newcoleco

So the guy didn't even took time to check, just too happy to get a boxart and go with it. Well, done.

I do wonder if I've missed an episode here... How stupid someone can be to use a convincing artwork BUT not take care of using also the same font for the name of the game at the top of the box?

When music done, sure, I will post a video

NEWS #1 : Dale promised me to start shipping this month. Great! NEWS #2 : For emulator and mostly for AtariMax Coleco SD cart users, I've put together a special edition of the game ROM file, plus pure text instructions, plus an image (pc format) in a ZIP file... and it's on a digital distribution web site. This will be my first attempt to digital distribution of one of my games, more to come if any interest in this type of quick and easy distribution. Side note : some fees are taken away from all transactions, I'm getting at best $4 per sale. ColecoVision - Flora and the Ghost Mirror - Rom File EditionSpecial : "80 Cents Save Coupon" : MYWXR6WSEE

Sent a very tiny piece of data to RK, not something elaborate but gives an idea of a possible music.

Yes, October 4 at approximately 4AM. And This week, November 4, things restart to be "back to normal" at home.

The final version of Flora was completed in July, and Dale has the responsability to publish it. The last information I do have about "why it's not published yet" has to do finding free time to work on this ( make carts, design instuctions manual for final version). Finding free time seems to be a huge problem for Dale lately and I don't want to put pressure on him to release it as soon as possible. If he tells me that he can't do it, then I don't know who has time to do it. Side note : All the pre-release version of Flora for Canada are in the hands of Dale Wick. Dr.Drushel had all the pre-release version of Flora for US and they were all shipped at the end of July.

I'm currently considering to do a special version for the blue carts. Harvey DeKleine is dealing with the normal version to be burned on pcbs and shipped to me for the final packaging in black carts. Shipping to you guys should follow right after. I apologize to everyone... I've no excuse. It's just that... each time I wanted to keep going in any of my projects I just couldn't, my mind was struggling with recent events in late september and october. It's more than a month now that my mother died and I couldn't predict how much this will affect me. I still want to cry today just writing this. And you're all right, I should give news more often... I've no excuse, really sorry.

A few questions to you. What is the time left for CV homebrewers to select, modify or even program for scratch games to be in this app? What is the "ideal" deadline? Can a collaboration be possible to make things easier to integrate our CV homebrew games into this app? And can this app be a portal to promote our upcoming CV games (like a blog? or downloadable demos?) so users can check this app for news too? I do know that it needs time to make something good enough to be generaly appreciated specialy when it's not based on an actual commercial success. As an homebrewer mostly specialized in making original titles, I'm basicaly alone to make these new CV games. Just thinking of the weeks spent on writing ideas, designing concepts and screen levels, calculating for memory management, drawing graphics and animations, composing sounds and musics, coding, optimizing by using various methods like data compression and rewriting some crucial parts in ASM language, tweaking speed, fluidity and precision, testing, debuging, retesting, fixing last details and publishing or not depending if I've the ressources. I do all this by passion, risking each time my reputation without any clue if it's gonna be well or badly received; this makes me put a lot of pressure on myself each time, trying to renew myself, to explore new ways and game ideas, to bring originality and my imagination into game cartridges for this great console from my childhood. So yes, being a small studio isn't ideal but it can work with time and effort.

I would love to hear which titles 5-11under, Ikrananka and many others do have in mind for homebrew titles in this project. I do think that Jeepers Creepers is probably my best title for this project, with levels, lives, scores; the controls are simply fire left and right, move left and right, and press a number at the menu.

I'm OK with a project like this, of course, cool idea. In a personal note, I do prefer the real deal when possible. I'm surprised no one mentioned that Ms Space Fury IS a homebrew game ... that I've coded... for the 10th anniversary of DigitalPress. It's quite flattering to see one of my games in a big project like this to represent our 80s childhood in a sense. Oh well, I do hope at least DigitalPress is aware of this since Ms Space Fury is their game. They claim they got the rights? I would like to see the proof of that to be honnest. And if I think about it... Jumpman wasn't released for the ColecoVision, it is a homebrew project never was a commercial or even prototype for the ColecoVision. Anyway...

It's in the hands of Dale and he is struggling with work at the moment.

I don't care if you like it or now but I just love you all. You make me feel proud and happy , feel accepted and appreciated by so many. I can't name you all but you know who you are and thank you from the bottom of my heart. Special thanks to retrogamers communities like the CCJVQ (Sylvain deChantal, Steve Begin, Pascal Reeves, Serge-Eric Tremblay, etc.), Silicium, ADAMCon (special thanks Dr. D, Dale Wick, Rich Clee and Frances, etc.), DigitalPress (Joe Santulli, Sean Kelly), GoodDealGames, and of course AtariAge (Albert and so many more). Special thanks to all of the current active homebrewers, you are keeping the scene alive in a beautiful way, helping eachothers, offering new games and new hardware. Thanks to Youtube gaming community, reviewers, retrogamers, who with passion is bringing back to life games from the past, consoles from the past (MaximumRD, Gamester81, CorporalColeco, 65gamerguy, etc.) it is entertaining and great fun. My childhood dream came true the minute DACMAN was released in cartridges back in summer 2000 (thanks to John Donzila and CGE2K). It was a long journey exploring libraries and experimenting computer programming during the 80s and 90s to finaly get to this point of accomplishment. The game DACMAN was sadly first released buggy but nobody is perfect and the bug was fixed not long after for the big release of the game. I made my own tools and games with the coleco devkit by Marcel deKogel. During years, I made new ColecoVision games, met new people, and I've improved my style and knowledge, developping new tools, and writing some documentations that I made available to all of you in the hope that you give it a try. I sadly didn't kept my word of releasing a new CV game every year, that was my objective, I just couldn't do it. I've tried to be there, answering questions, helping others to get started and fixing bugs because it's a fun hobby when it works, and provide files and various data to those who needed them. Lately, I was more involved into music and sound effects which are greatly appreciated and I hope others will do the same eventually and be sound experts too. Thank you all for your good words and support! I hope you will excuse my tears now... it is a very emotional time for me today because I will see my mother alive for a last time. I'm transmiting to her all your positive thoughts, she is proud of her son and want me to continue in my passion. I'm taking a break to take care of my family... see you later!

Thank you all again for this tribute, it is really really appreciated. I like the picture, it needs a little more work to be perfect but as is it's already nice. For an entire day, I've listened to the GodFather theme and I was crying, not only because it's a beautiful song but because of what is going on in my family right now. NEWS I've shown this tribute page to my mother who doesn't read english well but some parts in french she understood. She was happy to see all the people taking time typing good words about me and my CV projects. She is proud of her son. The following is the last email I will ever get from my mother and it's her response regarding the tribute. Reading it makes me cry every time Last news about my mother, she is back at the hospital, palliative care, no coming back home this time, under morphine drug, not really there, waiting to die. It's heartbreaking, really heartbreaking. It is a very hard for me and my family and I hope you understand my current feelings

I'm sorry guys for the delay, before sending the rom file to Harvey to burn the chips I've detected a bug that any of testers found... you had to play alot to notice btw. Anyway, it It's fixed now so I can send the ROM file to Harvey. Deeply sorry for the delay, but better to fix a bug before than after the cartridges are released, no? As for Flora, Dale Wick can answer you better than me.

don't be sorry for something you like, I do like Ozzy too.

They are quite addictive games. I'm enjoying them a lot! Good continuation!

I can confirm this... because I distributed the BUSTin-Out carts pretty much by myself even if John Dondzila did the cartridges for me at that time. There is one and only one CIB BUSTin' Out vol.3, all the other vol3 ones are all loose due to various factors which includes John D. and my ressources of that time.

I've took time to download and look at the colecovision_borielszxbasiccompiler_20130908202020.zip file The first thing that's clear to me is that the CV header is incomplete and so, I might say, the code ends up not at the right place which makes for example the sprites demo not working. For instance, the absence of the label at the correct place in the header for the NMI routine screw up the entire execution. I'm not sure how you can manage to fix this, but here is what I have for my C programs. The header is structured simply as this : ;; CARTRIDGE HEADER (IN ROM) .area _HEADER(ABS) .org 0x8000 .db 0x55, 0xaa ; no default colecovision title screen => 55 AA .dw 0 ; no copy of sprite table, etc. .dw 0 ; all unused .dw _buffer32 ; work buffer (RAM ADDRESS OF COURSE) .dw 0 ; ?? .dw start_program ; start address for game coding .db 0xc9,0,0 ; no RST 08 support .db 0xc9,0,0 ; no RST 10 support .db 0xc9,0,0 ; no RST 18 support .db 0xc9,0,0 ; no RST 20 support .db 0xc9,0,0 ; no RST 28 support .db 0xc9,0,0 ; no RST 30 support jp spinner_int ; RST38 - spinner interrupt jp _nmi_asm This header covers 90% of the needs for new CV projects. You may decide to replace the reserved buffer space (_buffer32) by simply a null value 0, it depends if you are gonna use some of the BIOS routines or not. If you wanted to see the default ColecoVision screen that last 10 seconds, the TEXT used for the title, company and year should be right next to this ROM header, and the first part being AA 55 instead of 55 AA. In this header again, I've setup a buffer to be 32 bytes long, which is enough for some graphic routines in CVBIOS which are unused by homebrewers so far. These 32 bytes are enough for REFLECT VERTICAL $1F6A, HORIZONTAL $1F6D and ROTATE90 $1F70 (ref.: CV coding guide). But why 32 bytes? Because of a strange but true fact about CV sound routines. CV Sound routines in the BIOS needs information stored in $7020-$702A as SOUND ADDRESSES and $702B..?? as SOUND SLOTS (10 bytes each slot, plus an extra byte at the end to say "no more sound sound slot"). So we end up with a very short space of 32 bytes $7000-$701F which I think was used in a primitive version of the CV BIOS as a table for the sprites reordering. You can surely decide to go with your own sound routines and so avoid the strange RAM usage starting at $7020, it's really up to you. So my RAM mapping starting at $7000 looks like this usually : ;; TABLE OF VARIABLES (IN RAM) .area _DATA _buffer32:: .ds 32 ; buffer space 32 [7000-701F] snd_addr:: .ds 11 ; sound addresses [7020-702A] snd_areas:: .ds 61 ; 5 sound slots + NULL (00h) [702B-...] _no_nmi:: .ds 1 _vdp_status:: .ds 1 _nmi_flag:: .ds 1 _joypad_1:: .ds 1 _keypad_1:: .ds 1 _joypad_2:: .ds 1 _keypad_2:: .ds 1 spinner_enabled:: .ds 1 As the program starts, the first thing you want to do is to set "im 1" to first make sure that, if you are gonna use the steering wheel, roller controller or even the little spinner on the SuperAction joysticks they will work with this header. The second thing is probably "di" to deactivate by default getting interupts from the spinner (why? because interuptions mean stopping your code at any random point which may affect the end results). Then, a nice cleam up of the RAM space with a simply ldir opcode. What I do next is setting up sound tables, screen mode, graphics, etc... you know, the fun part. start_program: im 1 ; interrupt mode -> rst 38h di ; disable spinners by default xor a ; clear carry ld bc,#0x3b8 ; ram size left ld hl,#0x7000 ; starting from 7000 ld de,#0x7001 ld (hl),a ldir ; zero-fill bss I hope this little introduction of the CV header helps your decision on how you are gonna approach this CV header "complexity" and make it simple for you. Good continuation! P.S.: I saw your message in my Youtube, a bit late but I saw it.

My good ColecoVision busted, I can't test the cartridges I've just made, I'm a bit in a trouble here. I saw your project here and I'm quite enthusiast about it, do you think you can make a working prototype for christmas? While I'm on this topic here, I will be happy to provide some of my own CV games to your project.

Please receive here my official thanks to all of you for putting a smile in my face. The highly positive response for this strip poker game, the amount of orders for cartridges is simply bigger than I expected to be honnest. I was thinking, maybe 30 copies tops... well, it went beyond my expectations to the point that I have to order more material to complete these orders which I hope can be done specialy if Harvey DeKleine is still providing his help with pcbs that would be great. I need to print some more labels and start making the first cartridges during to ship them as soon as paypal finaly transfer some money into my bank account. The popularity of this game actually makes me rethink about coding a few other potential games ideas that I've discarded in the past years. Thank you so much for your support, it is really appreciated.

James B. : 1 black

Bill L. : 1 black Send me an email to newcoleco at yahoo dot fr. Shipping cost is approximately $7.80 apparently.

Oh well, because of my mistake of keep tracking of all the messages, there will be 7 blue carts instead of 6. Sorry David, I've mixed your name with David C. at some points, but don't worry, you'll get your blue cart. David S. : 1 black + 1 blue

Luc Miron : 1 black Holland : 1 black Tobby : 1 black + 1 blue Brian K. : 1 blue ColecoDan : 1 blue David C. : 1 black + 1 blue Michael P. : 1 black boxpressed : 1 blue gerry brophy : 2 black maria (maybe?) : 1 black + 1 blue No more blue carts left... unless maria changes her mind.