Dr. Van Thorp

On another discussion topic, it was mentioned that some of the old Colecovision games looked really great on the screen, but got dull fast, while many Intelevision games, with less detailed graphics, were more fun to play. I remember old games where the controls felt slow to respond, and some that were repetative, or too slow, or two fast. The original Space War failed as a machine because the controls were too complicated, but then Defender was a hit a few years later; I, myself, could never deal with games where the player object rotated like the Space War ship. Fighting games with complex moves that require a lot of learning do not appeal to casual gamers but make big money off hard-core addicts. Has anyone doen any real scientific study of what makes a video game fun? It seems like with the millions spent to develop games these days, someone would have done something like this.

You controller design is similar to the controllers from the old Colecovision store display. The display controllers also used arcade sticks and buttons (one red, one white) and the stock number pad, though the layout was different. I had a couple of these display controllers once, but, sadly, they went to the garage sale many years ago.

An era ended when these connectors went out of use. For some reason, PC hardware makers decided to use analog potentiometer joysticks back in the 80's. I guess that this allows finer, more detailed controle, but it is really not needed for most games. PC interfaces for Atari-style sticks were not common, and this had to have been a big part of the old-style controlers dieing off.

Interesting, this phenomena of the games seeming better at first, but then getting dull quickly. Has anyone done any real scientific study of what makes a video game fun to play? Did you know that internally, the Sega Master System is almost exactly like a Colecovision? The NES has similar display capabilities to the Colecovision, but can display more colors total, and can squeeze more colors in to an 8x8 pixel display tile.

The 1958 Pong game was called "Tennis for Two".

And since you listed computers, you may want to add Apple II (1976) to the list. Not to mention Commodore 64 and MSX. Also worthy of research for inclusion: the original Spacewar game that ran on a maneframe, and the original transister based osciloscope pong demo game. What was the first cartridge-based handheld game?

eBay has this wonderfull department called Vero. The idea is that intellectual property owners can send a fax to ebay and get any auction cancelled at aby time for any reason. One time I got a movie that was released on VHS a couple of weeks early in Canada. I had genuine studio copies, purchased from a major Canadian retailer, for sale from my home in the Detroit area. My auction was cancelled and I was given a warning for selling pirate videos. As best as I can determine, eBay created Vero to keep from getting suid by Hasbro back in the days when much authentic Japanese Pokemon merchendise was being sold by Americans, and Hasbro had a bug up their ass because they weren't getting a percentage from these low-volume importers. I have had auctions suddenly pulled after I had been selling the same item week after week without incident. Then when I posted the same item the following several weeks, I was able to sell it without incident. So what has happened is that some corporate pinhead has made a list of auctions and faxed it to ebay. In a week or two, the corporate pinhead might completely forget about eBay, and sales of unlicensed joystick games might resume without any problems.

Is 255 individual files really an efficient way to do this?

Might be that the little switch under the key has gone bad. What do the guts of the keyboard look like? Does it look like the individual key switches could be replaced?

How hard would it be to add code the the emulator to print the aformentioned Atari font to the printer?

Well, I don't have a library for either. I thought that it would be a cool project for the Sir Edmond Hillary reason: just to prove that it can be done.

I found a web site the other night that describes a bunch of 80's era computers and game machines that use the same cpu and graphics and sound chips. It turns out that MSX machines, Colecovision, and Sega Master System are all pretty much the same machine. There are adapters for playing Colecovision games on some MSX machines. Possibly, a Colecovision could be modified to play Sega Master System games. Do you think that it would be worth doing?

There is a readilly avialable Commodore 64 font that duplicates the 8x8 grid characters of the old machine.

There were expansions available in Japan that included a keyboard and BASIC language, etc. Game cartridges are not the whole world.

I found the master page that explains the relationship between Colecovision, MSX, and some machines I've never heard of. Even the Sega Master System is part of the family. http://www.pelikonepeijoonit.net/confusingfacts.html Someone could have made a nice cross-development system to write games once to play on all these machines.

I saw a message board for people that are hacking the C-64 30 in one. Is anyone doing anything similar to joystick games that contain NES compatable hardware?

Another idea: Maybe if you wrote some perfectly timed code, you could change the color registers and get some extra colors on to the screen. Similar to tricks used in 2600 game kernals. If you could get code to execute in close syncronization with the raster, you could change the color registers as the raster moves from left to right, and get some extra colors out of mode 4. It might be easier if you had one or two colors that changed the same, and use only unchanging colors on the areas of the screen where the raster is when your custom code is changing registers. I found a web site once that described a demo hack that did something similar on the VIC-20's modest graphics hardware, but I think that it only did verticle changes. Is it worth doing? Why do men climb mountains? Because it's there.

Maybe if you wrote some perfectly timed code, you could change the color registers and get some extra colors on to the screen. Someone was just asking about using changes during display blank to blend colors. "Kernal tricks" might be just what he's looking for. If you could get code to execute in close syncronization with the raster, you could change the color registers as the raster moves from left to right, and get some extra colors out of mode 4. It might be easier if you had one or two colors that changed the same, and use only unchanging colors on the areas of the screen where the raster is when your custom code is changing registers. I found a web site once that described a demo hack that did something similar on the VIC-20's modest graphics hardware, but I think that it only did verticle changes. Is it worth doing? Why do men climb mountains? Because it's there.

Flicker varies with monitors.

I didn't know that they had third-party lock-out systems that early. It was the beginning of the end.

I thought that the Coleco was 6502-based. MSX was modeled after a spectrovidio machine. Do you suppose that Spectrovideo modeled their computer after Colecovision?

Zoids has been around for many years, and has been distributed outside Japan by several different toy companies (in Japan it's a Tomy toy line). It seems to have only really caught on recently under Hasbro.

How difficult is it to translate a game from MSX to Colecovision? I know that the graphics capabilities are somewhat similar, but the proccessors are different. Are their tools available for translating Z-80 code to run on 6502?

I hears that the Atari 800 has some graphics hardware features that compensate for this deficiency.

I downloaded the zip file that's supposed to contain images or someting, and it contained a mystery file that I couldn't match to an application. Amazing what can be done on these old machines twenty years later. Why couldn't professional developers do these things back then?