ColecoVision - We would like your opinions on Specs

[cardo1]

MINI-ARCADES:

Ok. We get it. Atari Age users are the gurus at Hardware and Emulation.

Everyone is asking for the Minis. We do need your help.

Our goal is to create a Mini that is similar in size and quality as the mini's from the 80s. The goal here would be to have each mini focus on one featured game (for EXAMPLE only: Say its Ms. Pac Man on one unit, Donkey Kong on another etc.), then each unit may have a few other games on the system as well, but they would not be featured on the side stickers, and only mentioned on the box art.

Please feel free to give your opinion on the technical specification of the Mini's that you would suggest.

Screen type and size, emulators, hardware, platform or any other specs that you think we should consider. The more specific the better.

LET'S do this as a team!...

Keep in mind that we would like to keep the quality of the plastic high as well as having a mid range quality on the guts of the machine. BUT, at the same time, we would need to be able to have a retail price point that consumers would be interested in. (And while we are at it, you may as well give us an idea of what you would expect to pay for a mini).

Any other advice would be appreciated.

This is out first thread, and we are hoping to keep up with responses the best that we can!

You can also give your opinion on the same topic on our facebook page.

[+5-11under]

Sounds good. Welcome to AtariAge.com (and ColecoAge.com!).

 

Question: what would you be looking for, now and later...

Just ideas?

A company or individual to "invent" the item?

Who would be responsible for marketing, manufacturing, and handling distribution? You, or the company/individual you would engage with?

[Andromeda Stardust]

On the topic of Coleco minicades, I would love to see these make a comeback.

I understand many AAers are nostalgic and would like to see exact replicas, but I think that's unrealistic. Small color LCD screens are fairly cheap now and I think a multicade with a half dozen or so licensed arcade titles would be great. As much as I would love to see Donkey Kong, that's likely out of the question because Nintendo refuse to license their games to third parties, but if Coleco could partner with Namco to get Pacman, Ms Pacman, Galaga, and maybe some third party IP like Frogger or Qbert all in one unit, would be great. If you goto the expense of designing a unit, better put multiple games on it. Casual consumers expect more for their dollar and this is by and large where the majority of the market is. Collectors might prefer the idea of individual units for their "collection", but units with one game each would be a hard sell to casuals unless you can make them very cheaply.

My two cents on the matter.

[cimerians]

Copy and paste my response from the other thread

 

"I dont know, I'd love to see an emulator in there running the actual game. Probably impossible but thats what I always wanted as a kid...the actual arcade game in those things."

 

So, if a MAMED Frogger can be played in one of these I would definitely buy a couple of each of every unit. Not just for me but for kids and family as they all remember them but would definitely get a kick of playing the "real" game in these minis.

 

Yes, Qbert and other games would work well too...only thing I'm worried about is Nintendo.

[Newsdee]

AMOLED screens look amazing and would give good blacks. Can you see if you can source them at 320x240 resolution at a sensible price?

 

Look up a system called the GP2X Wiz, and what it could do. It was a Linux handheld with an AMOLED screen and an SD card, which was sold at $180.

I'd consider this the high range of what's possible and viable; it's probably too much tech and price for minicabs but gives an upper bound on the price.

On the low price range you have those cheap minicabs at around $30 with more than 200 games, so I'd expect the minicabs to be in between.

 

For some games (Pacman) a VHDL implementation exists on the web. Check if it could be done as an ASIC so as to reduce unit costs.

A small FPGA is probably too expensive to pack in there.

[RupanIII]

A modern LCD is going to hold up better than an OLED screen. The OLED Screen WILL SUFFER BURN IN. Don't use them.

 

MANY Samsung tablets with Demo software in stores have burn-in from having the screen forced to be on 24/7 instead of going black every once in a while.

 

Also, LCDs can have a tiny bit of that edge bleed which frankly can look like a tiny bit of the reflection you used to get off of the arcade's cover glass which would have the game's graphics and instructions often printed around the screen.

 

So, if you want to sell more single use hardware, they will have none of these.

 

NO USB

NO NETWORK ETHERNET

NO NETWORK WI-FI

 

Maybe an internal USB, but more likely just an interneal JTAG for programming.

Since your company currently has no Android affiliation or presence, yeah, i guess that you will have to produce single use models.

Edited March 11, 2016 by RupanIII

[cardo1]

Promotion and distribution wise, this would be something that we would do in house. We did have a major retailer suggest that they would purchase these at the right price point. The goal would be to meet their retail price needs. However, we would partner with someone larger in the development and manufacturing. We do have a few conversations going, but are open to some ideas. Mainly, we were gathering specs that the community thinks are best so that we can develop a great and detailed spec sheet.

Sounds good. Welcome to AtariAge.com (and ColecoAge.com!).

 

Question: what would you be looking for, now and later...

Just ideas?

A company or individual to "invent" the item?

Who would be responsible for marketing, manufacturing, and handling distribution? You, or the company/individual you would engage with?

[cardo1]

This is a good point. Perhaps there can be more than 5 games per device, but we were trying to avoid a game system that simply has 100's of games on it. Adding a ton of games and thus storage, would this significantly increase the cost of the rom/storage?

 

 

Collectors might prefer the idea of individual units for their "collection", but units with one game each would be a hard sell to casuals unless you can make them very cheaply.

My two cents on the matter.

 

[GroovyBee]

I think emulating the VFD display won't go down well with a modern audience. Purchasers will only buy it for the novelty value which will result in far fewer sales because retro gamers expect far more bang for their buck these days.

 

The problem with having a main game and some minor/hidden games is that large companies don't like to play second fiddle to each other. I think it would be better to have a "Namo Collection" mini arcade and a "Konami Collection" mini arcade, perhaps other "collections" too. The mini arcades might also be better split into portrait and landscape variants, with games that are geared to a particular screen orientation. Grouping games together from large companies is probably better for reducing licensing fees too. Perhaps 5 to 10 games on each? The more the merrier.

 

With "collections", the side/back panels of the mini arcade could then be montages of the games they contain. Good button and stick orientation is a must too. If you are emulating the original ROMs then the biggest weakness in these games is the sound/music, Pay close attention to getting that right.

 

Will the products be battery and/or mains powered? This pretty much determines how it works under the hood and the time to market. For a quicker time to market you could use a Raspberry Pi (the Zero variant has the best power consumption), suitable emulators, a bespoke joystick/button I/O board and licensed ROMs. However, thats not going to be as good for a portable battery powered device (due to the power consumption) so it mostly becomes a mains powered/tethered device.

 

For a minimal BOM cost but a longer development time you could either have emulators coded (using the licensed ROMs) or write the games from scratch. If you have them written from scratch find people who love the original games to play test for you. You are most likely to get a product that lasts longer on batteries going down that route. However, you'll end up needing FCC/CE approvals testing which also adds to the cost of the bespoke design.

 

If the products are powered by one or more batteries, then use the normal ones that can be bought from general stores. Once a Li-Poly (and other technologies) battery has reached the end of its working life it becomes difficult to find a suitable drop-in replacement.

[Great Hierophant]

All the games Coleco released back in the day use a 224x256 resolution : Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Zaxxon, Galaxian, Frogger or a 224x288 resolution for Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man. Many other vertically oriented arcade games of the "Golden Age" period also used these resolutions. It would be awesome to have a custom LCD panel cut to these dimensions for an arcade-accurate mini-arcade lineup.

 

As far as computing power goes, a Raspberry Pi Zero, the $5 computer, would probably be sufficiently powerful to provide the emulation required for these games. MAME is now free and open source software, so getting the games up and running is not likely to be an issue.

Edited March 11, 2016 by Great Hierophant

[dj_convoy]

Copy and paste my response from the other thread

 

"I dont know, I'd love to see an emulator in there running the actual game. Probably impossible but thats what I always wanted as a kid...the actual arcade game in those things."

 

So, if a MAMED Frogger can be played in one of these I would definitely buy a couple of each of every unit. Not just for me but for kids and family as they all remember them but would definitely get a kick of playing the "real" game in these minis.

 

Yes, Qbert and other games would work well too...only thing I'm worried about is Nintendo.

MAME isn't commercially available, is it?

[+thanatos]

My reply in the previous thread...

I think a mini multicade would be awesome. Pack in 5-10 classic arcade games like the Plug-in TV games.

 

That and I'd like to see someone sell a mini-cabinet wired up with a harness ready to plug into a Raspberry Pi. (My crafting skills are terrible)

[Gentlegamer]

I know nothing about tech, so here's my suggestion:

 

How about a mini cocktail version with Ms. Pac-man and Galaga?

[galax]

Yeah for price it's hard to beat an LCD screen and an emulator running on an ARM SOC, with flash storage. Number of games isn't much of a problem with old games, they are tiny- even in the SNES/Genesis era the ROMs were no bigger than 4 or 6MB. I think the ZX Vega and Vega Plus are similar to what you want to do - they went for very cheap ARM SOC hardware and flash storage, and included expandability so people could add their own ROMs on SD card.

 

The MAME license changed last year, so if you can get the rights to the ROMs it might be usable in a commercial product: http://gamasutra.com/view/news/243598/MAME_is_going_open_source_to_be_a_learning_tool_for_developers.php

http://mamedev.org/legal.html

[Shawn]

Please do 1:1 cosmetic clones of the ones from the 80's. Exact (or as close as possible) copies of the tabletops but instead of C or D cell batteries how about rechargables built in? If the display has to change to something a little more modern but is still playing the games as intended thats a ok with me.

[davidbrit2]

I'd love a little tabletop multicade running some kind of ARM SBC and Linux distro.

 

Crazy idea: What about getting in touch with these guys and making a tabletop chassis you just fit a CHIP into? Could sell them bundled with games/software preinstalled, or as bare cabinets for bring-your-own-CHIP. The capability is there, as you can see from the PocketCHIP.

 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598272670/chip-the-worlds-first-9-computer/description

[cimerians]

MAME isn't commercially available, is it?

 

No I dont think so but I think you can license MAME now. I simply meant "Mame'd" as in emulated.

[Andromeda Stardust]

This is a good point. Perhaps there can be more than 5 games per device, but we were trying to avoid a game system that simply has 100's of games on it. Adding a ton of games and thus storage, would this significantly increase the cost of the rom/storage?

 

Most of these classic golden era arcade game ROMs are incredibly small so space shouldn't be an issue. Flash is so cheap now and even if you went mask ROM the emulator code would be larger than the ROMs themselves. I think 6-12 games would be the sweet spot. Give them stuff that's good and they will remember, but you don't want page after page of games nobody has heard of. Get them hooked in quickly.

 

I would want to stress this point that if you go emulation, the games and sound effects should be as accurate as possible. Some of the AtGames Flashback consoles were marred by bad emulation.

[cimerians]

The MAME license changed last year, so if you can get the rights to the ROMs it might be usable in a commercial product: http://gamasutra.com/view/news/243598/MAME_is_going_open_source_to_be_a_learning_tool_for_developers.php

http://mamedev.org/legal.html

 

Thats it

[+5-11under]

Promotion and distribution wise, this would be something that we would do in house. We did have a major retailer suggest that they would purchase these at the right price point. The goal would be to meet their retail price needs. However, we would partner with someone larger in the development and manufacturing. We do have a few conversations going, but are open to some ideas. Mainly, we were gathering specs that the community thinks are best so that we can develop a great and detailed spec sheet.

 

Can you provide any information on ballpark retail price and/or ballpark total parts cost (including insides, shell, display packaging)?

 

On a slightly different note, I'm wondering what games are available to you with zero licensing costs (i.e. games you "own")?

[Great Hierophant]

Here is a thought, if you want to give an arcade perfect recreation device, why not include an "classic" simulation mode where the VFD version of the game is simulated?

 

Also, if you go the emulation route, the Raspberry Pi Zero does have an HDMI port, so you can allow the games to be played on a TV.

[Gentlegamer]

Please do 1:1 cosmetic clones of the ones from the 80's. Exact (or as close as possible) copies of the tabletops but instead of C or D cell batteries how about rechargables built in? If the display has to change to something a little more modern but is still playing the games as intended thats a ok with me.

 

No! Let us use eneloops!

[+madman]

When it comes to the displays, stick to 4:3 if it's even possible to source those anymore. I've seen way too many projects stretching a 4:3 image on a 16:9 display.

[Osgeld]

I have recently sourced 4:3 small screens though alibaba so they are still out there and at least one company is making them

 

Cost though was about 50% more than a 16:9 and cost is a massive factor in producing electronics

 

So much so it would probably be cheaper to use a 16:9 on its side and hide part of it under plastic to get the arcade like aspect

[+Tarzilla]

I agree on a couple of versions of the device, one horizontal screen, one vertical.

As for content:

-2 different "Arcade Classics" with properly emulated (not reprogrammed) arcade versions of Venture, Pepper II, Lady Bug, Mouse Trap etc. grouped by orientation.

-Harder to Licence, but Namco/Konami IP such as Pac Man, Ms Pacman and Frogger would be nice. Konami at least is approachable, a few of us have the contact info if you need it.

-A "Stern Arcade Classics " Multicab with Berzerk/Frenzy alone would be nice (as long as the voice works) There also many older games that were programmed for Stern by Konami such as Amidar, Super Cobra and Scramble

-1 "Coleco Classics" with the best of the ColecoVision games you own, however the key pad will be an issue.

 

If the audio is as poor as what is on the ATGames devices due to the chipset, then don't bother.

While I love the look of VFD (because I'm that old,) a lot of the people that would buy one of these more remember the mini cabinet device itself, not the game running on it. So LCD would be fine as long as the orientation is correct, no horizontal games on a vertical screen.

 

With the licence change to MAME, I'd investigate the proper licencing of it and pair it with the $5 Raspberry PI or equivalent so we get ACCURATE emulation. Then it is a matter of what games are available to you from the Arcade. Atari might also be willing to licence as well but stay away from anything that isn't original arcade (there are more than enough ways to play 2600 roms on devices)