly has the resume for both hardware and software development, and was supposedly working with Lee??? Do we know if Steve Woita was really working on this project after John left, or that he seen's Lee work???

Because Sean is very, very good at this kind of manipulative shit. He bilked all kinds of money and goods from people for promises just like this. He's quite convincing and good at gaining trust for things he promises but has no real ability or intention of delivering. He always claims to know people you trust.

 

Thats said, it took more than just a scam artist hardware guy like Sean to make this debacle what it is. All of the dodgy pictures, false claims etc are not Seans doing.

 

This whole mess was a team failure of epic proportions.

Edited by Lord Thag
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So Mike is back to breathe new life into the zombie corpse of this thread. I'm glad he had the guts to come back into the vipers nest of us skeptical haters, and there may be some truth to his story, but I'm not ready to believe every word of it yet.

I also hope that you will also wonder why I would go to all this trouble surrounding this venture with guys like Ben Herman (he was a Rockstar at Toy Fair, and had tons of legit retailer interest in this thing) and Phil Adam, Paul Wylie and eventually Steven Rosenbaum. Why would I go out and bring Coleco on board as a licensing partner? All done and then just try and pass off fake prototypes? This is just something that I would not intentionally or knowingly do. I have way more integrity and respect for this hobby to pull that shit.

We have all wondered this at length, but not having a good answer is a different thing from thinking that it didn't happen. You did all of these things on the basis of at best the promises of a very shady character with no known address, and who had never demonstrated anything to you, even if your story is completely true.

I think that you started off with good intentions, and at some point things went South and you thought you could lie and bluff your way through to getting funding (a.k.a. our money), at which point you could magically just pay some worker to make this a reality while you were crowned king of the world and walked away with the profits.

 

Your attitude towards people who have the actual ability and dedication to build a project like this has shown through. You seem to see the actual hardware and software as a minor undertaking that can be performed by any chump you can find for a measly few thousand bucks.

 

There are people out there who can build incredible hardware and software products, but they don't do it to get rich themselves, and they don't do it to make you rich, they do it because they enjoy it. At least Coleco are honest about the fact that they want to team up with these people who can bring them a finished product.

I want to apologize to all of you for the past few months. The John Carlsen era was an honest to goodness list of I mistakes. But there was never any intention to deceive or pull the wool over any of your eyes.

The video that you helped to make in John Carlsen's kitchen was an attempt to deceive. You also lied about how you found out about the video, pretending that you weren't aware of it until Steve woke you up the morning after it had been posted.

I want to ask you all for some level of forgiveness and I hope you all understand that I would have never gone to Kickstarter with a blatant rip-off of a prototype. That was never my intention.

No, because Kickstarter wouldn't let you, so you went to Indiegogo instead, and spun it that Indiegogo 'courted' you. You did try to crowdfund a fake prototype once, and only stopped saying that you would do it a second time after we had proved that the second prototype was a fake.

And please, dont let this mess carry over to the magazine. I have a great team of people working on it. We are pouring a lot of heart and soul and sweat equity into keeping the magazine going and its only getting better.

More spin; we've seen people deserting the magazine, and all reports are that the latest issue is the worst so far. Story for Mike is of course things have never been better.

 

Breaking the silence, apologising, and admitting (some of) your mistakes is a good first step, but you've got to stop with the lies and the spin. It would be a whole lot easier to see you as the victim in some of this if you would come clean about the lies that you have been caught in.

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Mike had to have known the level of scrutiny he was facing after, first, the failed RVGS and second, the SNES-Jag kerfuffle. So, I've always struggled to understand how he could possibly believe that fake photo with the capture card would get past the internet nerd militia.

 

I don't know what the actual truth is, but I will say this: Mike's story about being conned is actually easier for me to believe than the idea of him wittingly posting the capture card jag photo and trying to pass it off as a prototype.

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He's quite convincing and good at gaining trust for things he promises but has no real ability or intention of delivering. He always claims to know people you trust.

 

For a second I thought you were talking about someone else we know...

 

It sounds to me like Mike and Sean fit together like peas in a pod. Here's an idea- how do we know one was trying to scam the other? Maybe Mike and Sean were working together to fabricate a convincing prototype that would fool Kickstarter and eventually their backers and Mike thought if anyone can help him pull off that scheme it would be Sean? Then if/when all goes to hell you have a fall guy ready to take the blame.

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There were only (4) engineers (or people) EVER working on this project with Steve Woita and myself ( and in the beginning there were two working together) despite what Scott Schreiber has been spewing. And none were EVER working simultaneously on the project. And Scott had nothing to do with much of anything and was never considered to be “working” on this project. Has he ever produced and shown anything he was working on? Nope!

All of this is clearly disproved in the RVGS interview when Steve Woita describes all the conference calls I participated in and we discuss my work, MK was in that interview and didn't present one opposition to those statements. Have a listen to that interview here: http://www.retrogamingroundup.com/shownotes/2015/roundup091_2015.09.php

 

 

To understand how this ended, I want to direct your attention back to the early times of this venture, early to middle 2014. At this time, my first choice to design the system, Curt Vendel (who Scott Schreiber helped introduce me to thus ending his minimal involvement in the venture) decided he wouldn’t have the time to devote to this venture and opted out soon and never got started.

True/False. At my direction Curt was contacted to be part of the project. I felt the two of us could work more efficiently because he had a wealth of experience in console design (my background is in missile guidance, avionics, and satellites so it would take me longer going solo on the design) and I loved the idea of working with him and it was unfortunate we didn't get the chance. With Curt unable to participate I was not off the project by any means, and again at the time the stated plan was to stand up the studio side first so I was ok with the extra time. Again, most of that was touched on during the interview.

 

 

At this time I researched others that could step in and bring this product to fruition and that lead me to Clay Cowgill.

Sean and Clay are the two guys I have mentioned came after me, I never used their names because they asked to be left out of it so I left it anonymous but I knew it was them shortly after they started, no hard feelings toward them.

 

I noticed MK glossed over the first fake prototype that was shown for the Indiegogo, I suppose Carlson was a minion of Mr Lee setting MK up as well? As to the Indiegogo courting him, he was desperate to get back on Kickstarter, here is the Whatsapp chat:

 

15/09/2015, 14:22 - Mike Kennedy: Interview is good with no changes :)

15/09/2015, 14:52 - Mike James: Cool

15/09/2015, 16:29 - Mike Kennedy: Mike- slim chance we might go back to Kickstarter.

Can you do some

Edits and remove the Indiegogo talk if needed?

15/09/2015, 17:56 - Mike James: I'm working on my new house day and night this week

but if you can send me time stamps for the edits, yes.

 

 

(Thanks Eli! For stepping in with his SNES multicart in place of Sean’s glitching out SD card driven demo cartridge).

As identified in this thread we reviewed the SD2SNES on RGRUP and MK knew what one was, it was only glitching because the power supply used is a cheap aftermarket one that can't supply enough current to the FPGA used on the multicart, the same issue we discussed on the show in regards to the portable SNES not being able to support it on battery alone. And remember MK claimed that the SD2SNES was a special unit developed by Mr Lee.

 

 

I made a comment that it looked great (in the photos) and he responded by saying something like “this is what we can do when given the proper time.” Keep in mind, these pictures were to combat the criticism of the “fake” Toy Fair prototype and were given to me by him to post on Facebook to show people the real “prototype”.

No mention of the Pic being deleted from FB the night it was identified! And he emailed me and UKMike the next morning claiming he just saw them.

 

Scott,

I saw the photo you posted last night and about fell out of bed. I need to talk with you please. Can I call you in an hour?

Mike

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: Mike James <ukmike@retrogamingroundup.com>

Date: Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Subject: Console

To: Kennedy Mike <socalmike@gamegavel.com>

Hey Mike,

Is it over now?

Three fakes is a lot dude. Sell the molds and move on.

 

--

d-_-b

Regards

Mike James

Retro Gaming Roundup

--

 

--

Mike Kennedy, Founder & President

RETRO Media Network

 

 

After it was learned that we essentially had a SNES duck taped in my console shell I decided to delay the Kickstarter because it was always my intention to show off the prototype completely in the campaign video, open it up and show it running and playing games from at least two different systems.

Jag Bar already shot that down, unless he is also a minion of Mr Lee?

 

 

 

I have way more integrity and respect for this hobby to pull that shit.

 

I was left in a terrible spot at this point and I had a decision to make that evening at the hotel. Do I take this thing apart and see what was in it and quit the show or continue on with the show,

 

 

In the end, I am the only one that has lost anything, money, potential opportunity and my reputation in this hobby.

Coleco's reputation was unfairly damaged

John Carleson was publicly trashed by MK http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/12/coleco-chameleon-continues-quixotic-quest-for-contemporary-cartridge-console/

My shares of GameGavel are worthless

The console conceived, created, and developed under GameGavel/Retro with the name stamped right on the front before the 2nd or 3rd companies even existed was removed from GG/Retro and destroyed

Piko interactive was put on the spot

Collectorvision was made to look foolish

etc.

etc.

 

 

 

 

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The video that you helped to make in John Carlsen's kitchen was an attempt to deceive. You also lied about how you found out about the video, pretending that you weren't aware of it until Steve woke you up the morning after it had been posted.

 

No mention of the Pic being deleted from FB the night it was identified! And he emailed me and UKMike the next morning claiming he just saw them.

Scott,

I saw the photo you posted last night and about fell out of bed. I need to talk with you please. Can I call you in an hour?

Mike

 

 

 

It was a dark and stormy night in Retro Land...

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I don't have anything to add to either side, but all this information about Sean Robinson is pretty upsetting. As a Commodore guy, I became aware of Sean's Commodore Computer Club a while back. He and I have had lots of Commodore-related conversations on Facebook. He told me he enjoyed my book Commodork, and told me he was working on his own book. If he still releases it, this will make for one hell of a chapter.

 

I just checked Facebook and CommodoreComputerClub.com -- his last posts there were on 3/15 and 3/14, respectively.

 

I don't know SoCal Mike personally but I was an early adopter of Game Gavel and know Mike was an active poster over at DP back in the day. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt (too much, at times). I'd like to think that one or both of them entered this venture with good intentions.

 

There are so many good things about retro gaming and collecting, like podcasting and going to conventions and talking to people and, yes, even playing games. Things like this really just bum me out.

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I hope that Albert is actually getting the tooling. Ever since this began with the Retro VGS, the only thing I could think about was the tooling being used to make Jag stuff again.

 

Maybe Mike is going to wiggle his way into AtariAge somehow.. And the molds are the spearhead or trojan, they go in first, he follows..

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