Tony Cruise

Are you disabling the VDP interrupts before doing your write to VRAM? Anything other than a couple of bytes needs to ensure that the VDP interrupt is disabled while doing the copy. So other than initial screen setup it is a good idea to only do VRAM reads and writes in the interrupt routine. See my assembler template for some more examples.

I missed out on the 1st batch of Battle of Hoth, as I think that would top the list for me. Can't pick my game of course So I would go for Mecha-8 and Lode Runner as my top two, and if pressed I would pick Lode Runner by a nose.

Memory debugger would be great as I have had some issues with my current game, where I have reworked parts of it so it uses less Ram and will work in a standard Colecovision. I haven't started a tile editor yet, the sprite editor is pretty much done, and I am part of the way through the compression utility.

You are going to send me broke, but at least it will be with a smile Looking forward to both titles, but next Pixelboy reminder service email is going to be painful!

Matt, Welcome to the Colecovision home brew development scene and this community. It is nice to know one of the people behind some of the games that I enjoyed throughout the years, especially the Diablo series - burned a lot of screen time on those games for sure I am a programmer for the original Spectravideo and the MSX machines that followed, currently working on a few Colecovision projects based on my original titles. I have some modern tools for SVI/MSX/Coleco development that I will be releasing to the community shortly. Although I do say I like the sound of your tile editor tool you mentioned. Regards Tony

Necromancer (Atari 8-bit) would definitely be doable - very nice game that one. Wolfenstein and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein would definitely be doable as well, played them both on the Apple II when I went to college. So add these three to my list to call dibs on But as I have said before they will be after the three titles I am working on now (all which I am slowly making more progress on - need more hours in the day/less kids/more beer or something like that). The Atari 8-bit version of Demon Attack would be nice though, mmm.

One of my favourite MSX 1 games, can't wait for this improved version - mark me down for one.

Template.zip The attached archive contains the current version of my template for writing games on the Colecovision using Z80 assembler. The archive contains three files, that are in the Z80 assembler style parsed by the TNIASM Z80 assembler. It demonstrates the following base concepts: Rom Header structure with options Interrupt handler supporting the inbuilt sound routines Simple sprite flicker routine allowing eight sprites per line Loading character patterns Loading sprite patterns Capture player joystick input Use of Timers I have been working on a new set of tools, developed using .Net that I will be releasing later in the year, they will include: Sprite Designer - including multi-layered sprites Tile Editor Compression Utility - supporting multiple compression types (and supporting assembler code to use the data) All of the above tools allow active cut and paste to your project in multiple formats i.e. Raw, C and Assembler. I currently use the ConText text editor, along with the TNIASM assembler and BlueMSX emulator along with it's debugger.

Seriously if you are on Mac get yourself Parallels or even better VMWare Fusion and make a Windows XP or 7 sub host. Use BlueMSX as the emulator as it has a debugger. My preference is assembler - tniasm and I use ConText as the editor. I have written more updated tools (that I am not quite ready to release) but they also run on Windows only as they use .Net.

Four PCB's with keypads arrived today, thank you. Now to break out the arcade parts, wiring and some boxes - really looking forward to putting some new controllers together. Will do video(s) on the progress on my Youtube channel.

I'd vote for Megaman first too (well lets say a Megaman clone) - and I call dibs on doing it But after I finished my current projects of course

Looks excellent, count me in as well please.

The shape of the map i.e. room layout should be exactly the same in procedural generation so you only need to store the function starting value for each level and then a list of state items for each room, this can include how much you have explored on each level by storing path covered (which is not every square as each move uncovers multiple squares based on line of site and range). Also remember if you have things in lookup tables, if you don't need 256 values you don't need to use all of a byte to store state. But I do like the idea of using VRAM to store things, I should look at doing that more myself. It is surprising the amount of state information you can store in a bit pattern My current game I am working on has 100 levels, that will only be using 16k of Rom (and no I am not keeping state between rooms, this is just showing how with proper tables and structure you can save a lot of space) without compression. So currently 169 bytes per level, which I could reduce to 144 if I wasn't being a little lazy.

Rogue levels are procedural generated, so you don't need much ram to generate the shape/design of the rooms, just the state of items/enemies in the rooms.

The Coleco (like the MSX and other similar systems) have a separate graphics processor that has it's own work RAM of 16k, along with this the Coleco has 1k of normal RAM for the CPU (Z80) to use. The standard cartridge can have a maximum ROM size of 32k, which can contain, code, graphics and sound data mixed in any order (most launch titles only used 16k Rom cartridges - thus why titles such as Donkey Kong are missing a level). With compression it is amazing what you can fit in a 32k cartridge. As the main CPU is a Z80 it is capable of bank switching and there is a bank switching cartridge available that allows much large ROMS (up to 1Mb?), which can once again contain code, graphics and sound data.

Can you put me down for 4 pcbs please.

Well for me my list is: 1) Finish off the conversion of Pyxidis & Cavern Fighter so they can be released by Collector Vision. 2) Keep working on secret project 3) Start work on another new EA game from notes from many years ago. 4) Track down some of the cartridges missing from my collection And some progress on the above will be made when I start holidays (hooray) in a few days time

1. Tutankham 2. Time Pilot 3. Q-bert