eegad
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Posts posted by eegad
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My Colecovision story...
I was always an Atari guy throughout the 80s (and still today) . 2600...400...800xl. But 2 of my favorite games in the arcades were Venture and Turbo. Venture was available on 2600, but wasn't very good. And Atari had no Turbo ( although - Thank You Atariage for finally releasing a 2600 cart several years ago... It was the coolest Christmas present, 30+ years late) . Anyway...when Colecovision came out (I was in high school) , I drooled over the Venture and Turbo versions it had. But, having just talked my parents into getting me a 400 setup, there was no way I'd get one.
Fast forward to 1988 or 1989. I'm out of college with a job and finally have some spending money. A mail-order videogame catalog lists a clearance on Colecovision stuff - both new & used consoles & carts, and also some Coleco clone called "Telegames Personal Arcade". I think a new CV console was maybe $80 or $90, used maybe $60? The Telegames thing was only like $40 so I ordered it, a used driving controller (with Turbo cart), plus Venture & a dozen other used carts for maybe $5 each.
Got it. Played it. But Turbo doesn't work. WTF? Found out Telegames doesn't work with driving controller. So I gave in and ordered a new Colecovision console. Got it. Played it. ....for a few weeks. Then packed both consoles away in their boxes and mostly forgot about them.
The 90s drift by, and then....
Got married and bought a house 20 years ago. My old videogames and computers made the move. About a dozen years ago, nostalgia hit and so I set up my Atari stuff in the basement and have continued to play with it occassionally to this day. On one rainy weekend while I was down there maybe 6-8 years ago, I decided to hook up the Colecovision just to see if it still worked. It did, so I played some games that afternoon and then packed it up again.
A few weeks ago, while at my parents house, I found a box of my stuff in their laundry room. In there was the Telegames Personal Arcade box, and the separate box for the power pack. Hmmm. I only vaguely remembered it at first. Brought it home and hooked it up. Works fine; nice clear picture. Got me thinking about Colecovision in general again, so I hooked up that system too and have been playing around with them both. The Coleco works fine mostly, but has some occasional graphic glitches. I Googled and read about common issues. Mine seems to be with power plug. Jiggle it a bit or pull it out and re-insert it and screen clears up. Totally playable, but sometimes screen tears briefly or shows squiggly interference lines, so it is a bit annoying. The Colecovision is practically brand new, so I don't really want to mess with it if jiggling the power cable clears up video glitches. But would a new power supply most likely fix it? If so, I might consider getting one. Also plan to try to light sandpaper the contacts and see if that helps.
What shocked me was when I was Googling the Telegames console. Like, seriously, this thing is going for hundreds of dollars on ebay these days? What I'm wondering is WHY? It's a cheaper knockoff, the controllers suck (though regardless of which console I now play, I prefer to use an Atari joystick anyway) , and the expansion modules don't even work with it. What makes it so special?
Also....what do people consider the must-have carts? Maybe I'll pick up a few more on ebay while I've got both consoles set up. Have Burger Time, Donkey Kong, Cosmic Avenger, Carnival, Lady Bug, Destructor, Smurf and 2 or 3 others.
Thanks for any feedback.
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On 3/12/2021 at 3:29 AM, shanti77 said:Cheat:
We press Shift + C on the title page, now on each new level pressing START gives us immortality. We can turn it off during the game with the OPTION button.
Thanks for this. Just tried it and it works great. I was *finally* able to kill main boss at the end of the first level. Unfortunately, that uncovered a problem. After killing the boss, I get a "Level Complete" notice, and then the screen turns black and stays that way. Level 2 does not load. Tried pressing keys, joystick, nothing works. Also rebooted and played through the first level again, with the same result. This is on a stock 800xl, NTSC. Can anyone else confirm same issue? File download is from initial post in this thread.
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Usually use an sdrive-max these days. Also have several maxflash carts with games. But I do like to hook up a 1050 once in a while and play some games off of actual disks. It's partly the nostalgia of hearing the actual disk access noises, and partly wanting to give the drives a little bit of use to see that they're still working properly. Still kinda surprised that after 35+ years all 4 drives still work, as do 99% of the disks.
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I know this isn't the answer you are looking for, but I wanted to throw my 2 cents in anyway. one of my heavy 6's had a broken reset switch spring. My simple solution was to use a rubber band... Wrap it around the base of the switch (loop it into itself) and tie the other end to the video cable. It was a simple and free solution and has been working for at least 5-6 years.
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What's interesting is that I don't recall any advertising early on. First time I heard about 2600/vcs was when my friend got one for christmas 1978. His dad had a computer related job and so he heard about it and got one.... I guess mostly because HE wanted to play with it. But I thought it was cool and wanted one too. It was a few years before I did though. But I also don't remember regular commercials for it, or it being a thing that everyone wanted until 1979 or 1980.
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Just watched the first part of your video and am really confused. First, colors are totally different. Second, I cannot jump off the springs..... It does nothing (I gently bounce up and down) or I fall off. Is there a trick to it?? It's almost like it's a PAL game that doesn't really work on my NTSC 800xl. But I bought it here in the USA, and posts say it was only a US release, so totally confused.
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Can't add any details except that I thought I'd toss my 2 cents in... Back in the day I cracked several games for myself and my friends. I was never any kind of expert, but I was succesful many times. I bought AR City; had it backordered for many months. When I finally got it, I was amazed by it (hell, I still play it once or twice a year NOW, 35 years later, still continuing my original character). I gave it my best try to crack it for my friends... With no success. I think it started with a fuzzy sector. Easy. But then it did multiple levlels of encryption.... These sectors EOR'd with those sectors... Run... Then load more sectors EOR with others, then perform operations on those multiple results.
Somewhere in the original disks was the text "protection from paradise", and I agree. Insane levels of protection at the time.
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2 more things...
- everywhere says it's a 1989 release, yet my disk clearly says (c) 1990.
- I just tried enabling cheats via Altirra, but it doesn't work at all (disabling PM collisions) . If anyone can beat the various game levels, I for one would love to see a video (or learn how to cheat). Now that I have stumbled upon this game again, I really would like to see how it was supposed to play out.
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I gave everything a scan. Unfortunately my scanner is ancient, and the type of printing on this causes a moire pattern on the scans.
Two things. First, I really dont recall this game coming with the box/book shown in previous scans. If it did I imagine I would have kept it. Secondly, has anyone ever been able to get anywhere with this game? I played a bit last night and it matched my vague memories.... Namely that I couldn't beat any of the 3 levels you can start at, and all it did was frustrate me.
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Wow, what a flashback. When I saw the topic title I had to pause and think "why does that sound so familiar" for a bit before I recalled. I think this was probably the last game I ever bought for my 800xl, before retiring it and buying a Mac. All I vaguely recall about this game is that I couldn't get far with, played with it for maybe 2 days before being frustrated and giving up. Anyway, I figured I must still have it so I dug it up. Maybe I'll hook up a 1050 later in the week and check it out.
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The games that people have been making in recent years are truly impressive. And there have been a good number of older commercial games that have received updates/improvements. Also, additional controller options... I was just playing the patched centipede that supports native trackball mode. Which got me thinking...
One game that I miss playing is Crossbow. I think Atari did an excellent job on the XEGS cart. But it only works with a lightgun. How feasible would it be to hack it to work with a trackball?
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Very impressive. And a huge thanks to the person who removed the PAL check. Was just playing it on a 64k NTSC 800xl and it mostly worked fine. Occasionally the gems seem to glitch, at least on level 2. Was only able to play through the 3 test levels since I don't have my 256k 800xl hooked up at the moment, but even so it was great. How many levels are there with extended memory?
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Curious if anyone here has made it through all 4 levels? If so, is there an ending scene, or does it start over at level 1? I love this game, but it is hard. There are at least half a dozen youtube videos of gameplay.....all but one ends with the person being killed by the boss fight at the end of level 1. In the other video, the person beats the boss and goes on to level 2, and then dies quickly. I can almost always make it to the first boss, but die every time without killing it.
>If only there were a pause feature and possibly a feature to start from higher levels
I personally wish for an invincible cheat to just get past the boss fights. But failing that, you can get to see & play higher levels fairly easily. Use the disk explorer option in Altirra. Delete all the files starting with LEVEL0. Then rename all the files named LEVEL1 to LEVEL0. You will start the game on level 2. Or do the same thing with LEVEL2 or LEVEL3 filenames to start on levels 3 or 4. (And I still die every time at each levels boss fight)
Here's hoping that any future updates have difficulty options and a level select.
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Very nice! I haven't gotten very far in it yet, but it is very well done. I have 2 "beta tester" suggestions :
- As was previously mentioned, if you walk into/over an item on the floor you should just pick it up automatically.
- Make using a standard joystick an option. Stick to move, button to attack. You would still need to use keyboard, but it would be much better to be able to move around with a joystick (in my opinion).
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Somehow I missed this one, and only stumbled upon it a few days ago. I'm so glad I did... This is a totally fantastic game!!
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1 16k 400
1 48k 800
2 64k 800xl
1 256k 800xl
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Thanks to everyone for the replies. And extra thanks to DJayBee for getting Frogger to work. Figures that the first game I was trying to do this with had copy protection to check if it had been transferred to disk. (Reminds me of long long ago when I tried to convert my atari branded cart based games to disk files and they never worked. I finally ran Missile Command (I think) through a disassembler and saw that it was writing a bunch of garbage to some addresses that a cartridge would normally occupy. At first I was like "that doesn't make sense because you can't write to ROM". Then the lightbulb went off as I realized a disk copy would be in RAM and that was their copy protection. Clever....and I wasted several hours before figuring it out.)
Anyway, I just successfully used that tape to boot-disk utility to convert Apple Panic to a 16k boot disk, so it's all good.
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Here are the files. FROGGER.CAS is the original tape file, which loads and runs on 16k 400. DOS20S.atr is the disk I made containing the tape-to-disk utility, along with the imported FROGGER.CAS file and the file it converted to FROGGER.EXE. I then used the utility to create the boot disk FROGGER.ATR, which boots fine on a 48k 800 (or 64k 800xl), but which will not work on a 16k machine.
Thanks so much for your help in understanding what the problem is.
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Here's a chance for me to perhaps learn something. I used CharlieChaplin's suggested utility, along with Altirra, to load a single-stage boot tape of FROGGER.CAS. This .CAS file boots fine on a 16k 400 via an sdrive-max. I created a new disk in Altirra and formatted it. Then I loaded the boot tape file, wrote to a boot disk, and then saved the ATR. The resulting ATR boots on a 800 with 48k. It does not boot on a 16k 400.
Now, I totally get that if you convert a boot tape that works on a 16k machine to an .EXE and then try to load that from a DOS menu, or to rename it to AUTORUN.SYS, it likely won't work because DOS is taking up lower memory that the program wants to load into. But if it's made into a straight boot disk, with no DOS, why does that not work? Wouldn't the boot disk just have header bytes that basically say "dump the next xxx number of sectors into memory starting at xxxx address and then run at address xxxx"......which is the same as what the tape would be saying??? Maybe the block/sector length is different, but other than that, what's different? Same amount of data loading into same memory areas. I'm puzzled.
Much thanks for any enlightenment (...and perhaps 35 years ago I knew the answer, but it's long been forgotten) 🙂
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Is there a utility somewhere that can convert single-stage ML tapes (as a CAS file) to an ATR disk image?
(I've been playing around with my 16k 400 this week, booting up CAS & ATR files via an sdrive-max. Not too many games work in 16k of course. And I've found a few that work only as a CAS, but not an ATR. (Frogger for example - the single stage CAS works in 16k, but the available ATR on Atarimania needs at least 24k. Any way to dump the CAS data to a bootable ATR?)
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On 12/19/2018 at 7:22 PM, CharlieChaplin said:Anyone know where this came from? Always liked Superman on 2600 and was happy to see this at first. Unfortunately it's not playable. All the locations, characters and objects are there and working, but you can't deposit the bad guys into the jail, and the bridge never re-assembles when you return the pieces. Seems like all the most difficult work was done on this.....such a shame it never got finished.
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My friend and I also built one back in the day. Had the board inside the bottom half of an Atari joystick case with a piece of clear plastic glued across the top. Wrote a little program to let you type in a sentence and have cheep talk speak it. Then wrote a short text adventure that would speak the location descriptions and such. Wish I still had my Cheep Talk, but somewhere along the way I guess I must have thrown it out because I've never come across it since getting back into Atari a dozen or so years ago.
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I just finally played this via Harmony cart and just wanted to say how impressed I was.... I can't believe you were able to do such a faithful recreation on the 2600.
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Has anyone by chance heard from Warren recently? When I heard about Annotated Adventure, I was excited to get it. But his website entry about it hasn't been updated in a long time....as of 4 years ago it was finished but going through revisions.
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Telegames find / Rediscovering Colecovision
in ColecoVision / Adam
Posted
Yes, both CV and Telegames were new and sealed in the box. The steering controller also was in the box, but used... Good condition, but with signs of usage. Carts were all loose, some looking clean, some pretty beat up.