coleconut

Do you have actual evidence to back this up? It seems equally likely to me that in the rush to get ADAM to market, they just ran out of time and decided to throw the formatting feature overboard. Whenever there's a question of a conspiracy versus incompetence, I tend to believe the latter. We could both be incorrect in our assumptions, I was more leaning towards ensuring quality tapes made to spec were used so buy em from us rather than "lets corner the market on data tapes". The problem with the argument that it was incompetence that prevented Coleco from building in some kind of formatting hardware/software solution OR that it was on the original spec but dumped due to time constraints is perhaps that you just cant plunk in an audio tape outa the box, you have to drill holes in it. I am no engineer but it occurs to me that to get a reliable read on a block on a tape and also have the tape whip back and forth from directory to read/write block at the speeds it does would require the extra pins where they put them to hold the darn tape in place. So what do you use instead of extra pins, maybe some friction clip device but then how easy does it become to insert and eject tapes? And the medium used was thicker than many audio tapes since tape stretch would ruin it. So what would be a viable solution that Coleco could have provided to the end user? "Well here we have the Accessory kit including cordless drill, bit, handy drill template AND now you too can format your own high speed digital data packs!" Small print - make sure you use high quality Sony HF60 tapes because otherwise your gonna come back to us with problems Or I could be totally out to lunch on this. All I remember is that in 1984 when I got the ADAM I was pretty ok with the fact that the tapes were faster than my buddy's computer that used audio tapes but this got old within a year once I saw what my disk drive could do even though I paid thru the nose for it.

They touted the "256K high speed digital data pack" idea as a viable alternative to a 160K disk drive and faster than an audio tape player. They also wanted you to buy the formatted tapes at a premium over the off the shelf audio tapes. To me this seemed almost like arguing in pre-CD days that an 8-track tape was better than the cassette tape for music on the go. You couldnt format ADAM tapes digitally with the existing hardware until Syd Carter came out with his after market Megacopy device to digitally format tapes. (anyone remember that one?, it was a device that went between drive 1 and 2 and copied the digital format off an existing ADAM tape onto a regular cassette.)But many users made analog tapes copied in common tape recorders and they seemed to work fine once you drilled the extra holes in the audio tapes so they'd fit on the data drive alignment pins.

I know of the Eurostar Black Extended font as the "colecovision" font but has anyone come accross the ADAM font? Closest I could find is the ER Kurier 1251 Bold Italic (but its not available non-italic) and not 100% what I seek. Thanks

Thanks to all that responded. The actual phrase used was "Die Konsole wird in OVP geliefert und eine Bedienungsanleitung liegt bei." Which prompted the OVP question since my translator did nothing with OVP. Edit - Ok I went ahead and bought the item. If you are curious, its a Schmid TVG 2000, an Arcadia 2001 variant. Goes with my American Arcadia, Canadian Leisurevision and Australian Hanimex. Only about 16 more varieties to go. Anyone have a French Advision for sale cheap?

Not sure which forum this belongs in but since it has to do with sales on Ebay, I chose here. I see on the German Ebay several listings referring to OVP. Does this mean original packaging/box? Danke

Smooth transaction, I'd recommend with no worries.

Only Cosmic Crisis & Meteoric Shower were released by Bit-Corp in Europe only Strike it! & Tank War were never officially released, They were only released by Telegames This guy showed pics of what looks like a legit Bit Corp Tank Wars.

Thats the standard Telegames release, not sure if it should be considered rare. (If so, hey I have a couple of boxed dupes for sale) The only other one that may exist is the Bit Corp version but I've never seen one, not sure it exists.

Nah, thats a misconception. You can get by very well totally in English in Montreal. But its kinda cool to practice your French anyway. I will be there Sat and Sun for sure, maybe Friday. Many in the core group are very knowledgeable about the CV and the ADAM, pushing it to the limits. But as Daniel says, half of it is the comraderie. And if you can only make it for one or two days, there is normally an opportunity to pay a prorated amount and not the full convention package price. Try and make it...

I own them all. The values quoted on DP are likely a good starting point although based on my personal experience, they may all command more when they show up on Ebay which is very infrequently. I have sold Alcazar CIB for an average of $80 over the last year.

That's extremely odd... I've never heard of or seen a game that plays different on the Adam than the CV. Did you try it on an actually CV to make sure it's not that way there too? Just curious as this is kinda baffling me. Ok I musta been smokin something bad that day because today it works fine on the ADAM. More to the point, if you just use controller 2 to start a one player game you play Luigi. Why I experienced what I did the other day I dont know. I could say controller #1 wasnt working but heck, I played a 2-player game, I just had to initiate it using controller 2. But today....normal. Sorry for the misinfo didnt mean to mislead anyone. I even tried removing and re-adding my 128K memory board from the ADAM to see if that was making the difference but no...

PM with offer

In '84 I owned an ADAM first, and so played Buck Rogers (on tape) until my hands hurt. As I recall the first CV game I went out and got was Venture, payed about $35 at Zellers for it. At the time, I had no real exposure to any other game console to tell you the truth. A relative had an Atari 600 and a neighbour had a Vic 20 but I really dont recall seeing any other game consoles until later on, no one I knew owned one (!?) I spent a lot of time in arcades though on Yonge St in Toronto feeding quarters into Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Pinball.

Got mine today, yay! Very nice, professionally done, great manual. FYI, found something interesting about this game. I play 99% of my games on a standalone ADAM. I re-read this thread again and there's no mention in messages or on the box or instructions about the ADAM. Turns out player 1 is on controller 2 and you play Luigi. Player 2 is Mario on controller #1. El-reverso of standard CV play.

I have a Y-cable. Didn't think to try it but assumed it was a straight pass thru which I assume doesnt address the issue. I mean I would assume paddle activity on player 2 paddle does not use the same "address" as 1. So what the console would be seeing is one player even with 2 paddles on a Y adaptor. For example I'd use the Y adaptor on a colecovision to use a Gemini controller to play the game and use a Colecovision controller on the other "branch" of the Y cable to input from its numeric keypad. the Colecovision would just "see" 1 controller not the two. I will check it out though and in response to the other reply, try refurbishing the "real" paddles.

Im a Coleco guy but enjoy 2600 games on my Expansion Module 1, the Atari adaptor. I also like to use the Coleco Gemini controllers which I find both responsive and easy to maintain, the paddles on these controllers are easy to clean and eliminate jitter. Issue is that I cant use 2-player paddle games with this setup noting that the original paddles both plug into port 1 and plugging in a single paddle on port 2 doesnt seem to work. I suppose my question is whether or not there exists an adaptor of some kind to use 3rd party single paddles like on the Gemini controller and enable player 2 or perhaps another solution could be suggested? I DO have Atari paddles but they jitter a bit and the cleaning process is much more involved, havent attempted it yet. Goin' fer that high score in Kaboom... thanks in advance.

Notable mention for Crazy Chicky for the Dick Smith Wizzard console Why....there's ol' Dick himself on the bottom left corner of box...

I didnt realize there were VV in the States, I have never seen one in my travels south of the border, whereas most mid-size to large cities here in Canada have one or more. My gripe with them is the price tags that DO NOT COME OFF and they place those price tags on the worst spot if they arent bagged (which they often are). Local VV used to price games @ 2-3 bucks but seem to be $6 and up lately.

I need to create a new saved search on Ebay to go with my Colleco and Liesurevision

I'd never heard of this but I experienced it this week...well I was on the other end as I was the buyer. Sale price was $232.50, after finding that it would be on hold, the seller refunded the money in full and asked me to make 2 payments of $116 each. Then it went thru for him, no hold. His feedback was < 100 To make it up, he delivered it free to me (he was local)!

I appreciate the work and research you and Steve did on this. I am going to try a couple myself, havent used a die since junior high school metal shop class, here goes nothin'. Hey those folks at the knob place are good to deal with.

Not sure why there is 2 labels on the bottom, maybe a serial number re-numbering, or something. The label on the top is common, been on pretty well every one I've seen but it is often soiled and or torn but it comes off easy and the glue residue comes off to with little effort. But yours is clean and new-ish looking. Good condition CV console compared to the grimey Atari adaptor. Craigslist has been hit and miss for me, I used to travel a lot and would place an ad a week in advance of me arriving in a new city, and try to drum up some goodies for my arrival. A lot of people wasted a lot of my time so I gave up on that. Once in a while a good score though...

Go ahead and get the box then just send it to me. I will somehow learn to live with it....

My story is that I used to collect then my (now ex-)wife wanted it all gone, I got an acquaintance to come by in his boat-of-a 1970's station wagon, we filled his trunk, back and front seats and the rest that didnt fit got trashed (sigh) Years later I found myself single and I went on a speedbuying binge, I bought everything on ebay, I mean 5 figures worth and hoarded. Supreme re-action I am thinking. I am not depressed and hopefully not a hoarder like that current TV show but it was psychological I am sure. Now it has balanced out a little more, I dont play everything I buy or bought, to me it is a collection. If I sell anything, it is 90% of the time a duplicate. I suppose my points are that I REALLY regret getting rid of everything originally, and understanding my motivation (even after the fact) of why I binge-bought helped me gain control over it. Anything to excess is not good. Balance is good.

I have a whack of these European releases, that Danish site has many of them, I have a few that he doesnt. My scanner is boxed up since my last move so it may take me a bit to get these done. Pls send me a msg to remind me if you havent heard in a while.