7800 vs. Colecovision

[toptenmaterial]

I'm not a technical guy- at all- but this video seems to imply that the colecovision could eclipse the NES graphically.

[+darryl1970]

I'm not a technical guy- at all- but this video seems to imply that the colecovision could eclipse the NES graphically.

That is with a new expansion module. It couldn't in its original form.

[kool kitty89]

One thing I wish had happened with the Colecovision is that more post-crash programmers looked at it. It seemed weird that it didn't really continue in some fashion whereas the 2600 and Intellivision did. INTV even had COMMANDO on it.

 

Would have been neat to see post-crash programmers trying to push it, using bankswitched cartridges, mapper chips etc.

 

Yeah, Coleco was short sighted like Mattel and dumped it, but unlike Mattel, no one picked it up again. (a shame since it had a lot more long term potential than the Intellivision)

 

There was a clone with dual SG-1000 and CV compatibility released in the US, but I think that's about it. (if Sega had stuck-in, I wonder if they could have taken advantage of some form of cooperation with Sega given the nearly identical hardware -a shame Coleco didn't managed the Adam more like the SC-3000 in some areas, that could have made a big difference; ie have the lowest end computers identical to the CV but with a keyboard and monitor/AV output -maybe some other peripheral ports or just the expansion port- and then have a mid-range model with expanded RAM but still a fairly bare bones form factor, and then something more like the higher-end desktop form factor of the historical adam -but much more modular and with different bundles, some with just the machine itself, others adding drives, printer, etc, and get rid of those funky tape drives in favor of more conventional tapes -much slower than the custom format, but on the higher end of contemporaries like the 3000 baud of the CoCo or Spectrum at "double speed"- and of course push for disk drives for the higher-end medium -perhaps double density from the start, maybe even IBM-like formatting)

 

 

The MSX1 gives a fair impression of what the CV could have managed (albeit with a better stock sound chip and more RAM -in many cases ROM would displace that, in a few cases of software rendered effects, it might not). The SG-1000 to some extent too, though it doesn't seem to have been pushed as far as the colecovision in some cases even. (Sega's own arcade port of Pitfall II has choppy cell-wise vertical scrolling vs smooth scrolling on the Activision game)

[bmcnett]

My Dad was VP of Preliminary Design at Coleco at that time, and until his death in 2009 didn't seem very interested in the videogame side of things. Not sure what involvement he had with it - I remember him showing me a dark gray ADAM prototype, the arcade room they used for research of ports, and a development room where they were working on a filled line graphics RPG.