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Team Pixelboy News Bulletin - January 1st 2017


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Hello to you all, ColecoVisionites and ColecoVisionistas! :D

 

Before the surface of the Earth is reduced to a pile of smoking ashes in 2017 because Donald Trump mistakes the red nuclear launch button for the snooze button on his bedroom alarm clock, I'd like to wish you all a very happy and prosperous New Year! :D

 

So without further ado, allow me to outline what's coming from Team Pixelboy in 2017.

 

THE BUDGET GAMES

 

I will be devoting all my efforts in January and February towards assembling the carts of the budget games. As you can see in the pictures at the bottom of this post, I've made some progress with this recently, but I still have many weeks of work ahead of me to assemble well over 1000 more cartridges. I also attached below a preliminary screenshot of Yars' Revenge provided by the programmer of the game. The graphics are subject to change, but I expect they won't change much between now and delivery day.

 

As I write this, the assembly work is stalled because I ran out of metal screws. I ordered more screws a couple of days ago, and I expect to receive them next Friday, or maybe a little later. In the mean time, I will finish the print templates of all the manuals. Six of them are ready, and the texts of the other manuals are about 95% done, so I just need to wrap things up, prepare the final templates and pass them along to my local print shop.

 

As for the boxes, like I mentioned last week, my contact at the printer company told me that he should be able to speed up the print work for the rest of the boxes starting in January. I have only received 200 of the 1800 boxes so far, and another shipment of 100 boxes is on its way to me right now.

 

 

OTHER UPCOMING GAMES

 

I've been focussing on the budget games since last summer, and I must admit that I've been mostly neglecting all my other ongoing Team Pixelboy projects as a result. At this point in time, I'm not really sure when the next batch of "regular" Team Pixelboy titles will be released, but I'll put some serious effort into that as soon as the budget games have been shipped. For now, the least I can do is provide a quick status report on each of these upcoming games. Here it goes...

 

Ghostbusters : Eduardo Mello is in charge of this MSX port, and he hasn't worked on fixing the remaining bugs in the software since my beta-tester first reported these bugs back in summer 2015. Even worse, roughly six months ago, my beta-tester discovered that the game does not function correctly on his ADAM computer (the controller stops working at the "equipment purchase" screen) and I confirmed the problem with my own ADAM soon after. That's one more reason why I cannot release this game in its current state. Hopefully 2017 will be the year this accursed game will finally be released.

 

Space Shuttle - A Journey Into Space : The ColecoVision port of the MSX version was completed quite a long time ago, and I haven't found the time to beta-test it yet. Yes, I want to beta-test this one myself, mostly because I want to work on the manuals of the game in parallel. At least the box template and the controller overlay are done and ready.

 

Secret of the Moai : The port is finished, but the game has been giving my beta-tester some trouble. I enlisted the help of another beta-tester to try to make further progress, but it's like everything fell into a black hole. And my neglect of this project hasn't helped either. On the plus side, the box artwork is ready so I will prepare the box template of this game in early spring.

 

C-So! : This one passed the beta-testing phase quite a long time ago, and the box artwork is also ready, so I should be able to push this game out the door in all deliberate speed, once the manual has been prepared and everything has been printed/assembled.

 

King & Balloon : Same as C-So! above, the software is done and ready to be put on cartridges, and the box artwork is also ready (and quite beautiful too!) so that's another one that shouldn't pose too much trouble for me to release.

 

Children of the Night : Yet another game that passed its beta-testing phase, and the box artwork is ready too. I want to mention that given the size and scope of this game, I hired two beta-testers for it, and they both loved the game, so I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of you ColecoVision fans play this totally new and original creation. :)

 

Wizard of Wor : I received the final release candidate of this game back in October, but again, I neglected it because of the budget games. I'll be looking for a beta-tester for this game fairly soon.

 

Gauntlet : No real news to report on this one, I'm afraid. I haven't received any kind of progress report from the guy in charge of the MSX port. I'll have to check up on him soon...

 

Utopia : Beta-testing is going well, and even better, Mystery Man recently delivered a new version of the game with the one-player-versus-computer mode implemented! As I write this, I haven't shared this new ROM with my beta-tester yet, and from what Mystery Man told me, this one-player mode is rather basic and will probably require some minor tweaks over the next couple of months.

 

Zombie Incident : I'm happy to report that this game has passed the beta-testing phase and the box artwork is ready too, so this will be another "easy one" to release.

 

QBIQS : A playable work-in-progress version was sent to me in early November, and it plays great! But there are some minor things that the programmer wants to implement (I will contact him again about this shortly) so I'm going to wait until the ColecoVision port is truly completed before hiring a beta-tester for it. I like this game a lot and I'm glad to be publishing it. :)

 

Uridium : To put things bluntly, not much has been done with this game yet. Nanochess hasn't begun porting it to ColecoVision, as far as I know, and I'll have to put some time aside next spring to prepare the box artwork.

 

Arcomage : The game is fully ported, and I even have a test PCB ready for the beta-tester. But this beta-tester is the same one who is currently testing Utopia, and I don't think it's a good idea to have the same person test two games in parallel. So I'll wait until Utopia is behind us before we shift our attention to Arcomage. I was expecting to have the box artwork ready by now, but the artist landed a new job recently so he had to put the Arcomage box artwork aside for a while. But from what he's shown me so far, the artwork is going to rock! :D

 

The Cure : As I mentioned last week in the previous News Bulletin, I received an advanced work-in-progress ROM that already plays wonderfully well. I'm waiting to receive the final release candidate before going ahead with beta-testing. The same artist who did the box artwork for Caos Begins, Majikazo, Secret of the Moai, C-So!, Children of the Night and Zombie Incident has accepted the commission of doing the box artwork for The Cure, so I think we can all expect some great box artwork for this game!

 

Jewel Panic : This game is on hold for now, and I will resume working on it once the other games above are all mostly done. The game already plays well (with no sound) but there are a few minor graphic glitches I want to take care of. I've learned a few things about the inner workings of the ColecoVision since I last worked on this project, and I believe I'll probably need to recode the game from scratch (again) in order to reach truly smooth gameplay.

 

The list above is a long one, as you can see, and I'm not sure all these games will ship before the end of 2017. I'm also hoping to add one or two titles to this list, but it's not a sure thing yet so if there's any good news to report, I will make announcements in a future News Bulletin.

 

 

HOW TO PRE-ORDER?

 

It seems like a long time ago now, but most of you probably remember that I set out to release three groups of Team Pixelboy releases. The first two groups were released, and the third group (composed of Ghostbusters, Space Shuttle, Secret of the Moai, C-So!, King & Balloon, Children of the Night, Wizard of Wor, Gauntlet and Jewel Panic) was put on hold in favor of the budget series. Since then, several new games were added to the long-term release lineup (Utopia, Zombie Incident, QBIQS, Uridium, Arcomage and The Cure) and I have refrained from recording any pre-orders for any of these newer titles.

 

The first thing I want to mention is that there is no need to send me an e-mail to check and make sure that you are still on the pre-order list for the third group. I keep very precise pre-order records, and I keep backups of those records too. So rest assured that you are on the list for whichever games you pre-ordered from the third group, and I know which games you have already paid for and which ones you haven't paid for yet, if any.

 

For the newer games (for which I haven't recorded any pre-orders yet) PLEASE do not send me an e-mail to place your pre-orders. As I mentioned before, I'm currently concentrating on assembling the budget game cartridges and I want to get that done as quickly as possible, so responding to e-mails about long-term pre-orders will only be a time-consuming distraction.

 

Not very long after the budget games will have been shipped to all customers, I will send an e-mail to everyone in my customer records and I will also post a Team Pixelboy News Bulletin, in order to give everyone a chance to pre-order the newer games. I will need to do this in order to determine how many boxes of each of these games I will need to have printed later in the year. So please just hold on tight, you will definately get the chance to place your pre-orders later this year, in an orderly fashion. It's just not a good time for it right now.

 

 

WHAT ABOUT THE TRADING CARDS?

 

I want to conclude this News Bulletin by mentioning that, over the last couple of years, some people went through extraordinary lengths to supply me with scans of games boxes and other hardware packaging, which will eventually be used for series of ColecoVision trading cards. To be honest, I don't think I will be able to get much work done on this trading card project in 2017 (I may work a little bit on it during my lunch breaks at the office) but I feel I have a moral obligation to get those trading cards done. So for now I just want to confirm that I haven't dropped the project, and I still think about it from time to time. But in all likelihood, these ColecoVision trading cards will only become reality in 2018. I have too many games to release this year.

 

 

This concludes this New Year edition of the Team Pixelboy News Bulletin. We now return you to your regular forum activities. :D

 

And again, Happy New Year!

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Hi, Pixelboy. Having just discovered the homebrew community recently, is it too late to get on the preorder list for some of the original titles in the third group of releases?

It's definitely not too late, just send me an e-mail at pixelboy at teampixelboy dot com and we'll get a discussion started. :)

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just noticed something..

 

Does the wizard of wor you announced is the same announced by opcode here?

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/260557-the-new-and-improved-super-game-module-aka-4th-run/?do=findComment&comment=3662018

 

I"m wondering also if the Berzek announced by electric adventure is the same than the one from opcode.

 

Or they are parallal projects???

Edited by youki
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just noticed something..

 

Does the wizard of wor you announced is the same announced by opcode here?

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/260557-the-new-and-improved-super-game-module-aka-4th-run/?do=findComment&comment=3662018

 

I"m wondering also if the Berzek announced by electric adventure is the same than the one from opcode.

 

Or they are parallal projects???

They must be, because I already told Eduardo that the Team Pixelboy version of Wizard of Wor will not use the SGM Pro (the programmer no longer has the free time required to get that done).

 

I don't know about Berzerk, but I expect Eduardo will want to program his own version, probably a direct port of the arcade ROM.

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They must be, because I already told Eduardo that the Team Pixelboy version of Wizard of Wor will not use the SGM Pro (the programmer no longer has the free time required to get that done).

 

I don't know about Berzerk, but I expect Eduardo will want to program his own version, probably a direct port of the arcade ROM.

 

Wow, so we will have two versions Wizard of Wor for the Colecovision? That's crazy.... but awesome!

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just noticed something..

 

Does the wizard of wor you announced is the same announced by opcode here?

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/260557-the-new-and-improved-super-game-module-aka-4th-run/?do=findComment&comment=3662018

 

I"m wondering also if the Berzek announced by electric adventure is the same than the one from opcode.

 

Or they are parallal projects???

I think there is a previous discussion about both Wizard of Wor and Bezerk from that Opcode announcement in that they were games he would like to release in the future. To my knowledge no coding has been done, the screen shots were just mock-ups of games he thought would be possible.

 

So Pixelboys Wizard of Wor and my version of Bezerk are the only versions that will be released that I know of.

 

I would also like to note, I do not foresee Bezerk needing the Super Game Module, even once I add the voice parts of the game.

Also with Bezerk I am seeking formal permission from the current copyright owner as they are still active.

 

And while we are on the subject, this is a thing that I hope others are doing, especially with certain games that current property owners consider to be one of their prime intellectual properties (they may have seemed to be asleep but I can assure everyone that they are not dead), as it could bring all of the games that are just ported (using most of original source code) in view i.e. especially the number of games that have been released in the last couple of years, it would make it worthwhile to pursue legal action by the mere quantity.

 

I am in recovery from the illness that has kept me out of action for the last half of 2016, so we shall see a lot more progress on my list this year.

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They must be, because I already told Eduardo that the Team Pixelboy version of Wizard of Wor will not use the SGM Pro (the programmer no longer has the free time required to get that done).

 

I don't know about Berzerk, but I expect Eduardo will want to program his own version, probably a direct port of the arcade ROM.

 

What features are missing due to the SGM not being used?

 

Really love WOW.

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What features are missing due to the SGM not being used?

 

Really love WOW.

Actually, the game does require the original SGM.

 

Adding support for the SGM Pro could have meant having voice samples played during the game (without freezing the gameplay to play the sample). As it is now, the player(s) only hear the voice samples between levels. On the plus side, the samples sound really good. :)

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  • 2 weeks later...

Small update today, but with lots of goodies to show! See pictures below. :)

 

I received the Cold Blood boxes a while ago, but I hadn't taken a picture of them yet, so I took one yesterday along with the other stuff. I just finished applying the labels on the Danger Tower carts this morning. I'll probably get the rest of the manuals printed as a single batch in mid-February.

 

I'm also glad to report that Remember The Flag has passed the beta-testing phase. So in terms of software development, all that remains to finish are Frostbite and Yars' Revenge. And speaking of Yars' Revenge, you can get a sneak-peek of the programmer's progress here. This is lookin' really good! I'm sure you guys will have a blast playing this game! :D

 

So things are progressing nicely, and I should have more pics of carts to show next week-end, if all goes as planned. :)

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