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Why I got back into collecting ColecoVision...


TPR

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Yeah, sorry about it being so much text. While I don't have a list of all the cabinets I owned over the years (bought, sold, and traded quite a lot) here are the ones I had when I sold them off at the very end:

 

Asteroids

Astro Blaster

BagMan

Berzerk

Blaster

Burgertime

Carnival

Centipede

Crazy Climber

Deluxe Space Invaders

Discs of Tron

Domino Man

Donkey Kong

Dragon's Lair

Galaxian

Gorf

Journey

Kickman

Mad Planets

Mappy

Moon Patrol

Mousetrap

Ms. Pac-Man

Omega Race

Pac-Man

Pac-Land

Phoenix

Q*bert

Reactor

Robotron 2084

Satan's Hollow

Sinistar

Space Duel

Space Fury

Space Invaders

Star Castle

Star Wars (upright & cockpit)

Stunt Cycle

Super Street Fighter II Turbo

Tac Scan

Tempest

Tron

Tutankham

Vanguard

Venture

Wacko

Wizard of Wor

Xenophobe

Zookeeper

you had a venture...and a star castle...you are my new hero....

 

I only have an Asteroids (that needs repair) and a Tempest and i'm rebuilding a Centipede cocktail....I want a VENTURE..SOOOOO BADLY

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I think these are now the three rarest carts I have in my collection...

 

Still looking for the following loose carts:

Alcazar

Amazing Bumpman

Boulder Dash

Gust Buster

Skiing

Super Sketch

Tank War

Robin Hood/Sir Lancelot Double Ender

This dude still has the Gust Buster http://www.ebay.com/itm/GUST-BUSTER-Colecovision-new-/151730017918?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2047675.l2557&nma=true&si=Z%252BEpDSZHsEuqZeUD012UYSxN0Y0%253D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc

 

email him

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Today I got an awesome box in the mail from Collectorvision filled with all kinds of goodies, but first I'll focus on these amazing fan-made boxes that create "US Coleco" arcade game boxes for games that never had one. I love this!!! While I like the variety of boxes that are out there, I'll always have a soft spot for the arcade cabinet boxes since I grew up on these and most of the games I had as a kid were in this style. Take a look...

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I think my favorite thing is that when you put them side by side with the classic boxes, they totally fit right into the library:

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I love that Collectorvision made these available, thank you! And kudos to Greg Off who apparently did the design (and he's a guy I used to work with when I was in the games business which just shows how small of a world this all is!) Now I just need to get some more loose carts to put into these boxes to make them more complete! Anyone know how I can get a one-off of Dig Dug or Pac-Man made? =)

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Now I just need to get some more loose carts to put into these boxes to make them more complete! Anyone know how I can get a one-off of Dig Dug or Pac-Man made? =)

Mumbai is your man for loose carts (and possibly even manuals) for games that were released.

 

As far as custom made carts of protos, there are a number of people in the community that can make them for you and CollectorVision would be a good starting place to ask.

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  • 4 weeks later...

 

Star Force, Bank Panic and Track & Field are all excellent titles. Gulkave isn't too bad it's just a little too difficult. I don't own the other games to comment.

Yeah I just got a copy of Gulkave. I was like wow! This ones gonna take some time to figure out! power off. hehe

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So here's something else new I added to my collection this week...

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As a fan of Konami Games and Juno first, I just had to play this on my ColecoVision! And it's also interesting to note that this is now the first game from Opcode to actually require the Super Game Module! ;)

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For those of you who don't know the game, the original arcade version can be described as "Konami trying to be Williams" as the game holds a lot of comparisons in sound FX, graphic style, and lightning fast gameplay as games such as Defender, Robotron, and Blaster...

junofirst_A_1.jpg

The screen shot doesn't do it justice, but open up the ROM in MAME and within the first few seconds, you'll get exactly what I'm talking about.

 

I was happy to see that the ColecoVision version (really the MSX version) ported over some of the key features of the arcade game, especially having lot of enemies on screen and the gameplay is very quick!

junofirst_1.jpg

 

While graphically, it does lose some of that flair that the arcade game has, it's to be expected for a home port, but this one is very good!

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You can still control the speed of your ship and the speed of the enemies coming at you... Every so often a UFO comes out that drops a human when you shoot it that you need to collect (again, more similarities to games like Defender)

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And some of the levels also include the "formations" that the enemies come out in. The game is HARD very hard! But it's also got a learning curve and after a while you can get through usually 4 or 5 stages before dying the first time.

junofirst_3.jpg

 

There are moments where the conversion tries to keep some of the cool looking art style from the arcade game, like when your ship blows up, it looks very much the same...

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One thing is, I kind of wish some of the Opcode "Prototypes" would come out of the prototype phase and just be made available. Juno First seems like a game that I think many people would be interested in, so I hope the decision to put it in a box at some point actually happens!

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One thing is, I kind of wish some of the Opcode "Prototypes" would come out of the prototype phase and just be made available. Juno First seems like a game that I think many people would be interested in, so I hope the decision to put it in a box at some point actually happens!

Exerion falls into this category. It's a fun shooter, but it's prototype only. I've never been a fan of the prototype style of release.

 

At least we can chase raccoons out of the bakery...

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  • 2 weeks later...

So a couple of new items I managed to pick up this week. One of them gets me closer to completing my collection of loose carts...

 

Super Sketch! I was pretty happy with the condition of this one, and other than just needing some wiping down and a little bit of glue in one corner of the cart label, it was in really nice working shape!

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The moment of truth...I go to plug the cart into the system...

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Hooray! It comes up right on screen!

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I decided to play around with it a little bit and even drew the best chainsaw I possibly could!

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And THIS is exactly why I'll never be an artist! lol :grin:

 

Overall, though, while this seems cool to have, I can't see it being something I'm going to actually play with that often, but at least is satisfies my OCD of getting closer to a complete loose cart collection!

 

The other thing I picked up was a NIB sealed Carnival....

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While obviously not as rare or interesting as the Super Sketch, it's always nice to find boxed copies of games that are in really really nice condition. And this was one I didn't have sealed!

 

Here is what I need now to complete my loose cart collection:

Alcazar
Amazing Bumpman
Boulder Dash
Robin Hood/Sir Lancelot Double Ender

Skiing
Tank War

 

If anyone has extras or a lead on any of them, please let me know!

 

Thanks for reading!

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Good idea, but the seller is going to have to be more realistic as far as his asking price because of the terrible label. He's had it on eBay for a while so shoot him a message to see if he's open to offers.... say $90.
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I was thinking about that one, but I'm sort of holding off in hopes that an actual one with a real label becomes available. Seems like quite a few of the other double-enders have shown up lately so we'll see....

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the double enders come up a lot, it is not rare to find the loose cart only the CIBs are very rare. You can find one if your patient.

Thanks for the input. That's kind of what I figured. I found the other ones pretty quickly and I assume this one should pop up at some point.

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Just announced at PAX! Yacht Club Games' Shovel Knight is coming to ColecoVision!!!

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Ok, just kidding... just kidding! The story behind this goes that the last five years I was in the games business, Sean (who is now head of Yacht Club Games) and I were a Director/Producer team at WayForward producing games like A Boy & His Blob, Batman: Brave & The Bold, Mighty Milky Way, and a few others...

 

I knew he was going to be at PAX this week and a buddy of mine from Orlando was going so I wanted him to deliver a present from me. Both Sean & I have always been into retro games and he knows my love of systems like ColecoVision & Vectrex (In fact, he still has my old Vectrex that I gave him before I left SoCal) so I felt that doing a mock-up of Shovel Knight on a ColecoVision cart would be a fun thing to do! As you can see from the pic, he loved it! lol

 

Now we just have to convince Yacht Club to actually produce a CV version of their awesome platform game! =)

 

Huge thanks to Kamshaft for producing the label. It looked AWESOME!!!!

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  • 3 weeks later...

A few weeks ago there was a link to an eBay auction in Germany for some interesting controller accessories that I decided to order. It was slightly difficult to get because the seller would not ship to the USA and he wasn't responding to my messages asking about shipment, so I had to have them shipped to a friend in the UK, and then shipped to me.

 

One of the items was an NES Advantage control modified to be at ColecoVision controller, and honestly being a fan of this control stick from my NES development days, this is something I was very interested in! The other was a pass-through keypad like the "Champ Adapter", something that I thought would be a cool item to have that I never had before.

 

Here's what the guy was selling:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Family-Fit-Fun-Arcade-Controller-fur-Coleco-Vision-/262021014012

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Hakurmar-Champ-Adapter-Joystick-Adapter-fur-Colecovision-/262011662158?

 

Sorry to say that both of these items are pretty much a bust. Possibly fixable, but we'll see. Here's my report...

 

At first glance taking it out of the box, it looked great! Was really happy with the modifications done and was pretty excited about this!

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Here's another look at the keypad and buttons of the controller.

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The bottom of the unit. Yup...at one point in this sucker's life, it used to be a Nintendo product... now it's Coleco!

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The controller came with a one-sheet printed instructions in both English and German.

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One more look at the controller! My expectations are high at this point!

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While the Advantage controller didn't really come with any packaging, the Champ Adapter at least came in this box:

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At first glance it looked ok. I've never held a real Champ Adapter, so I'm not sure what to compare it to.

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Holding it though, felt really "cheap" and the best way to describe it was "Chinese plastic crap" - It did not have a good feel to it.

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Here's a look at the controller port, and the keypad was made at least so you can slip an overlay into it.

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Here are the instructions that came with it:

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Yup....plastic Chinese crap! =) (I know lots of good stuff is made in China, but this just felt CHEAP!)

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So plugging in the Advantage controller instantly had several disappointments. First off, the right button didn't work at all. Secondly, the left button BARELY worked. I had to press it down as far as humanly possible to get it to work. I tested it with a couple of games and with the AtariMax Controller Test. It did not pass! And finally, they had placed these little number stickers over the number pad which really weren't stuck on. The first time you pressed a button, they came right off.

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I popped open the controller to find that one of the wires was completely disconnected to the buttons. It just looked like really shotty work.

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Here's the rest of the insides for those who are interested:

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On the plus side, the control stick worked really well! So I'm hoping I can get the buttons all fixed up (shouldn't be too much of a hassle, just sucks I have to go through the hassle) and this will prove to be a good controller. Although at the moment, I'm a little sour on the whole thing.

 

The Champ Adapter seemed like total crap. The first thing I did was grab and overlay and with almost zero pressure at all on it, the faceplate popped right off! It was like it was barely glued down!

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I pulled out some glue and did the best I could to get the thing back together, but really the number pad and the faceplate seemed a bit off, even going back to the photos above I shot, I noticed the same thing...

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But I at least got it to the point where I could put an overlay in it, but it really just doesn't line up correctly:

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A homebrew one worked a *little* better...

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Overall, I give both of these items a huge thumbs down. Don't bother. I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do with them. I'll fix the controller and see how that goes. Not sure what I'll do about the seller. I'm not going to send them back because they are interesting and unique, but the quality just isn't there. So if they come up again in an auction, I wouldn't spend a lot of money for them.

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It seems like the only thing that was quality, was the actual Joystick, which was from the original Nintendo parts. All the other buttons, and the champ adapter seems to be China crap.

 

I make NES Advantage Mod controllers, and I only use the actual NES Advantage parts. The first reason is it saves costs to just reuse the original parts, and the second reason is that it would be difficult to find quality parts that fit just right inside the NES Advantage case. My guess is that seller had to sacrifice in the quality of the parts to save money to make the item profitable to make and sell. This means that he has to buy parts from China, probably factory direct from Shenzhen. Same with the Champ adapter.

 

 

I have a real Champ adapter, and the quality is about the same as the quality of official Coleco Controllers. The quality of the plastic is probably a little cheaper, but its on par with official Coleco controllers.

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…It’s all the Flashback’s fault! Seriously!

 

Growing up, the ColecoVision was always “my system.” It really was the video game machine that I grew up on and followed religiously. Sure, I had a 2600 before it and a C-64 and then an NES after it, but it was the system that would change a part of my life as an adult.

 

My “video game childhood” started out with the original Sears Tele-Games Pong which I received for Christmas in 1975, and then two years later Santa put a 2600 under the tree. I was only 7 at the time when the 2600 came out, and while I played it to death, I was still a bit too young to really appreciate games and how important they were about to become.

 

But then 1982 rolls around, I’m reading Electronic Games Magazine and news about the ColecoVision at CES is talked about and I was blown away. At this point in my life I was addicted to any stand-up game to hit the arcades but disappointed in the current home-version offerings. Seeing what the ColecoVision was going to bring home blew me away, and I had to get one!

 

The two childhood CV stories that I remember distinctly… First - I always knew where my parents hid my Christmas presents and one day after school I had discovered that they had bought the ColecoVision system, Expansion Module #1 and several games that were available. But it would be weeks before Christmas and I just couldn’t wait. Knowing the exact schedule of when my parents would be coming home and how much time I had between getting back from school, I would go and take the ColecoVision, and very carefully remove it all out of the box, hook it up to the TV, play it as long as I possibly could, and then with enough time to reverse the process, put it all back into the box EXACTLY as it was before and put it right back to where it was “hidden.” And of course I played off the “surprise” perfectly fine on Christmas day! To this day, my parents still have no idea I did this!

 

The second was when I had saved up all my allowance to buy Donkey Kong Jr. For whatever reason that game came out (at least where I lived) at a higher price than other ColecoVision games and while at the store wanting to buy it, my parents wouldn’t let me due to the higher price. Thankfully, my parents didn’t pay too close of attention, and one day I rode my bike down to Gemco (big box store in SoCal in the 80s) and happily used up my allowance to purchase the game. They never even noticed that I had bought it.

 

My collection of CV games as a kid included pretty much all the “common” games. I had all the arcade ports and many of the original games that came out up until the end, all the add-ons, controllers, etc. The only thing I never had growing up was Adam.

 

Fast forward through the next few years…

 

My gaming career went from ColecoVision to the Commodore 64 to NES/SNES, etc… But even through all those years, I had kept a ColecoVision plugged in, and it would always be a system I’d go back to.

 

I ended up working in the video games industry from 1989 - 2011, which is an entirely other story, but I got into the industry because I was a fan. During those first 10 or so years, I would go to flea markets and collect games. ColecoVision was always the system I looked out for the most. At one point I pretty much had collected just about everything that was out there at the time. I want to say I had really close to a complete collection of loose carts, most games CIB, and at this point I even had an Adam up and running. ColecoVision was still “my system.”

 

At this point, I was also collecting stand-up arcade machines, and when I was living on the east coast I had about 40 machines in my game room and probably another 50 or so PCB’s that I could plug into various machines. I spent a great deal of time restoring dedicated cabinet 80s arcade games. Here's a few pics of my "game room" (wish I had more and at better quality, but in those days, the smart phone didn't exist!)

attachicon.gifgames1.jpgattachicon.gifgames2.jpgattachicon.gifgames3.jpgattachicon.gifgames5.jpgattachicon.gifgames6.jpg

 

In 2002 I took a job with Activision and had to move back to SoCal. At this point in my life, I had become jaded with the video games business based on a number of different things that had happened and I was totally disenchanted with the industry. It was no longer a “hobby” for me, but a “job.”

 

I sold everything I had. Didn’t even look back on it. Didn’t really care and moved to SoCal totally empty-handed as far as any retro games went.

 

For the first couple of years at Activision, I didn’t even look at retro games, even though I was working for the company that is one of the most iconic in the eyes of retro game fans.

 

One of my co-workers was selling off some of their old game machines, and one of the machines was a ColecoVision with a hand-full of games. I instantly flash backed to childhood and I just had to have it. I bought it, took it home, made sure it worked, loved it, but put it in a box, and there it would stay, for probably about another ten years.

 

In 2011 I finally got out of the video games business, focused on my theme park blog which I had been doing on the side for many years and moved to Orlando.

 

If I said I had totally gotten out of retro gaming over those years, that would be a lie. While I was no longer collecting physical hardware or game carts, I always had an emulator or two on my computer. And it almost always consisted of MAME, ColecoVision, and Atari. I would find myself going back to play my favorite ColecoVision games from time to time. When I worked for WayForward, I did have a Vectrex sitting on my desk with a Sean Kelly multi-game cart, but that was mostly for “show.” In fact, when I moved to Orlando, I gave it away.

 

Orlando was a total fresh start for me. No more video games career, time to shift gears, have a different focus, move forward and not look back. And things have been going very well since. Still have the emulators on my laptop and would play from time to time, but I had pretty much forgotten about games and anything retro. I had not given up on games entirely though. I always had whatever the latest Nintendo system was and a few games, but nothing really interested me to be fanatical. We’d play Mario Party with groups of friends, I was slightly addicted to Animal Crossing and always had a handful of NES Virtual Console games, but that was about it.

 

And then the ColecoVision Flashback system came out…

 

I thought “What a cool idea… so many of my favorites as a kid all in one place, and easy to hook up to the TV!” (I totally understood the licensing aspects of games so I knew some games couldn’t be included.)

 

Two things went through my mind while playing the system: 1. This just isn’t good enough, it didn’t *feel* right, and that right there sparked my interest in pulling the ColecoVision I had sitting in a box for ten years out and playing the real thing, and 2. WHAT ARE ALL THESE HOME-BREW GAMES!?!?!

 

When I had gotten out of collecting games around 2001, there really wasn’t any home-brew (that I was aware of) out there for the system. At least not to the level that I was seeing on the Flashback system. I did some research and I simply could not believe that people were STILL MAKING GAMES for my childhood system keeping it alive! And not just tinkering around, home-brew games that looked like someone punched in some code from Compute! magazine, legit boxed games of arcade ports and original content that was just as good if not better than the original games that came out for the system 30 years ago.

 

I had to do a double take… “People are STILL making games for a system that hasn’t seen a retail store shelf in 30 years???” This was something that I realized that I needed to be a part of! And all of a sudden, something I hadn’t felt in 20 years was back… I was once again a “fan” of games instead of it being a “job.”

 

As I played games like Circus Charlie, Buster Bros, and Girls Garden, I’ve just sat there thinking to myself “I honestly cannot believe I’m playing these games…on a COLECOVISION!!! WTF?!?!?”

 

I had known of sites like Digital Press and Atari Age, but hadn’t really paid attention to them. Doing some searching around, it seemed like Atari Age was *the* community for ColecoVision fans and I registered. Seeing just how much I needed to get caught up on, I spent hours and hours neglecting my own business to read up on hundreds of threads (and I’m still getting caught up!)

 

Through the help of many of the forum members I have now collected over 100 of the home-brews that have been produced over the years and have re-collected many of the loose released carts. I have been totally blown away by this community since I found it and I haven’t been this excited in anything game-related in years.

 

So that’s my story… my introduction, etc… And if you read this whole damn thing then I’m even MORE impressed with this community! Looking forward to getting more caught up on the past and what the future of the system has in store!

 

Thank you for reading!

 

 

I was kind of blown away at all the development going on for the Colecovision and the quality of the games. I think it has something to do with being so similar to the SG-1000 and MSX machines. Most of the old systems have some home brew, but Colecovision has almost as much support as it had when it was still being supported. The only downside is that they are mostly ports of games available on other systems. OTOH, they Japanese systems that are hard to get and play on real hardware in the US. It really is amazing though.

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