Tony Cruise

Yeah see that's the thing, Colecovision were working on their own design for quite a while and it probably did use the GI sound chip (so probably both stories are right), but they were running out of time, so it was easier to get the working model off Spectravideo (which was their early design before through Nishi's contacts in Japan they then replaced the sound chip with the Yamaha one). It also probably goes a long way towards why the Coleco Bios has so many rough edges i.e. it was rushed.

I am hopeless at the mine section - it stresses me out. This is the only time I made it past! 22,350

The Creativision is a design descendant of the TI-99/4A. TI were at heart a chip manufacturer and sought as wide a distribution as possible for their designs. The TMS99xx series of chips were very powerful and flexibly for when they were brought out. So the Creativision is a 6502 with accompanying TI-9918 graphics chip. The Z80 based architecture with the TMS991x chip and initial sound processor started with a design from the two designers (Hong Kong based Americans) of the original Spectravideo. Colecovision were working on their own design (with similar components) but could not get it work (this initial work then become the Adam) so bought the initial prototype design from Spectravideo. They then added their own BIOS, went to work on the early software titles, pushing their console out well before Spectravideo could launch their extensive range of machines and expansion units. Nishi of Microsoft Japan then took the design and showed it to a large number of Asian manufacturers, including Sega, trying to drum up support for a proposed 8-bit computer standard. Also early converts were Yamaha, who added the much improved sound processor replacing the original TI based sound solution. Sega went ahead quickly using the base design for the SG-1000, followed by the SC-3000 computer line (which actually ended up being released at the same time as the original Spectravideo). With support gathering from a large number of Japanese manufacturers, Bill Gates came fully onboard to support the MSX standard concept, allowing Spectravideo to work with Microsoft's Basic team merging features of Microsoft Colour Basic and Visual Basic (16-bit). Bill gates announced the MSX standard in advance of the official announcement in Japan. Some very minor architecture changes (merging the cartridge and expansion ports into the same interface) and changing the bank switching to allow up to 2Mb of memory, made Spectravideo having to re-release their machines with new models that supported the changes. There was a very well researched (proper interviews with most of the parties) article released by a UK publication recently for the MSX 30th anniversary. I'll have to dig up the URL and repost here for you to have a look at. All very interesting machines, I am currently collecting as many of the variants as I can find. I have most of them now, including a Creativision, a Sord M5, SC-3000 (& SC-3000H), Einstein all original Spectravideos, many MSX machines. Still missing a Memotech MTX though.

I might be able to use some of them for doing SG-1000/SC-3000 releases. Bit low on funds at the moment though (school holidays) but if they are still available in few weeks would be interested in at least 100.

Sorry been sick for the last two weeks - I'll take what ever number is free on the list.

Sorry missed the cut off as been sick (again). Did record a score just did not upload the picture. I will just have to do twice as good at Moon Patrol now.

Got my copies today, thank you Tobie, you have done an excellent job, they look awesome! Two more big stand alone titles from me in a couple of months. One will definitely be a SGM title, as it was my biggest selling MSX title back in the day and deserves the full speed conversion and the other requires a bit more work to see if it will fit in 1k.

I am truly hopeless at this game Don't have a physical copy so have not played it for years. Managed to get to stage 4 and got lost! 8,680

Sounds like a really good idea, sign me up for one. Be nice if there was a PAL option but not a deal breaker if there is not (Australian TVs are all multi-frequency anyway). Also be good if the extra ram is there, but if it causes too many problems, also don't stress about that as there is still the SGM.

That is the most awesome Colecovision shrine/collection I have ever seen!

Definitely be interested, would make it a lot easier to play some of the games. My preference would be to be able to use my Sega Arcade Stick II.

Yes with home brew releases, you can't really start using copyrighted characters and material when there still exists an active holder of that material. Even the current porting of MSX titles needs to be taken cautiously as Konami is still active in the market place. Now that an active community of home brew releases has been established I look forward to more original titles being brought out for the Colecovision. Yes they might take more effort than converting an existing ROM but they are definitely worth while. I especially liked Princess Quest and Quest for the Golden Chalice (yes I know based on Adventure for the 2600). There is no reason that one of the decent Batman platformers could not become an inspired game, changing the characters to something else but keeping the basic game play mechanics. Food for thought anyway.

Gyruss Pepper II Star Force (Homebrew)

Very happy with coming 8th after only playing 6 rounds Will participate in the whole season next time. Was lots of fun, Ikrananka thanks for organizing the series.

Excellent work, demonstrates that there are lots of techniques to reduce the rom space used by screen layouts. I have a future game planned (after my original game conversions are all done) that will require quite a lot of data compression techniques like this.

I am not that good at this one, took ages to get even this - 27651

As the Coleco does not allow you to trap the CPU timer interrupt you do not have an accurate time figure and thus it's very difficult to generate a random number. The best way around this is to have a timer that is updated every VDP interrupt and have your game/demo start once a human presses a button or number on the controller i.e. the human generated random time period becomes the seed to your random number sequence. I use the following code to generate a random number, but it does itself need to be seeded with a starting value. ; ; Generate a random number, based on the initial Seed ; value. ; RND: PUSH HL PUSH BC PUSH DE LD DE,(SEED+2) LD HL,(SEED) LD B,5 RLP1: RR H RL L RR D RL E DJNZ RLP1 LD B,3 RLP2: PUSH DE LD DE,(SEED) OR A SBC HL,DE EX DE,HL POP HL DJNZ RLP2 LD (SEED),HL LD (SEED+2),DE LD A,E OR H POP DE POP BC POP HL RET

I program all my titles only in ASM, using Context as the editor (as it allows both syntax highlighting and properly parses the output line from the assembler i.e. able to jump straight to error line). I use tniasm (version 045) as the assembler and BlueMSX as the emulator as it seems to work fairly accurately. My current MSX to Coleco conversions use a couple of the BIOS routines, but I am gradually replacing them with better performance versions that suit what I need. This also makes it easier for me to be able to reverse port the titles back to the MSX, original Spectravideo and Sega machines. For more information on VDP tricks look at the development forums at msx.org, as the Coleco's video processor is pretty much the same, just perhaps has slower video ram causing more potential corruption issues.

I had to have one more go 129,340

124,365

Yeah I know what you mean (I am used to numbering the modes from 0 not 1 - I'm from the original Spectravideo camp ) with the mode numbers, but you can only have one colour combination for each block of 8 characters and I think Monster Bash will need a bit more colour information than this mode will give. Actually when I first converted Meteor Swarm I was having all sorts of problems with the colours as I did not realise I had selected Mode 2. What I suggested was for him to use the same 256 characters for each of the three tile sections you have in the normal graphics mode (Mode 3). If he is just loading the data as saved from one of the tools, it will potentially have the tiles repeated three times. So by copying the same set of tiles to each of the three areas you save just as much room as using Mode 1, but you don't lose the amount of colour information you have. By the way love the look of that Ghosts & Goblins game, will have a better look later.