Tony Cruise

This threw me to start with as I kept on pressing down for the bombs (have played the 2600 version too much), but like this version much better now I have got used to it. 105,025

I don't think you will be able to use screen mode 2 as you have a lot more colour information in your tiles. You can only have the same colours set per 8 tiles. But yes sprites are available. It depends on whether you can optimize your tile set. Another thing if you can fit your whole tile set in 256 characters then all you have to do is copy the same tile set to the three locations in video ram. That should reduce your usage by 1/3 right there. Still working on some tools (for Windows) that will allow you to grab various bits of graphical data, split them up and compress them. Plus making some C libraries of a couple of the compression routines for unpacking. Still a bit busy at work, but might get some time later in the week. Regards Tony

What I see is needed here is a general tool that allows you to compress various blocks of data, using different techniques (RLE is best for a colour table but not always the best for data), rather than just be limited to saving a whole set of data as one piece as in ICVGM & CV SPRITE 2. Plus obviously more ASM & C libraries to load data in these formats. That way you can load the 1st part of the sprite table that repeats, followed by the screen specific sprite block. Give me a few days to put together some tools for this. A quick question which modern OS do you use for your development?

Have you tried both types of compression with the tile sets, plus dividing up the sets so that repeated sections (like the character set) are only stored once. I also don't bother putting the ASCII characters in their normal positions i.e. I start with the numbers & then with the alphabet only adding any extra characters if needed. Requires conversion of any strings, but there are not that many in a game. Plus as any text is now in the lower 5 bits of an byte you can bit compress larger text sections really easily. I would load each of your three sets of 256 characters per screen separately only with the needed characters for that section. Using these sort of techniques you should be able to easily get all three levels in the game. You can of course use compression for loading the sprite data as well.

All Electric Adventure games either used the processor clock on the MSX, so they run the same speed no matter what region. The conversions to the Colecovision adapt the timings of the region so play at the same speed in both regions (and I have tested this to make sure).

Sound pretty cool to me. Makes it definitely worth the challenge.

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My two cents is I think that Coleco should have worked closer with Spectravideo i.e. let Spectravideo handle the computer side of things, Coleco the game console and have a common cartridge slot design between the two of them. Spectravideo had a full range of powerful perhiperals, including reliable disk drives, CPM support, but they totally lacked the software support (on the games side). They built the Coleco adapter for the Spectravideo computers so they obviously had the smarts, but I suppose they were also dragged off task by Nishi of Microsoft pushing for the MSX standard. The Spectravideo with its direct support from Microsoft had the most powerful version of Microsoft Basic at the time, compared with Commodore, Atari and even Apple at the time (as they didn't want to continue to pay Microsoft licensing fees to get the newer versions - well I can't blame them ). So between the two of them their combined efforts might have allowed them to make a larger impact on the American market and would have alleviated all the money wasted on the Adam by Coleco. But back then it really was every man(company) for themselves.

Well best I also contribute to the comment count and thank J-F for his contributions to the Coleco community with CollectorVision and really look forward to the History Book.

Quite like this game, I don't have a copy so had to use the Atarimax SD, but quite enjoyed playing it. It gets pretty hard though. 56,600

As the others have said, seriously if nothing had been mentioned I would not have noticed anything at all. And it is pretty hard to see the green blur even when looking closely. Here is a closeup of my module:

The main things you will need to consider when switching from 2600 to Coleco are some fundamental differences which mean you need to use different techniques and approaches. - CPU Speed - Much faster CPU - the Z80 is clocked at 3.67MHz - Split Ram - Two sets of Ram & limited pipe between them - You can't write/access Video Ram directly you need to work through a port & it is only possible to transfer so much each vertical blank. Also due to the Coleco's limited 1k of Ram, you can't do large block writes (unless from a fixed Rom area) as you just don't have the space - this is why a lot of MSX games are faster than Coleco conversions - The SGM fixes this issue. - Horizontal blank - Sorry no horizontal blank - one of your main tools on the 2600, plus Coleco in difference from MSX does not have any Z80 interrupt support, the only one you get is the Horizontal Blank for the VDP, so all timings have to come from that - annoying, but it can be worked around. - Colour Palette - Only a fixed palette of 16 colours - but at a much higher resolution than the 2600 - you can use colour mixing techniques to achieve more colours - see my site and Cavern Fighter as an example. - Screen detail/tiles - The screen is divided into three pattern tables of 256 8x8 blocks. Each 8x1 line can be two colours i.e. foreground & background colour can be set, or if transparent the background colour shown. - Multi-coloured sprites - You can easily achieve multi-coloured sprites by overlaying them (no gaps required). Sprites are shown in a strict priority order, by planning your layering & game structure a lot of the 4 sprites per line issues can be avoided. But if not you have to implement sprite sorting (as others have mentioned). which does introduce flickering. - Scrolling - easy in 8 pixels chunks by moving the pattern table pointers, but nice if you can go to the next step of pre-storing enough patterns to smooth scroll 2-pixel doesn't do to bad in this respect. Smooth scrolling illusion can be created in some circumstances using sprites, being mindful of the 4 per line limit of course. - Collision detection - Hardware is sprite to sprite only, it is only a single register bit from the VDP & only tells you that one sprite is touching another, not which one. So you need to implement hit boxes, but remember you have a much faster processor. Most keep the whole sprite table in Ram & copy it once per vertical blank. Any questions, feel free to ask

I would definitely be interested in Moon Patrol, Jungle Hunt, Galaxian and Dig Dug (in that order if the releases were staggered)

Ok my review is up on my Youtube page. Unit worked really well and first time, both games I have so far are excellent (thank you Team Pixelboy). Looking forward to more SGM games in the future. Hopefully I will be able to contribute with one or two SGM games in the near future. Pyxidis will either be dual support i.e. will work on normal Coleco and use the SGM if it is there, depending on how I go at getting to run in 1K.

My SGM arrived in the mail today, I will have a full review video up later tonight and will upload a link once it has published properly. Can't wait to play some Super Zaxxon and Kings Valley

Really looking forward to receiving mine in the next week or so, then I can try out Kings Valley and Super Zaxxon Plus until I do some more memory optimisation my next game Pyxidis is not running in 1k so needs to SGM. I do want to try and make that one work without, but work in enhanced mode if it detects the SGM and/or extra memory of the Adam. Best of both worlds then.

It could very well be the RF circuitry is no good. There is a DIY AV mod kit from retro_mood on eBay, that I have used on two PAL Colecovision systems so far and it worked well. Both had video output though, although one barely. The mod disables the RF section completely. It's not very expensive so may be worth a try, no guarantee though of course.

This one makes my wrist ache with the firing! And I never realized how bad the collision detection was on it before. 32,520

No problem at all, it was a joy playing them, Gulkave is getting the most attention at the moment, as after my quick play of each I like to see how far I can get one at a time. I'll probably try and improve my poor performance in Quest next, used to love Adventure on the 2600 back in the day and the Coleco has always needed a game like that

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I just checked the upload it should be available in about 1 1/2 hours from this update. Upload running very slow tonight for some reason.

Sorry it was a bit longer than normal, so taking a bit of time to upload and post process and I need to turn in shortly

Just a quick note, that I got my box of titles from Team Pixelboy today, so I did an unboxing and mini-game play of each game if anyone wants to have a look. The video is still post processing but when it's finished you should be able to view it here: http://youtu.be/eLChN-OC5Mo. Don't have my SGM yet, so the two SGM titles I will do game play and reviews of when that arrives.