colecovision manufacturer?

[+retroclouds]

Here's a question I did not yet find an answer too:

 

What company designed and later on manufactured/assembled the colecovision ?

 

I checked wikipedia, but did not find anything related to that.

 

Can't imagine that Coleco did the whole thing by their own. Did they have any manufacturing plants?

 

Do vaguely remember reading somewhere that Texas Instruments could have been involved in the design process.

Is that true? I know that the colecovision does carry a Texas Instruments VDP and sound processor and

perhaps Texas Instruments was realy involved in the actual design/manufacturing. we know that TI had the plants

but I for one don't know if they also were into contract jobs.

 

retroclouds

[ten-four]

Hi kroy2049...

 

I can only speak for myself, all my Colecovision are all made in Hong Kong.

 

My Roller Controller are made in Taiwan.

 

My ordinary Controllers are also from Hong Kong.

 

So I would think that the people in Hong Kong and Taiwan were involved in the design along with designers from Coleco Industries in the U.S.

and maybe Canada.

 

Sorry I can not be more specific, but it is a really good question you come up with.

 

I'd love to know the answer too.

[goldvrx]

The bottom of my colecovision says "Made in USA"

The controllers are made in Taiwan

 

George

[ozma wars]

Some romsets are made in Italy !!!

proud to have had some part on it.

[ApolloBoy]

He's not asking where they were made, but which company designed the Colecovision. Coleco manufactured the Colecovision themselves, but I believe TI designed the CV, which would make sense considering how much of it consists of TI parts.

[JamesD]

I'm sure Coleco designed it themselves. The Colecovision was made with off the shelf parts.

All they needed to do was design the glue logic hooking things together to get a prototype working.

I'm guessing most of it was based on the sample designs for the TI chipset.

Part of the problem with the Colecovision was it had a large number of chips.

If they had created custom glue logic chips the system could have been much smaller, cheaper, and probably more reliable.

[Bruce Tomlin]

If they had created custom glue logic chips the system could have been much smaller, cheaper, and probably more reliable.

I would say that it's basically an off-the-shelf design built around the VDP and PSG chips. This combination was also used by Sega for the SG-1000, but the I/O was wired differently. (And someone at Coleco had their brain screwed on backward when they hooked up the VDP interrupt to the NMI.) There was even a 6502 system (Homevision?) built around the chipset.

 

"Custom glue logic chips" are very much not a low-cost option back in 1982. PAL chips were around as early as 1978, but didn't get much use in consumer equipment until the Macintosh. But since many of the CV chips were for specific functions, not shared decode logic, there wasn't much that you could use a PAL chip for. Certainly not enough to replace a few 25 cent chips with a two dollar chip.

 

The biggest problem with the CV chip count was the DRAM. 4-bit DRAM chips really hadn't caught on by then, and even if they had, the TMS9918/9928 requires separate data input and output lines, which the 4-bit chips didn't have because most things just tied the lines together anyhow. So the video alone takes up nine chips and eight square inches, before you even reach the analog side.

[JamesD]

If they had created custom glue logic chips the system could have been much smaller, cheaper, and probably more reliable.

I would say that it's basically an off-the-shelf design built around the VDP and PSG chips. This combination was also used by Sega for the SG-1000, but the I/O was wired differently. (And someone at Coleco had their brain screwed on backward when they hooked up the VDP interrupt to the NMI.) There was even a 6502 system (Homevision?) built around the chipset.

There really weren't any other off the shelf parts with sprites so I'm not surprised at how many designs used the TI chips.

 

"Custom glue logic chips" are very much not a low-cost option back in 1982. PAL chips were around as early as 1978, but didn't get much use in consumer equipment until the Macintosh. But since many of the CV chips were for specific functions, not shared decode logic, there wasn't much that you could use a PAL chip for. Certainly not enough to replace a few 25 cent chips with a two dollar chip.

Keep in mind that you aren't just replacing a few 25 cent chips. You are reducing board size and the size of the entire system which will save more on plastic than the chip will cost.

 

The biggest problem with the CV chip count was the DRAM. 4-bit DRAM chips really hadn't caught on by then, and even if they had, the TMS9918/9928 requires separate data input and output lines, which the 4-bit chips didn't have because most things just tied the lines together anyhow. So the video alone takes up nine chips and eight square inches, before you even reach the analog side.

It sounds like a new version of the chipset was required for any real space savings unless some bridge to 4 bit RAMs was developed.