Bruce Tomlin

Definitely worth 10 bucks. That's what I paid for mine a few years ago when I found it in Best Buy's assortment of $10 games. I'm not sure what it was doing there, because it still sold for more than that used at the time.

Um, yeah, Coleco sold quite a few pong clones long before the CV.

(This is probably in more than a few FAQs, but whatever.) First thing is don't use an auto-switch box on a system that doesn't support it. I'm serious. Whether you know better or not, it has to be said. It's too easy for people in general to not understand this, because they don't understand why it works in the first place. It works because the console sends power to the switch to make it switch. For what it's worth, the necessary circuit can be added to older systems with various levels of difficulty. So with that aside, the best way (without getting a video-out mod) is to get an F-to-RCA plug adapter. The gender you needs depends on whether your system has a wired-in cable or not. For systems like the (non-Jr.) 2600 that have a built-in cable, you need a female RCA/male F connector to plug it into the back of the TV. For all the rest that have an RCA connector, get a male RCA/female F connector and use TV coax. If you don't need to watch actual TV on the set (now that only cable broadcasts analog signals), the lack of a switch is even better than an automatic switch. (But don't do this with a system that does use an automatic switch, to avoid having the switch power go into your TV set.) If you do need a switch to hook up multiple systems, get a "Cable A/B switch". They are much higher quality than the slider switches that came with video games back in the day. They used to make multi-device switches, but that was so long ago that you aren't even likely to find them in thrift stores anymore. (I should mention that the 2600 internally uses an RCA plug to connect the RF cable. You could probably replace it with a TV cable, but the thickness of the cable -- which is what makes it so much better -- would make it difficult to use as a substitute.)

Eh? I said nothing about a speech snyth chip. I was talking about the extra memory needed to hold the extra sound data. (But you do need a speech synth chip to do speech without spending way too much on ROM chips.) I hate to shatter your dreams, but extra stuff doesn't come free. As I was saying, every extra 8K (enough memory to hold 2-4 seconds of raw audio) you had to add to a cartridge meant a couple dollars in extra costs. Extra costs mean either lower profit or you have to raise the price of the game. Neither was a attractive proposition once The Crash started to take hold.

"Real" in what way? No way would Atari have made a board like that with an EPROM, months after the game's release. They never missed an opportunity to monopolize mask ROM production to bring down per-chip prices and put the squeeze on competitors. (That's part of the reason they had to bury so many ET carts.) But it was clearly a professional mass-production design, with snap-apart gold-contact circuit boards and (apparently) wave soldering. (note that boards like that can be separated after assembly and soldering!) Someone must have been making relatively large quantities (thousands) of those... maybe it was from a high-volume pirate operation? I really don't know what to think.

You guys got me into action. I finally got around to ripping some of my old Sega CD games and set up the PicoDrive emulator for PSP. And because my stick was almost full, I went and got a 16GB MSPD too. ($70 at Fry's, and I noticed the total lack of any 3rd-party versions... I guess nobody else wants to share the inSONYty of the Memory Stick format.) So now I can finally play some of my Sega CD games without having to hook up a bunch of stuff.

Actually, that's to fool it into thinking the disk is double density (800k) rather than high density (1440k). The magnetic properties of the media changed between HD and DD, so while this is a bad idea for long-term usage, it's a good trick for trying to get something onto an older Macintosh with only 800k drives. And FYI, you can usually tell whether an SE has HD floppy drives or not, because I recall they put "FDHD" lettering on the front of the case of an SE that shipped that way. However, they could still have been upgraded later with the new disk controller chip.

There's now a 1-hour time limit on most boards.

I think that is the main point here. And in order to get his stuff, he still has to pay more than everyone else is paying. That sort of reduces the potential customer base, if you just turn around and sell them in the same place. Yeah? So? If nobody buys them at his absurd prices, all he's going to do is end up with a lot of unsold crap... that he paid actual money for. You can ask any price you want, but you can't force someone to pay it.

Pot. Kettle. Black. HAND.

Ummmm... hooray necro-post. The original poster just needed the screen cover plate, which are still available if you search around. There's someone with a video game store who regularly puts singles and 10-packs up on ebay, or at least did a couple of years ago. If your actual LCD display is broken, it's probably not worth the trouble of repairing it.

Where did you measure this? Before or after the power switch? Because I'm sure this is actually a power switch problem. As I have written a few times before, the grease in approximately 100% of Colecovision power switches has dried up, allowing the switch contacts to oxidize. Eventually this will reduce the power to the unit enough to cause problems. The best way I have found to fix this is to desolder the switch, take it apart and clean it, re-pack it with dielectric grease from an auto parts store, then re-install it.

I can say one thing about the board in that photo... it's no one-off hobbyist or prototype board. It's clearly designed for mass-manufacture with its snap-apart edges. Are there any part numbers on it? The dates on the chips indicate that it is no older than mid-'82. I see the release date as September 1981, so if it's Defender, it's not a "prototype" as in pre-release. And Atari (AFAIK) wouldn't have used an EPROM, especially post-release.

If you live where there's a Fry's, they have (or at least had a couple of years ago) an S-video to dual-male-RCA cord for five bucks or so. Then you can use a standard S-video A/V switch.

Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man were exiles from Flatland, transferred to a dimension where they had nourishment, but could do nothing more than eat and flee from the ghosts that inhabited the labyrinths of this dimension. They did, however, have a chance to meet and mate, hence Jr. Pac-Man and Baby Pac-Man. At some point the Maze Dimension expanded, and the Pacs became spheres with a wedge missing. Yet they were still doomed to haunt the mazes along with the ghosts.

I noticed that the newcoleco web site was still on Geocities, so I ran a "wget -r" on it. It found two other sites referenced from there (newcoleco2 and vgbelloq), plus a third which only had an index.html linking to its new location. Then I stripped the server-generated junk from the html and zipped up the files. Shouldn't this be in the "Gaming Publications and Websites" category? This a lot bigger than just the 2600. EDIT: just so you know, if you have wget, all you have to is this: wget -r http://www.geocities.com/(path) There should be no need to add index.html to the path. Wget will look for and download every file it can, and put it in a directory named "www.geocities.com/path". It will also spider into other linked geocities sites, so there's a chance that you could break out into unrelated sites.

You're making the assumption that they would have released it on a 32K (or 24K) cartridge... just for the sound. That would definitely have increased the materials cost of the cartridge, especially if they went with the multiple-8K-chips layout of the typical cartridge. The most expensive part in the cartridge (at least back in the day) was the chips. Even 2 bucks per 8K chip would have added $4 to the parts cost, either cutting into profit, or requiring a higher retail price. The bean-counters surely would not have gone for it. (To use a single 32K chip would require a 4-input NAND chip to combine the chip selects, so it still wouldn't have been a single-chip board.)

I have a feeling what this refers to is how the board got around the lack of a R/W line by using a different address range for reads vs writes... which is exactly how the 2600 Supercart RAM works. The chips on the board seem about right for that. Fortunately most of the traces are on the bottom side of the board, so it should be possible to create a schematic of it.

I added a 4000-4FFF version (actually 4000-47FF and 6000-67FF to be specific), but wasn't able to update the message text before the edit button timed out.

That would explain why a message became non-editable while I was editing it. Was the abuse really that bad? Oh well. EDIT: okay, this is wierd: I was just now able to attach a file, but not change the text to the message. Go figure. Maybe the attach happened within the 60 minutes.

I figured that the 32K dump included the last 8K from the EPROM, but I've disassembled the whole thing (with a tracing disassembler), and it only uses half of the last 8K of space for the RAM, and ignores the rest. There is no bank switching. The RAM is implemented similar to Superchip RAM on the 2600, except that it's 2K instead of 256 bytes. I suspect that the RAM is mirrored at both E000 and F000, and that it is impossible to read the last 8K of the ROM from the Colecovision. Playing the 32K version would probably confuse the hell out of the game on an emulator, since it would look like it had a scrambled save file. With minor modifications, it can be played on a CV with extra RAM, but of course you would have to supply your own battery backup. Someone needs to see what game that last 16K corresponds to, because it's not part of LoD. As I said before, the code that's at E000 was clearly assembled at A000. Anyhow, I've got my ICE set up on a Coleco right now for another project, so I should try to re-assemble it with changed RAM addresses and play it. EDIT: I loaded it up and tried playing it for about 5 minutes. The user interface is completely awful. And it starts up with a title screen that expects you to press down on the joystick first? JRPG-style menus would have been much better than the keypad. And it requires use of the right button, which makes my Champ keypads useless (they don't pass through the right button line to the plugged-in joystick). I can't argue too much though, since this got squeezed into 24K. It does seem to be pretty near complete, though. So here's a version re-assembled to look for R/W RAM at 6000-6FFF: lod.6000.bin lod.4000.bin

Osomatsu-kun: Hachamecha Gekijou

I did discover something interesting back in the '90s. At a flea market once, I found a cardboard box with eight games inside, packed around the edge such that the size of the box was the length + height of a single cart box. What was so interesting about this? It was a shipping box exactly the height and width of the Arcadia 2001 console's box. So there must have been some offer somewhere to get the unit with eight games, probably via some overstock or clearance place, or as a giveaway prize from a vacation homes offer. Anecdote: I once lucked into THREE Arcadia consoles new-in-box. Someone told me he had seen what he thought were Colecovisions at a Radio Shack dealer store in a small town south of San Antonio. Turned out they were three Arcadias, with the boxes partially faded from sitting in the sun for years. And no games. I took the best insides and the best box and traded it to JerryG for a Sean Kelly Vectrex multicart. There was a close call in that the shipper had treated it roughly, but I knew to ship it in another box with foam peanuts on all six sides.

Completely different. Go (game) - Wikipedia Computer Go - Wikipedia Partially solved games - Wikipedia The way I describe it is: Chess is like a battle, but Go is like a war. You basically end up with multiple battle sites all over the board, and have to pick the most important one in which to make a move. Of note is that while there are very few primary rules, they result in a second set of derived "rules", such as "two eyes lives". It is very hard to get a computer to play beyond the level of an above-average amateur player. And that's a modern computer, not a 6502 with few hundred bytes of RAM. It can be played on smaller boards, but usually only 9x9 and 13x13. 9x9 is good for fast games (15 mins vs the 2 hrs or so of the full board), and 13x13 has elements of play from both 9x9 and 19x19. Also of note is that 19x19 is the largest board in which the inside area is smaller than the edge area, when you line up opposing stones on the 3rd and 4th lines, so anything larger than 19 has yet another play style.

I noticed a day or two ago the board wasn't letting me edit some of my own posts. What's up? http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/151433-cv-lord-of-the-dungeon-images/page__view__findpost__p__1855297 http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/151682-when-did-this-happen/page__view__findpost__p__1854723 FYI, I just posted a message and it is letting me edit it.