Pixelboy

Ah, okay.

Wait, does that mean Boulder Dash has problems running on the ADAM? That'd be news to me...

Well, all I know is that the VBLANK interrupt is a non-maskable interrupt (NMI) on the ColecoVision, but it's maskable on the SG-1000. Also, the joystick ports work differently. Others can probably provide more details.

Bobblevania.

... and those "default" letters and symbols are stored in the Coleco BIOS, by the way.

Yep, that's what I was told earlier today.

I think you're confusing Gateway to Apshai with Temple of Apshai (which to my knowledge was never released).

Too bad they don't accept Paypal, I would have pre-ordered this right away. Oh well, I'll take my chances with eBay once this comes out near the end of 2024. EDIT: I had a look at Limited Games' Amazon.com storefront. They have a section for pre-orders but Shantae is nowhere to be found, even with the pre-order period ending today. I guess they REALLY don't want me to pre-order this game. Alright guys, I won't! EDIT #2: This reminds me, I should look up what's happening with the physical GBA release of GoodBoy Galaxy. It's been available in ROM format since December.

That's going to be difficult, because Albert is the only guy (as far as I know) who can produce new Activision PCBs, or rather, an alternate version of that PCB which is compatible with regular Coleco cartridge shells. At this point, I think Albert should chime in...

Antivirus plug-ins like Norton, perhaps?

Not releasing the ADAM wouldn't really have saved the ColecoVision. The video game crash of 84 was mostly due to retailers looking at Atari going down the drain and losing faith in console gaming as a whole. When Atari went down, it took down the whole industry with it. On the other hand, if Coleco hadn't spent so much money on the ADAM, they could have been in a much better financial position to face the crash of 84. But Coleco would have exited the console gaming market just like Mattel did with the Intellivision, so again, the ColecoVision wouldn't have survived the crash.

Four words: Symphony of the Night.

I'm seeing some 8-pixel lines with three colors (look in the last column on the right side, there's yellow + black + light yellow on some lines near the bottom) which leads me to believe that there are "color-bleed masking sprites" used in that particular picture.

Correct. On the ColecoVision, the background color is actually one of the 16 available colors, and it's the color that is displayed on the TV screen borders outside the 256x192 display. Any pixel inside the 256x192 display can also be set to that color, and it's the only color that can be set via software to be any of the other 15 colors at any time. So let's say you want to simulate a lightning strike (but not necessarily with any lightning graphics, just a flash of white across the screen with a thunder sound effect) you can do this easily on the ColecoVision by setting your "sky" graphics to use the background color, and then change the background color to white with a single quick command to the video display processor, and then reset the background color back to its original value (black, blue, whatever). Do that a few times while the thunder sound effect is playing, and you've got a nice storm effect.

One thing you have to keep in mind is that all those old consoles followed very different hardware architectures. For starters, did you know that the Atari 2600 doesn't have any video memory? This means that a substantial portion of the software on an Atari 2600 cartridge is dedicated to drawing stuff on the screen on the fly. To make the most out of this hardware "limitation", the hardware lets the programmer run a tiny amount of code before drawing each TV scanline. This is how the seagull in your example can have so many colors: The sprite itself is single-colored, but if you change the color of the sprite at the start of each TV scanline, you get a multi-colored sprite on the screen. Note that this technique only works well vertically. Changing a sprite's color while the scanline is in the middle of being drawn is much harder to pull off. Consoles like the ColecoVision and Intellivision do have video memory, and they work quite differently under the hood. For example, the ColecoVision doesn't offer any way for the game software to run code at the beginning of each scanline like it can be done on the 2600. All it offers is a single interrupt signal sent to the CPU after the entire TV screen has been refreshed, and when the software receives this interrupt, it has only a finite amount of time to alter the contents of the video memory before the TV starts the next screen refresh. So that's why the seagull in the ColecoVision version of Fathom only has one color. I'm not very familiar with the Intellivision hardware, but I know it's similar to the ColecoVision in the way it handles displaying graphics. Ask any programmer and they'll tell you that having video RAM to work with is way better than not having it. But video RAM always comes with its own set of constraints, at least where game consoles from the 80s and 90s are concerned.