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Team Pixelboy News Bulletin - July 22nd 2013


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Hello ColecoVision fans!

 

Welcome to the I-just-returned-from-AdamCon summer edition of the Team Pixelboy News Bulletin! :)

 

Last Saturday, during my presentation at AdamCon 25, I showed release-candidate versions of the games that will be coming to a ColecoVision near you next Christmas, namely Battle of Hoth, Module Man, Mecha-8 and Buck Rogers Super Game. Sadly, since Eduardo Mello has been M.I.A. for several weeks now, I had no version of TwinBee to show. Same goes for Front Line SCE. But there was another project which I presented to the AdamCon attendees, and I think now is the proper time to disclose it on AtariAge...

 

 

THE FLIP-CART PROJECT

 

Internally, I like to refer to this as the H.D.E.C. project (Homebrew Double-Ender Cartridge) but the public name of this new product is "Flip-Cart". I had a meeting with Sylvia at Moldex last Wednesday (the day before leaving for AdamCom) and I officially got the ball rolling with Moldex to alter the existing metal mold in order to produce these Flip-Carts. Don't worry, the metal mold will still be able to produce regular Coleco cart casings after everything is said and done.

 

So as you can plainly deduce from the paragraph above, I'm talking about a cartridge with two openings (so two PCBs inside the cart) but Flip-Carts differ slightly from Xonox double-enders in the sense that they are smaller, and they are also designed to have one label on each side, so you need to flip them around (hence the name) instead of just turning them around like Xonox double-enders. Flip-Carts will be specifically designed to house 5-11under's 32K PCBs.

 

The interesting thing is that the Flip-Cart casing will actually be composed of two plastic parts which are identical, and are designed to interlock with each other to form a complete casing. This design idea will help to drive the price down, where modyfying the metal mold is concerned.

 

But this new project will still cost several thousand dollars, and to help finance this endeavour, I am planning to create "Twin Packs" of legacy games. The first of these Twin Packs will be the "ADAM-compatible Twin Pack", which will unite the versions of Defender and Super Cobra which were hacked by nanochess earlier this year to work properly on the ADAM computer. Here's a tentative list of other possible Twin Packs I came up with:

 

02 - "Donkey Kong Twin Pack" (Donkey Kong + Donkey Kong Jr.)

03 - "Mr. Do! Twin Pack" (Mr. Do! + Mr. Do's Castle)

04 - "Q*bert Twin Pack" (Q*bert + Q*bert Qubes)

05 - "Frogger Twin Pack" (Frogger + Frogger II Threeedeep!)

06 - "Pitfall Twin Pack" (Pitfall! + Pitfall II - Lost Caverns)

07 - "B.C. Twin Pack" (B.C.'s Quest for Tires + B.C. II - Grog's Revenge)

08 - "Smurfs Twin Pack" (Rescue in Gargamel's Castle + Paint & Play Workshop)

09 - "Cabbage Patch Kids Twin Pack" (Adventures in the Park + Picture Show)

10 - "Super Action Sports Pack" (Super Action Football + Super Action Soccer)

11 - "Xonox Repro Doubler-Ender #1" (Artillery Duel + Chuck Norris Superkicks)

12 - "Xonox Repro Doubler-Ender #2" (Robin Hood + Sir Lancelot)

13 - "Xonox Repro Doubler-Ender #3" (Tomarc The Barbarian + Motocross Racer)

14 - "Xonox Repro Doubler-Ender #4" (Word Feud + It's Only Rock & Roll)

15 - "Interphase Sam's Adventure Pack" (Sewer Sam + Squish 'Em Featuring Sam)

16 - "Imagic Fantasy Pack" (Fathom + Wing War)

17 - "Imagic Space Pack" (Moonsweeper + Nova Blast)

18 - "Sega Space Pack" (Buck Rogers + Zaxxon)

19 - "Fisher Price Logic Pack" (Linking Logic + Logic Levels)

20 - "SierraVision Twin Pack" (Oil's Well + Sammy Lightfoot)

21 - "Parker Brothers Arcade Twin Pack" (Gyruss + Popeye)

22 - "Parker Brothers Adventure Pack" (Montezuma's Revenge + Tutankham)

23 - "Paddle & Ball Twin Pack" (Strike It + Flipper Slipper)

 

Note that I am fully aware that I'm trying to sell games which many CV fans already have in their collection. I'm only doing these Twin Packs to help finance the Flip-Cart mold. If I add 5$ to the end price of the Twin Packs listed above, and manage to sell just 30 copies of each Twin Pack, then the metal mold alteration will be fully paid for. Of course, I'll be including a custom box and manual with each Twin Pack, while doing my best to keep costs down, so these Twin Packs will be affordable AND worthwhile for CV collectors, even if they already own these games.

 

When I presented the Flip-Cart project at AdamCon, some of the comments I received indirectly gave me a neat idea for additional legacy Flip-Carts: N.K.R. games! N.K.R. stands for "No Keypad Required". Imagine if you played hacks of such games as Venture, Time Pilot, Lady Bug or Pepper II in which you would select your skill level by moving a cursor on the blue skill-select screen and pressing a trigger button to select a skill level, instead of using a keypad key. And when the "GAME OVER" message is displayed, you would press the left or right buttons instead of the [*] and [#] keys to either restart at the same skill level or return to the blue skill-select screen. Then you could play these games with any third-party controller equipped with two fire buttons but no keypad. I think such hacks would make great Flip-Carts, but someone would have to sit down, disassemble each ROM and implement the hack, and they probably could only be done with a handful of early 16K Coleco games (I figure the new cursor-based skill select screen would be coded in the second 16K of a 32K ROM). If I could find someone who would be willing to perform these hacks, I would take care of all the rest... ;)

 

Beyond these proposed legacy Twin-Packs, I'm thinking some CV homebrewers could be interested in using Flip-Carts for some of their projects. I know CollectorVision is already interested, and I'm hoping I can get others interested as well.

 

 

THE BLACK ONYX IS COMING!

 

Earlier today, when I returned home from AdamCon, I found an e-mail from Mystery Man in my inbox, and he had some really good news for me: He got the savegame function working in The Black Onyx, on real hardware! He was having some trouble with it before, but after some hard work, he ironed out the bugs and now the player can save his progress on the EEPROM inside the cartridge! So that means the release of The Black Onyx in the first half of 2014 is pretty much a done deal! RPG fans rejoyce! :D

 

 

This concludes this edition of the Team Pixelboy News Bulletin. We now return you to your regular forum activities. ;)

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if hacking the rom to allow a cusor to select the level is not possible, perhaps hack the rom to allow controller 2 keypad input to function as if it was controller 1 would be good enough

 

See the attached image below for my vision of what I'm talking about. :)

post-7743-0-38919100-1374550598_thumb.png

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I would love to use double-ender cartridge for one of my project. I don't have to worry about bankswitching :P. Seriously, this would be perfect for a game I been working on and I have thought of a double-ender cartridge.This should solve one of my main concern with one of my game being too short.

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I don't know what to think about the Flip-Cart, but I do know that I have been really looking forward to Black Onyx! Kudos to Mystery Man for ironing out the save game feature. This is a game I've been waiting for for a while, and I'll definitely purchase a copy when it comes out.

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