[Ghosts ‘N Goblins]

4 minutes ago, Jess Ragan said:

What gives, IBM?

You kinda defeat your own argument there, Jess. When did anyone at IBM ever care about gaming? 

 

[The Processor Used In Pac-Man Is Being Discontinued, 48 Years After It Launched]

So the venerable Z80 is retiring. I have to admit I'm surprised it lasted this long. But then again, it's so well-known that a clone of it can always be created commercially, especially via FPGA, if the need arises. There's always a market for cheap little CPUs, to put in toys, appliances, and whatnot.

 

[Coming this summer, the licensed Coleco Vision Arcade Cabinet]

So the keypad on the bottom right corner of the screen seems to indicate that it's a touch screen? Interesting.   

 

[ColecoDS - An Emulator for the DS/DSi/3DS - Official Release and Discussion Thread]

Ah, okay. 

 

[ColecoDS - An Emulator for the DS/DSi/3DS - Official Release and Discussion Thread]

1 hour ago, wavemotion said:

Fixed Colecovision RAM mirrors such that Boulderdash runs properly.

Wait, does that mean Boulder Dash has problems running on the ADAM? That'd be news to me...

 

[The Weird, Wild World of ColecoVision and its Kin]

Well, all I know is that the VBLANK interrupt is a non-maskable interrupt (NMI) on the ColecoVision, but it's maskable on the SG-1000. Also, the joystick ports work differently. Others can probably provide more details.

 

 

[What do you call the genre defined by Bubble Bobble? What are your favorite examples?]

Bobblevania. 

 

[Colecovision recharged BASIC compiler: CVBasic v0.4.0 (now with compression and MSX support!)]

3 hours ago, nanochess said:

CVBasic starts in MODE 0. In this mode, it loads the ASCII letters and signs in the range 32-127.

... and those "default" letters and symbols are stored in the Coleco BIOS, by the way. 

 

[The Official Game Boy Thread]

2 hours ago, roots.genoa said:

They recently sent an email to backers to explain they just sorted out the cart production problem.

Yep, that's what I was told earlier today.

 

[Colecovision Adam "Temple of Apshai Trilogy?"]

1 hour ago, OriginalJohn said:

Coleco Temple of Apshai was one of my favorite games when it came out.   Nothing like trying to be very careful at the later levels and you get jump scared when a vampire pops up and...  like lightning, tracks over to you in a millisecond and you die.  Fun times.... never did figure out what some of the items do...  Did someone ever decompile this or come up with a better manual to describe each item, etc?

I think you're confusing Gateway to Apshai with Temple of Apshai (which to my knowledge was never released).

 

[The Official Game Boy Thread]

8 hours ago, SlidellMan said:

I'll just leave this here, and I'm glad that Wayforward decided to release this.

Too bad they don't accept Paypal, I would have pre-ordered this right away. Oh well, I'll take my chances with eBay once this comes out near the end of 2024.

 

EDIT: I had a look at Limited Games' Amazon.com storefront. They have a section for pre-orders but Shantae is nowhere to be found, even with the pre-order period ending today. I guess they REALLY don't want me to pre-order this game. Alright guys, I won't! 

 

EDIT #2: This reminds me, I should look up what's happening with the physical GBA release of GoodBoy Galaxy. It's been available in ROM format since December.

 

[Team Pixelboy News Bulletin - January 1st 2021]

6 hours ago, NIAD said:

Seeing as AtariAge will probably never do anything with these games, even for purchase as a rom image download, is there any hope that these can be switched to another CV publisher or the roms for Acromage and Jewel Panic made available?

That's going to be difficult, because Albert is the only guy (as far as I know) who can produce new Activision PCBs, or rather, an alternate version of that PCB which is compatible with regular Coleco cartridge shells.

 

At this point, I think Albert should chime in... 

 

[16 FREE Homebrew Games for ColecoVision From Inufuto]

42 minutes ago, TPR said:

I just tried Chrome on three different computers using two different internet connections and I didn't get any sort of warnings.

Antivirus plug-ins like Norton, perhaps?

 

[the last official Colecovision game?]

Not releasing the ADAM wouldn't really have saved the ColecoVision. The video game crash of 84 was mostly due to retailers looking at Atari going down the drain and losing faith in console gaming as a whole. When Atari went down, it took down the whole industry with it.

 

On the other hand, if Coleco hadn't spent so much money on the ADAM, they could have been in a much better financial position to face the crash of 84. But Coleco would have exited the console gaming market just like Mattel did with the Intellivision, so again, the ColecoVision wouldn't have survived the crash.

 

[Original Playstation a 2-D powerhouse?]

Four words: Symphony of the Night. 

 

[Crisp art on ColecoVision... what's the secret?]

14 hours ago, Falonn said:

When it's done right it looks effortless, but when you take a look with the 8-pixel delimiters, you can see the intricate dance between form and palette:

I'm seeing some 8-pixel lines with three colors (look in the last column on the right side, there's yellow + black + light yellow on some lines near the bottom) which leads me to believe that there are "color-bleed masking sprites" used in that particular picture. 

 

[Colecovision recharged BASIC compiler: CVBasic v0.4.0 (now with compression and MSX support!)]

8 minutes ago, ZippyOasys said:

I thought it was 2 colors per 8x1 scanline for each 8x8 tile. I could be wrong though...

Correct.

 

On the ColecoVision, the background color is actually one of the 16 available colors, and it's the color that is displayed on the TV screen borders outside the 256x192 display. Any pixel inside the 256x192 display can also be set to that color, and it's the only color that can be set via software to be any of the other 15 colors at any time.

 

So let's say you want to simulate a lightning strike (but not necessarily with any lightning graphics, just a flash of white across the screen with a thunder sound effect) you can do this easily on the ColecoVision by setting your "sky" graphics to use the background color, and then change the background color to white with a single quick command to the video display processor, and then reset the background color back to its original value (black, blue, whatever). Do that a few times while the thunder sound effect is playing, and you've got a nice storm effect. 

 

[Why do certain things on some of Imagic's titles just look better on the 2600 when compared to the Colecovision and Intellivision?]

One thing you have to keep in mind is that all those old consoles followed very different hardware architectures. For starters, did you know that the Atari 2600 doesn't have any video memory? This means that a substantial portion of the software on an Atari 2600 cartridge is dedicated to drawing stuff on the screen on the fly. To make the most out of this hardware "limitation", the hardware lets the programmer run a tiny amount of code before drawing each TV scanline. This is how the seagull in your example can have so many colors: The sprite itself is single-colored, but if you change the color of the sprite at the start of each TV scanline, you get a multi-colored sprite on the screen. Note that this technique only works well vertically. Changing a sprite's color while the scanline is in the middle of being drawn is much harder to pull off.

 

Consoles like the ColecoVision and Intellivision do have video memory, and they work quite differently under the hood. For example, the ColecoVision doesn't offer any way for the game software to run code at the beginning of each scanline like it can be done on the 2600. All it offers is a single interrupt signal sent to the CPU after the entire TV screen has been refreshed, and when the software receives this interrupt, it has only a finite amount of time to alter the contents of the video memory before the TV starts the next screen refresh. So that's why the seagull in the ColecoVision version of Fathom only has one color. I'm not very familiar with the Intellivision hardware, but I know it's similar to the ColecoVision in the way it handles displaying graphics.

 

Ask any programmer and they'll tell you that having video RAM to work with is way better than not having it. But video RAM always comes with its own set of constraints, at least where game consoles from the 80s and 90s are concerned.

 

[C_So! Tips?]

You can also crush an enemy under a see-saw: When he's walking under the raised portion of the see-saw, just jump onto that raised portion.

 

[Colecovision BASIC compiler: CVBasic v0.1.0]

This is excellent news! I do have a few questions though:

 

1) I know this new compiler is very early in its development, but do you have plans to offer a tile/sprite editor, or a sound/music editor? If it's not something you've thought a lot about so far, perhaps you could collaborate with people on AtariAge who have already made such editors (mostly for data import/export functionalities)?

 

2) While the programming language is a central part of the project, another very important part is the debugger. Do you plan to add a proper debugger (with breakpoints, RAM usage monitor, interrupt monitor and time-to-next-VBLANK monitor) into CoolCV? One thing that is difficult with programming for the ColecoVision is that you don't have any real control over when the VBLANK NMI happens, and if your code tries to do too many operations between VBLANKs, this results in graphic corruption, and perhaps even complete runtime crashes.

 

3) Your sample Basic code doesn't seem to have any provisions for specifying the compiling setup (i.e. does the game use bankswitching (32K, MegaCart, Activision PCB), does it require the Super Game Module, is it supposed to support (or ignore) interrupts from the Roller Controller, that kind of thing).

 

4) Will you be offering built-in functions with the language? For example, a standard function to detect the SGM, or a function to clear VRAM at boot/reset, or a function to initialize the sound chip into "silent" mode, so programmers won't need to code their own routines?

 

 

Those are just questions off the top of my head, I'm sure I could come up with more. 

 

[Viboritas: A game I made as an 11-year-old kid.]

9 hours ago, nanochess said:

That's so cool! 😀 I hope you have a copy

I had an ADAM at the time (with no floppy drive), not an IBM PC, so I never had any reason to bring home the PC floppy disc from school with my games on it, and there was no printer I could use to print the listings of by Basic programs (I probably did write those listings by hand at one point during development, but I threw away those papers a long time ago). I also didn't know how to define and use sprites in SmartBASIC, so it never occured to me to try to reproduce either Big Maze or Basicanoid on my ADAM.

 

One thing I did do on my ADAM was adapt the Basic listings from the classic books "Computer Spacegames" and "Computer Battlegames". Both can be found (along with others) in PDF format here. A few years ago, I actually spotted both books on eBay and decided to buy them just for nostalgia's sake. I still have them, and I'd be willing to sell them to anyone here, if they share this nostalgia and would like to own them in printed format. 

 

 

 

[Viboritas: A game I made as an 11-year-old kid.]

I can recall the first real "game" I made back in high school, in Basic. It was called "Big Maze" and was essentially a very large maze of interconnected empty rectangular rooms (think Berzerk but without inner walls, and the player controlled an Otto-like smily face). There were no enemies, so there wasn't a lot going on aside from exploring the maze, but I recall that you needed to find a key to reveal the exit of the maze.

 

My second game (during that same time) was actually an end-of-year assignment. I tried making a clone of Arkanoid in Basic called Basicanoid, and while the CGA graphics looked good, my code was a spaghetti mess and I never got the ball to actually collide with the bricks, the ball was like a ghost flying off the screen and making the program crash! I ran out of time and handed in "Big Maze" instead! 

 

[Is there a list of which games work with both the colecovision and Adam?]

Scramble = Super Cobra

 

[Is FPGA really that much better than regular emulation?]

All I can say on this subject is that the number of bugs reported to FPGA core authors (forcing the release of updated cores) looks roughly about the same as the number of issues reported in software-based emulators. That alone tells me that FPGA solutions are not really "better" than emulation, just different.

 

Also, the way FPGAs are used today to replicate game consoles and handhelds is a relatively recent thing, and I have to wonder how long those FPGA chips last. Will Analogue FPGA products still work 20 years from now? Maybe, maybe not. And as FPGA technology progresses, will the cores developed for today's FPGA chips still work on more advanced FPGAs just 5 to 10 years from now? If it turns out that FPGA solutions are just as transient as original hardware, then for me PC-based emulation will always seem like the better option, because programming a pure software emulator is less of a niche activity than learning to program FPGA cores.

 

[Mummy Maze]

If this bug can be reproduced under emulation, then that's where all efforts should be concentrated. An emulator equipped with a step-by-step debugger should be enough to track the problem down and ultimately provide an explaination for the bug. Testing on real hardware is a good thing, of course, but it's absolutely necessary only if emulation fails to reproduce the bug.

 

Just my two cents.