Jess Ragan

Appreciate the encouragement!

Did I ask this? I was meaning to. Say you want to change the colors for text or whatever, but you don't want to change it in the character set, but rather on the screen itself. Is there a span of addresses for this? Say, you printed something on the top row, but you wanted it red (indicating a mistake by the player) rather than its default white and grey color. Can you do that? How would you do that? It'd be really helpful to know this for color strobing and the like.

Do I dare ask what the hell is a Collectorvision club? I know about Opcode's thing, but Collectorvision is doing something too? There's like two competing ColecoVision game distributors? I greatly under-estimated this market...

Fair. There's a part in the BBC film Micro Men where Clive Sinclair actively expresses contempt for video games. "My lifetime of accomplishments has been reduced to Jet Set Fucking Willy!" That contempt for video games is further expressed in the ZX Spectrum hardware, which is hella cheap and completely unsuitable for video games. No sprites. A single channel buzzer for sound. Colors are kept a safe distance apart at all times, like dancing couples at a Mormon prom. I don't even think that system has a joystick port by default; you have to go out and get a Kempston adapter or some such. It's like whoever designed the internals of the ZX Spectrum cackled madly to themselves and shouted, "Just TRY and make this thing play games!" Challenge accepted. There are thousands of ZX Spectrum games, and thousands of Generation X nerds in Britain who grew up with this machine, and still have fond memories of it. When there's a will, there's a way. People would (and have) gamed on a calculator, after all.

I'm old enough to remember a time when sprites were the deluxe package, rather than standard equipment on video game hardware. "Watch in awe as a small patch of graphic data is seamlessly moved across a complex background, without one affecting the other! It's like maaaaagic!" (I remember back in 1996, when I was making shareware for DOS PCs, how distinctly irritating it was that there were no hardware sprites available. There were screen stamps, but they're not the friggin' same thing, due in large part to the lack of collision detection and the stamps polluting any graphics underneath them. It was 1996. 1996, and this hardware standard STILL didn't have sprites. The Commodore 64 had sprites! The TI 99 4/A had sprites! What gives, IBM?)

Legend has it that Nintendo studied the hardware of the ColecoVision very carefully before releasing the NES, which is probably why it seemed to address all the limitations of that system and the SG-1000. No more scrolling issues, no RAM bottleneck, no limitation of two colors per 1x8 line, etc. etc. They also finally killed that damn numeric keypad trend from the late 1970s and early 1980s, where every game system just had to have a touch tone telephone receiver built into the front. You do not need this abundance of buttons! You could make gameplay a whole lot smoother and less confusing just by using a better interface. Er, anyway. Unlike before when I was a mere spectator, I'm actually looking at the ColecoVision from the inside. I'm in the process of making a game, and have done several demos. It adds perspective, and makes me realize just how involved it is to make games, and by extension artwork, for this system. Donkey Kong looks kind of weird and simplified in the ColecoVision version of that game, because the hardware necessitated those changes. I don't know what you did to get around this, Opcode... I'm assuming you pulled out a heaping helping of those "magic sprites" Nanochess talks about to fill in the color gaps?

Like this faintly animated ROM featuring the YouTube semi-sensation Layman Video Gamer. Layman said he loved the ColecoVision... let's see how much he likes being INSIDE one! It'll be like that one especially ridiculous episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, when they're fighting Video Man. I just realized that instead of just games, people can whip up greeting cards and all sorts of weirdness on the ColecoVision. Maybe I shouldn't encourage that... the complete list of NES games is thousands and thousands of entries long because everybody kept using NESticle to turn Mega Man into Mega Butt and River City Ransom into Wilford Brimley Battle. layman.rom

I saw footage of this on YouTube. It's janky and limited in that distinct ColecoVision/MSX way, but it aims pretty high for that format, and actually looks better than the Micronics NES version in some respects. At the same time, it does illustrate that the CV wasn't capable of keeping up with the gaming trends of the mid 1980s, particularly scrolling.

It's legendary kusoge, among the worst games on the Super NES. As a result, it's frequently reviewed by YouTube content creators, particularly the yellers like AVGN. That notoriety probably explains its high market value. (Don't buy it, though! It's crap! It's like the Simpsons arcade game, if it had been made by the people who made Bart vs. The Space Mutants!)

It'd make more sense if you saw the ending in the arcade version. Just... trust me on this one.

whackem_game.rom Fixed the previously mentioned issues, and added some extra graphics for when Byron gets bonked. Oh, this is shaping up pretty darned well!

We have collision detection! And point labels! (You would not believe how annoyed I get when ColecoVision arcade ports don't have these.) One slight problem: new Byrons will pop up in holes where there is already activity from bonked Byrons. This seems easy enough to fix, by placing a flag in the PoppinByrons routine preventing new Byrons from being spawned in those locations. There's still no trace of sound or music. I have ideas for these, but as I've stated before this is not my strong suit. whackem_game.rom

On a related note, can you check for tiles near or colliding with a sprite? I presume VPEEK would be the way to go for this.

Dang! Good call! I just made the change and the game runs more consistently now. Can you explain why?