bmcnett

Actual Colecovision compatibility is a technical liability if your goal is to make and sell microgames to a mass market. The cheapest hardware worth mass producing in 2017 is somewhere between PS2 and PS3 in terms of capability, and it is far, far easier to pump out Coleco-era-looking games that target this actual hardware, because there is no need to fit everything into Colecovision's extreme technical limitations: no scrolling background 32 16x16 pixel sprites with 1 color each, only 4 per scanline 16 total colors 2 colors per 8x1 background pixels 1KB RAM Z80 ASM is the only programming language There is no mass market business value in producing Colecovision games in 2017, because the cost of dealing with the above limitations vastly exceeds whatever profit could be recouped. So anyone who wants to make big money from the Coleco name these days, wouldn't be interested in Colecovision games per se. They'd be more interested in a fantasy platform like pico-8 that provided the same nostalgia feel, but which didn't have expensive technical limitations.

You know what's lewd, guys? When you're playing Smurf Rescue and you deliberately retreat from the final screen, knowing that it will cause Smurfette's dress to disappear for a few video frames.

Your theory makes more sense now that you've gone into more detail. This does assume that Coleco has a poor understanding of the retro computing scene, which is possible. Historically, a commercial platform holder's ability to control brand perception flows from their power to block distribution of games. Colecovision was the last major game platform to implement no hardware controls to lock out unauthorized games, and this is cited as one of the reasons it eventually failed. The pico8 homebrew platform holder manages to block distribution of lewd / infringing games without hardware controls, but he does this by maintaining the free BBS and free game download system that are convenient for people to use. If Coleco is a homebrew platform (it is right now) it would probably have to work more like the pico8 model, since there's no money involved.

"Strong arm the community into making you more money" this, I don't buy. the kind of money thrown around on coleco homebrew, as i understand it, amounts to probably a few grand a year, total? i have no idea really, but this seems like a reasonable first guess. so an attempt to horn in on that money would net you what, a few hundred a year tops? it just doesn't make sense to me that this is a move to squeeze money from the homebrewers - unless the scale of their operation is much, much larger than it appears to an outsider like me.

Heh, I didn't know it had sold this well.

*Should* the Coleco owner have gone after this fan page, in this way? Well no, probably not, because of the Streisand effect: those who attempt to forcefully cover things up on the Internet tend to achieve the opposite result. If a person under the age of 30 who knows how the Internet works had been consulted before action was taken, things could have gone a lot more smoothly, probably... My imagination can still imagine that somewhere, a businessperson is considering releasing a say, Raspberry Pi powered microconsole for $40, that comes preloaded with official Coleco, but which could also run NES favorites, etc. If the price were lower than NES Classic Edition and if it did multiple consoles more smoothly, I know people who would buy such a product.

People who seem irrational often simply have poor information about the decisions they are making. The chameleon affair tells me that there is a lack of tech and product design savvy in play. People have succeeded without them before, but unfortunately the videogame market is already fairly mature for that sort of thing to fly.

While technically, yes, Colecovision Flashback already is the Coleco equivalent of NES Classic Edition, it went on sale in 2014 when there hadn't yet been a runaway success in the retro console market. A business-minded person could argue that NES Classic Edition sold well partially because the platform is so beloved, and partially because a higher degree of polish went into the product itself. Personally I am not the market for any of these products, but I can't think of any other reason why the owner of Coleco would suddenly see fan-pages as a threat, where no threat had been perceived before.

Hello all, Ok so here's my view from 30,000 feet. In 2016, Nintendo's "NES Classic Edition" console was a smashing success and sold out everywhere. One of its pack-in titles is "Donkey Kong." http://www.nintendo.com/nes-classic/ This fact can't be lost on the person who currently owns the rights to Colecovision - the favored game console immediately before the original NES, which had the *exact same* "Donkey Kong" pack-in title. If I were them, I'd be thinking about attracting investors to a "Colecovision Classic Edition" product, but first I'd want to ensure that when people search for "Colecovision" on Facebook and Google, nothing sketchy appears. The crucial flaw with any such plan is that the vast majority of nostalgia-inducing Colecovision titles have always belonged to third parties, and never to the owner of the Coleco brand. Sega and Nintendo own the rights to most of those games, and would likely not participate in anything Coleco-related ever again. Anyway, this is what I think is going on here. I don't get the impression that the "homebrew community" is of any concern to the rights-holder particularly, other than it should not get in the way of business. Who am I? My dad was an Art Director at Coleco during the Colecovision and ADAM years, and I am a game industry veteran with dozens of credits on AAA titles. Bryan

AWESOME!

after reading all this i think I was wrong to say that no randomization entered the mainstream.

No, see, matthew has been talking about (eventually) offering scrolling in his enhanced 9918A but the implementation remains an unsolved problem. I happen to be working on that problem in my fake 9918A. So this is relevant to at least matthew's 9918A project. Do you have any technical opinions to offer, or are you satisfied quoting mine and replying "So what, I don't care because you're nerdy McGurdy."

I've been working on scrolling again in my VDP emulator. I'm going to have to take back my recommendation for a Game Boy-like fixed "tile window" inside of which the screen scrolls and wraps. With sadness in my heart I have concluded that Atari 400-like "display list" scrolling is ideal. That is to say, there is a data structure in VRAM that says for each scanline where to start reading tiles. I am sad because the Atari 400 way is prone to fiddly-piddly hacks - it is possible to get lost in there doing scanline breakdancing. All I want is scrolling. However a "display list" is capable of expressing all existing VDP modes OR something almost the same but with the required extra two rows and columns for scrolling without special cases for either, plus some other useful interesting scrolling methodologies, which is more than I can say about a fixed scrolling window a la Game Boy.

randomization would complicate testing because there would be far more variations than any user is likely to encounter. also the artwork and programming would be more complicated than otherwise necessary. there have been games that do things like you mention ( did black and white set game time from the net connection? ) but none so far have become mainstream because the perceived cost/benefit is too high. famous games with randomization include nethack and dwarf fortress, both quite far from mainstream gaming.

i remember my family had the 2600 w/launch titles, so that was 1977? i was five years old. most of the games required two people. my brother and i played a lot of indy 500 and combat... it didn't occur to me until years later that games could look any better than that.