Pixelboy

You want a real suggestion? Coleco's Skiing, the vaporware title. It's right up there among the most drool-inducing of the promotional flyers, yet no one ever got around to actually do it as a homebrew title, and I don't think anyone is working on that game right now.

This was probably a demo, and it probably filled up a large chunk of the available 32K ROM with graphic data. Knowing this, the programmer of this demo probably didn't even expect to make an actual game out of this, unless it was to be upgraded to be an ADAM Super Game. Then everything would have been possible for this type of game. Cut scenes were a rarity in those times, so the driving portion was probably an action sequence that separated the multiple locations of the game where "Papa Smurf's treasures" could be found. I can say this by looking at the promotional flyer image, where a white door/opening can be seen in one of the trees.

Yeah, I'm aware of this, but there's visibly more than two screens in that "winding road" animation sequence. So you still have to update the name table(s) in a sustained manner, and updating any 768 consecutive bytes in VRAM (presumably with raw ROM data) takes the same time, whether it's visible or non-visible. The more sensible solution is running at 30fps (i.e. each screen refresh being displayed for two refresh cycles, which gives you enough time to update VRAM like you want to).

If I were moving a forum of my own to a cloud-based solution, I'd be concerned about maintenance fees from Invision. I'm curious to know if the cloud-based version will be more costly for you, Albert, or less costly compared to the current forums.

Hopefully we'll get confirmation of some kind. My expectation is what we see in the YouTube video is the TV being connected to a hidden VCR, and the footage we see on the TV is a running demo of "Papa Smurf Treasure Hunt". The reason I say it's a demo is because no one is playing it, and we see the entire screen being updated repeatedly as the Smurf drives forward into the scenery. This kind of full-screen update is rather hard to do for the ColecoVision's video processor, as you have to blast 768 bytes of tile data into the name table in VRAM as quickly as possible on each refresh cycle, which leaves very little processing time for any game logic, unless it's done every two refresh frames. Also, I'm not seeing any score, or any enemies on the road. This is consistent with a demo that's just there to wow people with the winding road full-screen animation.

Interesting. That TV set was probably playing a pre-recorded video of that Smurf racing game "Papa Smurf's Treasure Hunt" which turned out to be one of Coleco's vaporware title. So perhaps a prototype of this game exists somewhere...

You mean like a CollectorVision Phoenix?

Yeah, they're all great (from both Coleco and Parker Brothers) except maybe for Space Fury, which is a little clunky and rough around the edges.

Didn't we just celebrate the 30th anniversary? Man, how time flies! ? Anyway, for legacy commercial games, my favs are (in order of preference): - 2010 - The Graphic Action Game - Gateway to Apshai - Root Beer Tapper - Donkey Kong Junior - Spy Hunter - Star Trek - Strategic Operations Simulator - Pepper II - Roc 'n Rope - Star Wars - The Arcade Game - Popeye - Gyruss - War Games As for homebrews: - DKA - Bomb 'n Blast - Asteroids - Magical Tree - Bejeweled / Jewel Panic - Joust - Quest for the Golden Chalice - Sydney Hunter games - Zombie Incident - Burn Rubber - Mario Bros - Vanguard - Pooyan

Gotta admit, the idea never crossed my mind until now, and I think it's pretty cool!

If the video is on YouTube, you just copy-and-paste the link into the text window and it converts it automatically to video display format. Pretty neat, I have to say.

Thanks.

Actually, my "talents" on the ColecoVision are extremely limited. Pretty much all my Team Pixelboy titles are games ported by other people, or programmed from scratch by other people. When I started my publishing label, I had envisioned learning Z80 programming and making some of my own games, but as it turned out, all my time went into everything but programming. I was very lucky to find and work with experts who could really get the job done.

If you want to take a crack at it, here are the two versions of the DSK image which I found in my personal archives. I don't know what the difference is between the two versions, or even if they are 100% good dumps, but they probably are. MicroChip_ADAM.zip

Ah, okay, I didn't know it was a SmartBASIC program.

While you're at it, perhaps we could interest you in porting Steve Pitman's Micro Chip? Something tells me that ADAM game could fit on a cartridge just like Diablo.

That alone is impressive.

Stella emulates the custom chip.

You may be confusing this with the Atari 2600 version, which has its own custom sound chip.

If you really want to develop software on the ADAM, I would invite you to something that current ADAM owners are the most likely to try out, and perhaps even adopt: A new game-oriented version of SmartBASIC. Something that lets you set up the VDP to your liking without having to resort to obscure PEEKs and POKEs, something that lets you import tile and sprite graphics (created by an auxiliary sub-program perhaps) and also sound and music (with yet another sub-program) and just lets you design little games within whatever RAM is not used up by the SmartBASIC software itself. Better yet, if this new incarnation of SmartBASIC had a compiler feature that would let the programmer turn his creation into an actual ColecoVision ROM, that would be cool, but then again, you'd probably be limited to 8K ROMs because of RAM constraints, so a separate compiler that one can run from the command line would be better, if you want to create bigger games. The key feature here would be to have an easy programming language, with easy tools, to let one create games on the ADAM. Just my two cents.

Interesting. If you come up with an Atari 2600 snap-in module, and perhaps an Intellivision snap-in module, this will likely attract lots of people.

Yeah, the pictures are a little crooked, too dark, and there's that big glare in the middle (from your smartphone, I assume). I really need the best box picture possible for the trading card. Let's resume this conversation tomorrow, after your next attempt. Thanks!

Ah! Very good! But in order to use the box image for the trading card, I need a picture taken straight from the top of the box, with no light glare whatsoever. Do you think you could manage that somehow?

Hello everyone. Quick update: I recently finished the templates of all the cards of the European Series, and I am currently working on the hardware cards. I have a question for ADAM experts: Can anyone point me to a full list of all the "accessories" that come with the stand-alone ADAM (manuals, DDPs, one or two beige controllers, daisy wheels, etc.)? And does the Expansion Module #3 come with the exact same accessories (aside from the "underbelly plastic tray")? To close this update, I just want to mention that in terms of boxes of legacy commercial items, I am still missing only five items: - Canadian box of BurgerTime - Canadian box of Root Beer Tapper - Adam Family Computer (Canadian version) - Expansion Module #2 (Canadian version) - Expansion Module #3 (Canadian version) These items are all pictured below, just to prove that they actually exist. Thanks in advance for any help, guys!