Pixelboy

I never would have guessed that Pengo was the one. Looking forward to some screenshots, if only to see how Pengy differs from the original arcade game.

I wouldn't call a box and manual "bonus memorabilia". I'm talking everything else they can insert in the box.

My picks would be either Pleiads, or Peter Pepper's Ice Cream Factory. In fact, a sequel to BurgerTime featuring Peter Pepper but not necessarily set in an "Ice Cream Factory" would fit your clues pretty well. Also, Diner was only released on the Intellivision, if I recall correctly, so perhaps something like "Peter Pepper's Diner"?

So given the above, I'd say it's one of these: Pac-Man Polaris Pleiads Pac-Man Plus Pengo Pole Position Pooyan Popeye Pac & Pal Phozon Pickin' Pole Position II Professor Pac-Man Pac-Land Pandora's Palace Paperboy Peter Pack Rat Peter Pepper's Ice Cream Factory Pitfall II: Lost Caverns Are we getting warmer?

It all comes down to wallet damage, I'd say. If you reduce the "bonus memorabilia" to a minimum, how will that affect the price of the games? If the bonus stuff adds a lot to the price, I would expect people will want to pay less. If the price is the same (which means you're paying for the bonus stuff out of your own pocket) then I think people will appreciate the extras, but in the end, it's all about the game itself. Just my opinion.

I've practically never played Spy Hunter with the SAC, and I played a lot of Spy Hunter BITD, so I had little trouble with the stock controller. The only "problem" was positioning the car properly with the enemy chopper while pressing the keypad key to launch a missile. That always gave me a little bit of trouble.

Not necessarily all that surprising since a lot of ColecoVision fans don't own a Roller Controller. That's the target audience for a Standard Controller Edition.

I don't have any insider info or anything, but one other possible reason for the "secrecy" (aside from pandemic-related issues) could be that they're trying to see if they can release the Pocket and the Dock on the same date. That alone would greatly boost sales, but it would also make their production schedules more complex, let alone putting more pressure on the development side of things. Under such circumstances, it would be understandable to delay making announcements until they're sure that they can deliver both the Pocket and the Dock simultaneously.

Good question, and I'll be answering this in an upcoming Team Pixelboy News Bulletin, hopefully within a couple of weeks. I'm waiting for some stuff to come together before I post the bulletin.

Is it a Nice Ideas prototype?

It looks nice, and the "rotating" mechanism in the TV screen is kinda cool, but this thing would have been much cooler if it had been packed with an actual NOAC board designed to be inserted inside this NES replica. Then it could have been connected to an actual television set, and even if the game cartridge had been fake, it could have come packed with some built-in games like SMB, Metroid, etc.. Of course, the controllers would need to be real as well, as controllers made with Lego parts would not stand the rigors of play for very long. It won't take long for some people to stuff this thing with a Raspberry Pi or something similar.

If that's what it takes to make this controller happen, at least as a one-off, then sure.

Yep, it's a full-fledged flight simulator at its core. That's why a controller like the one I proposed would be nice, because the placement of the buttons would be more intuitive while you're trying to keep up with everything that's going on around your plane.

Interesting, I missed that.

Yep. Also, according to the manual of the game, the right trigger button is never used, so both "FIRE / ACTION" buttons would be mapped to the left trigger button. But this would need to be verified, obviously.

Another great creation! I know you intend to make a controller for WarGames eventually, but is Dam Busters on your list as well? I attached below a rough mockup of how I envision a Dam Busters controller. May it inspire you.

Won't that summon Cthulhu or something?

Pitstop and Turbo (as well as Destructor) were fun to play with the steering wheel, but I had a basic problem with Bump 'n Jump: Setting up a jump by moving the car left or right was rather slow to do with the steering wheel. And moving sideways in mid-jump was pretty slow too. You really had to turn the wheel fast to match the more accurate controls provided by the standard controller. So BITD, after deciding that the steering wheel wasn't optimal for Bump 'n Jump, I went back to the stock controller.

Perhaps some dip switches on the unit, for configuration settings? Or maybe just a knob of some kind, to put the unit in the desired mode. Also, how about a barcode reader?

It's fine, it's an old thread.

Also, it can be argued that the 44% of people who voted "HDMI" in this thread's poll understood implicitly that they were going to get square pixels on their modern TVs, and that didn't bother them one bit. Sure doesn't bother me.

So when you steer the wheel, it just presses against switches mapped to left and right, kind of like the SG-1000 steering wheel controller?

Awesome!!!! Congrats on a job well done!

I was agreeing with your post until this part above. Some people seem to have a philosophical problem with the concept of "territory" where ColecoVision homebrewing is concerned. Yet this concept has been at the core of CV homebrewing since the appearance of the very first CIB homebrews over a decade ago. But in a way this "philosophical problem" is understandable because there's a certain notion of open tell-and-share in other homebrew communities: Look at how easily Atari 2600 homebrewers share work-in-progress ROMs of their games on the AtariAge forums, there's not a lot of that going on in the ColecoVision community. So yes, there's a concept of "territory" in this community of homebrewers. It follows the first-arrived-plants-his-flag system, and when someone says he has dibs on a game or a piece of hardware, other CV homebrewers are expected to respect this "unwritten declaration" before and after the release of the product, especially if the game is planned to be released with a box and manual. For example, do you know why the famous Coleco vaporware title "Dracula" has never been released on cartridge by a CV homebrewer? One of the main reasons is because a guy named Dale Wick (he goes by the handle "hardhat" on AtariAge) has dibs on Dracula. He did some work on it (I saw his work-in-progress at an AdamCon convention years ago) and then he lost interest afterwards. Yet, to this day, no one else has seriously tackled Dracula. I should mention that this is a bad example, because Dale Wick has been missing in action on AtariAge (and in the general ColecoVision homebrew community) for a few years now, and I don't think he would complain if someone else did his own version of Dracula on ColecoVision. But the point is that he could "legitimately" pop on on these forums and complain if he wanted to, and the rest of the community would take note of his complaint. Also, with Dracula there's only one mockup screenshot and a short text that loosely describes the game on a Coleco promo flyer, and it's rather hard to create a good game from scratch with so little information, so that's another reason why no one else has tackled the project. Anyway, all this to say that the concept of territory is important in this community, and saying that "it shouldn't be this way" is not going to make it go away. Anyone who steps on someone else's territory is going to need boxing gloves, that's all there is to it.

If I may add something, I've published many SGM-dependent MSX ports over the years (including many ports of MSX homebrew games) and my angle towards those has always been about the quality and fun factor of the games themselves, rather than the fact that they are "more easily portable" to the ColecoVision. There are a lot of sub-par games on the MSX (and on the SG-1000 too) and I steered clear from them, publishing only the games that I believed players would have actual fun playing. I would have gladly published several more MSX ports, like Parodius or King's Valley II, if the SGM had been capable of outputting SCC sound. So when I encounter people putting off MSX ports on the ColecoVision, it makes me believe those people can't tell a good game from a crappy one. If the games are genuinely fun to play, that's what matters.