Coleco Chameleon .... hardware speculations?

[InnovaX5]

...I am now in a unique position having the ear of Chris (Coleco) and Mark (River West Brands), I just want to put my energy to helping Coleco succeed and hope we as a community can help with that. I know Chris is very thankful for all the hard work the people here on AA have done to help protect the brand during this situation. Lets continue to help Chris further with the New Coleco Brand so we can get some awesome product I would implore anyone to send in some feedback to Chris. There is also a subforum I created called "Ask Chris Cardillo" in the ColecoVision section of the Classic Gaming SubForum. If Chris does not see the question there, I can make sure he gets it.

This, right here, is fantastic. I don't think any of us here ever wanted to see the Coleco name go the way of other revived brands. It is a huge step in the right direction that these 'higher ups' of the company are listening to the community. I think majority, myself included, would love to see the Coleco table top arcades come back in some form. I'd like to see Coleco think about doing their own controllers that work with both the at-games clone and the original console. I would love to see them bring the hulking beast of the Colecovision back to the media by maybe making a certain add-on an official licensed product. All these revived brands seem to focus on making cheap knock offs of their legacy counter parts, why not give the legacy some love for once?

[Great Hierophant]

If Coleco were to release a revitalized line of mini-arcades, I doubt they would be content to rely on the ancient technology like Vacuum Fluorescent Displays and single tone beepers used in the original units. I'd expect something like a color LCD screen with an emulated version of the real arcade ROM. Far from a terrible idea.

[Newsdee]

If Coleco were to release a revitalized line of mini-arcades, I doubt they would be content to rely on the ancient technology like Vacuum Fluorescent Displays and single tone beepers used in the original units. I'd expect something like a color LCD screen with an emulated version of the real arcade ROM. Far from a terrible idea.

 

But PLEASE do not cheap out on the LCD screens. There's a lot of chinese cheap systems with bad/mediocre screens already. If they can do something like AMOLED it would look fantastic (albeit more expensive, sure).

Bonus points if you make it somehow moddable; most people won't care but look at how well the C64 DTV fared when it was found out to allow for extensions from existing PCB connectors...

[galax]

http://colecovisionspodcast.blogspot.ca/2016/03/minisode-2-q-and-with-chris-cardillo-of.html

 

I thought some more quotes from the podcast were interesting:

 

37:00 "Some of the memes at the time, when they first started coming out, I actually kind of thought they were funny. You know this one with duct tape and a Jaguar and it said like "the Chameleon Starter Kit", and that's hilarious, so I copied it and sent it to my team."

39:17 "Atari was at the show, and Atari was talking about games. Atari saw the Jaguar shell, they weren't pissed they said, which is kind of cool."

39:30 "The Kickstarter was delayed for 2 reasons" ... "don't have a concrete game lineup" "wanted to see this system working on multiple platforms" "that was not something that they were able to demonstrate at that time" ... "3 days before launch" ... "that answer wasn't acceptable"

42:00 "If you're going to delay the Kickstarter" ... "one would jump to the conclusion that that was admitting, and if that wasn't the case then" ... "Retro would have to at least release photos of a prototype" ... "then came the infamous PCI board photos" ... "so the idea was hey it's not a Mini, OK well this is what appears to be a PCI board in a Jaguar case" ... "spoke with a number of engineers and the concern here is that device has absolutely nothing to do with a gaming system. In short that board is basically a DVR board"

43:35 [Chris asked one engineer] "Is there anything conceivable that could be pulled from this board that would have to do with a gaming system? And he basically said "Chris, if I invited you to my kitchen to bake a cake, and I pulled out a frying pan and a set of spark plugs, you'd have some serious concerns.""

45:15 "John Lester recently put out a video which I thought was very fair what he said- there is a chance that this may be a legitimate prototype, and if that's the case then everybody can be assured."

45:30 "So there's only really 3 things that could happen, one is the inspection goes out and it's legitimate. If the inspection goes out and it's not working up to the standards, then I owe everyone an apology and we would have to cease the plan."

46:00 "The only other option is that they would choose not to participate, and we would move on to other opportunities."

46:35 "The brand can't be associated to it if it's not as far along in development as portrayed."

47:00 "I'm the one who engaged with Retro. I'm the one that made the call to lead with the product at the show"

52:10 "That was the point of engaging Retro in the first place. This concept that, to develop a system takes thousands upon thousands of hours of work. A system like this probably costs about 1/2 a million dollars to a million and a half in man hours. Now there's also purists who are sitting in their basements developing game systems because that's what they love to do. And they may have spent years doing that. OK great, and the good news is that retro is retro, so they haven't passed this point where that's outdated, because it's retro right? So we were hoping to engage somebody who had that development side done, had the software done, and there's now doubt that the design has already been done, y'know granted it's a Jaguar right. So we're attempting to have a product that would shortcut that 24 month process by going with something that had been in development for 18 months already. So if that's not the case then there's really no reason to proceed with this"

57:54 "I do apologize to the community" ... "The important thing here is that they paid attention to what was going on, they addressed some concerns, we listened to those concerns, and at the end of the day they would have saved us, y'know, development time, embarrassment, production costs, they were invaluable in this process is the message that I would want to hear. And I do have profound respect for people who gave their opinion, who called and gave their advice."

Chris comes off as a decent guy in the podcast. Even as the most skeptical person in the world I'm inclined to believe that he was being lied to by Mike and wasn't in on the scam.

[prince_david]

 

 

Sounds like Coleco definitely aren't going to roll-over and play nice with Mike's feelings.

 

So then the next question is, will Mike Kennedy ...

1. Actually have the balls to send in whatever "prototype" he can scrape together from the local GoodWill?
2. Just stay silent and let the deadline pass and lose "by default?
3. Come up with some lame excuse about him being mugged by a little-old-lady on the way to the Post Office?
4. Come up with some lame excuse about it all being the hardware guy's fault for lying to him?

 

While Mike Kennedy is at fault, equal blame needs to go to their people working on the hardware. These guys are slimeballs.

[enoofu]

While Mike Kennedy is at fault, equal blame needs to go to their people working on the hardware. These guys are slimeballs.

Maybe, maybe not... Also possible they started new around when John left which would be after Nov, and i doubt they were the ones that planted the DVR.

[triverse]

How close are we to the end of the 7 day deadline?

 

Has anyone visited the RetroVGS Facebook page lately? The page still has 19,864 fans. Do you think they were all legit or are some of these "fans" the kind you can buy in bulk on Black Hat sites and Fiverr? The average post on the RetroVGS Facebook receives around 250 likes. Their videos have received thousands of views. Coleco Holdings LLC has around 880 followers on Twitter.

 

How much legitimate interest was there really in this product? I mean the IG campaign failed spectacularly, would the Kickstarter have failed too? Even with a working prototype?

All it takes is a little investigating to unravel this too.

[Great Hierophant]

 

 

45:15 "John Lester recently put out a video which I thought was very fair what he said- there is a chance that this may be a legitimate prototype, and if that's the case then everybody can be assured."

 

Given everything we know now about the people and the history of the project, this is getting close to "there is a chance that the United States faked the moon landing", if it isn't there already. They will not pull a rabbit out of the hat at the last moment. We should be grateful for the following statement and hope Coleco follows through on it :

 

 

 

"The only other option is that they would choose not to participate, and we would move on to other opportunities."

[galax]

While Mike Kennedy is at fault, equal blame needs to go to their people working on the hardware. These guys are slimeballs.

 

Whether they were lying to Mike, or were told to lie by Mike - yeah these guys are slimeballs.

 

 

Given everything we know now about the people and the history of the project, this is getting close to "there is a chance that the United States faked the moon landing", if it isn't there already. They will not pull a rabbit out of the hat at the last moment. We should be grateful for the following statement and hope Coleco follows through on it :

 

Yeah I think he's trying to sound polite and even handed there.

[enoofu]

They probably do have something, but I doubt that something could do everything they said and at that pricepoint

[galax]

They probably do have something, but I doubt that something could do everything they said and at that pricepoint

 

Why do you think that they probably have something? They nothing but had off the shelf parts under a Jag shell when John Carlsen left in November, and suddenly 4 months later they have managed to develop something but instead they show 2 fake prototypes? They have nothing but hopes and dreams.

[godslabrat]

46:35 "The brand can't be associated to it if it's not as far along in development as portrayed."

 

That's pretty clearly saying that there's no conceivable way Coleco will still be on board after Friday.

 

 

 

 

47:00 "I'm the one who engaged with Retro. I'm the one that made the call to lead with the product at the show"

 

 

 

 

You know, this might possibly be the shittest thing yet. Mike Kennedy's lies could, conceivably, cost this guy his job. I doubt they will, because hopefully clearer heads will prevail and see that Mike was lying, but in no way will the RVGS incident be seen as a feather in his cap. Even if he's lied to, he has to admit that he was taken in by the lie, which isn't a great day at the office. In the professional world, you don't get to survive many mistakes of that magnitude.

 

For anyone who thinks "no harm was done to anyone" just because Mike never got to take money... please stop saying that now.

Edited March 7, 2016 by godslabrat

[toiletunes]

The only defense I can give Hardware Guy:

"He changed the system demands every week. As soon as I got something working, it was 'obsolete' and then they demanded a final working prototype! With two days deadline, I panicked and threw together something - anything- just to get him off my back. It wasn't the right thing to do, but how would you react when Kennedy brings out the whips and zipper mask?"

[enoofu]

Believe Ketris said they changed everything around at least 3-4 times while he was there.

 

Also believe Mike would of knew that the prototype was faked since Steve is a electrical engineer and worked on hardware in the 90's.

 

Apparently Steve still using Social media, nothing on CC posted that I see

https://twitter.com/stevewoita

Edited March 7, 2016 by enoofu

[InnovaX5]

How close are we to the end of the 7 day deadline?

 

Has anyone visited the RetroVGS Facebook page lately? The page still has 19,864 fans. Do you think they were all legit or are some of these "fans" the kind you can buy in bulk on Black Hat sites and Fiverr? The average post on the RetroVGS Facebook receives around 250 likes. Their videos have received thousands of views. Coleco Holdings LLC has around 880 followers on Twitter.

 

How much legitimate interest was there really in this product? I mean the IG campaign failed spectacularly, would the Kickstarter have failed too? Even with a working prototype?

Seems RVGS Inc is super popular in Turkey!

[ventrra]

The classic way to play classic games like VCS and Intellivision is to sit in front of a console TV, on the floor or in a beanbag, with the console right in front of you, with a stack of carts at your side.

 

And with a Swansons frozen dinner cooking in the oven. That was the best! After my monthly shower, I'd get one and play Superman on Friday nights.

Having been gaming in the '70's, I disagree.

Obviously you should be sitting in fluorescent colored, paisley patterned chairs with the console on a small coffee table next to them.

 

I'm not going to disagree with the TV dinners, though. I distinctly remember the aluminum trays that they used to come in.

[PlaysWithWolves]

I guess its' conceivable that no one at Coleco Holdings would know the questionable history of the RVGS and that CH was lead astray. Still, I think Bill's post (which I believe he already mentioned here) under the "seven-day notice" Facebook message rings true and would have saved everyone a lot of trouble:

 

[S1500]

I like how official sounding with bringing in a "team of inspectors", as if there was suspicion of WMDs in some country. Do they drive up in a black Suburban, and all look like secret service agents?

[djxtheowl]

Believe Ketris said they changed everything around at least 3-4 times while he was there.

 

Also believe Mike would of knew that the prototype was faked since Steve is a electrical engineer and worked on hardware in the 90's.

 

Apparently Steve still using Social media, nothing on CC posted that I see

https://twitter.com/stevewoita

 

Does that dude even know that he's on the coleco chameleon "about us" page?

[sh3-rg]

Sorry if this link was already posted, but following up on that Youtube screen grab I posted of David G. leaving as editing manager of RETRO...

 

http://www.polygon.com/2016/3/5/11166982/coleco-chameleon-controversy-kickstarter-indiegogo-toy-fair

"the rumors and hate speech we dealt with before "

So it was just rumors and they were haters... until the evidence was indefensible... and only then it became a problem defending RVGS/CC/MK?

How about admitting you were wrong in the first instance? That it wasn't ever hate speech, rather determined requests for the truth. Others have been big enough to do that.

http://colecovisionspodcast.blogspot.ca/2016/03/minisode-2-q-and-with-chris-cardillo-of.html

 

Chris comes off as a decent guy in the podcast. Even as the most skeptical person in the world I'm inclined to believe that he was being lied to by Mike and wasn't in on the scam.

He does, it's all good stuff - apart from a little more pointless Piko/CV defence force stuff - nobody did those things he's saying there, there was no huge backlash against Piko and CV simply because they were making games that might appear on RVGS/CC. There's nothing to support that kind of statement. It's a complete red herring.

 

What people wanted to know was the exact level of their involvement with the mighty RETRO/GG/etc empire and just how much knowledge of the system (whatever it was supposed to be) that they had. Thankfully pretty much all of that has been kindly responded to, so there's really no reason to go there again. Piko was duped by a Mike/Lee tag team. gamester81 never held a stake in any part of Mike's myriad businesses. Mike and Lee fed them all a load of horse shit and unfortunately they had little else to go on. Entirely understandable.

 

[Flojomojo]

 

http://colecovisionspodcast.blogspot.ca/2016/03/minisode-2-q-and-with-chris-cardillo-of.html

 

I thought some more quotes from the podcast were interesting:

 

52:10 "That was the point of engaging Retro in the first place. This concept that, to develop a system takes thousands upon thousands of hours of work. A system like this probably costs about 1/2 a million dollars to a million and a half in man hours. Now there's also purists who are sitting in their basements developing game systems because that's what they love to do. And they may have spent years doing that. OK great, and the good news is that retro is retro, so they haven't passed this point where that's outdated, because it's retro right? So we were hoping to engage somebody who had that development side done, had the software done, and there's now doubt that the design has already been done, y'know granted it's a Jaguar right. So we're attempting to have a product that would shortcut that 24 month process by going with something that had been in development for 18 months already. So if that's not the case then there's really no reason to proceed with this"

 

Suspicions confirmed, this project is on par with the kids who drew pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog on their letters to the editor of Electronic Gaming Monthly in the early 1990s, full of dreams and wishes. "Coleco" has no native skills, so they were hoping they could find some basement coder "out there" and exploit them.

 

How did this guy come into the "Coleco" name? More money than sense? It's like something out of a "what would you do if you won the Powerball" daydream. The stuff of underpants gnomes.

 

Sure, he sounds like a "decent guy," but so does Mike Kennedy. I think "nice guy" comes standard. Personally, I would aim higher than "not obvious evil psychopath."

[livingonwheels]

Love this response to Gamerster81's video:

 

Okay. So the fact that you are first announcing that you and your so called Collectorvision company were proud to be selling these so called pack-in-games and basically were standing behind the launch titles of this system doesn't really mean anything regarding the fact that you, you Gamester81 had No knowledge about anything of this? Are you mentally handicapped? Seriously, if you are vouching, co-releasing by selling your games together with the system, and overall talk about how good it is to an extend that you pull out just One day before the Kickstarter campaign is about to begin???

So with all this said. The conclusion is that you are saying that you had no idea what the Chameleon was. You had no idea what the guys at Chameleon crew were doing. You had no idea what You were promoting. You had no idea about basically anything, and yet you agreed to let you co-bundle your companies games together with this system?

Look. This is the issue. You joined Collectorvision games because they needed someone to promote their name. You were offered a tiny role by taking care of marketing their games. Why? Let's get this straight:

Ever since you joined YT and started to reviewing things, you have been getting a growing fanbase. You clearly were/are not able to handle all that attention, so you fell into the opportunist trap. Instead of continue just reviewing old computers, consoles or whatever, you saw an economical opportunity and therefore you started to whoring for small overpriced companies like StoneAgeGaming and you even mentioned yourself that you had no idea how to even edit your own videos so you had someone else do it for you.

This is where all of this started. You slowly but steadily started to transform your channel into some semi-commercial bollocks where your ego grew larger than anything else. You wanted to make "your own" game. You wanted to create a "Gamester81"-Game. That's why you turned to a small indie company that was called Collectorvision Games, started to throwing your money to them and finally got a sprite hack game with your name slapped on the title.

Finally you were offered a tiny role in the marketing division at Collectorvision Games and That blew your ego so big that your head was about to explode. You announced this as "I AM NOW A GAME DEVELOPER!!!" (For people who do not know, just take a look at his previous videos), but the fact is that you are nothing. You have no knowledge of programming. You have no knowledge of hard/software-engineering. Heck, you do not edit your own YT videos so why are you promoting yourself and making comparisons with companies like Naughty Dog and Sony?

I have been following you since the start and it ain't beautiful. What started out to be just a nice dude who reviewed old game system has slowly turned out into your own little adventure in trying to get as many quick buck deals as possible with the least effort as possible, no matter what. Just look at you. Are you a president candidate running a campaign or something?

All over your videos you are wearing your own t-shirts, your own logo on the background, to an extent that it more or less screams "BUY ME!!!".

So why is this even relevant to the story of the Chameleon? Well, if you aren't mentally handicapped then you wouldn't vouch for a system that you had absolutely know idea about what it was capable of doing. As a representative for a company then it is your own responsibility to make sure that things are in order. But what baffles me and most of the people I would assume, is the fact that you already announced the games that were going to be launch titles for the system, yet you say that you had no idea what the actual hardware was looking like.

Something is clearly not right here. You are either lying or trying to size down the responsibility of what you and your company has been involved in, which has to be at least part of the case since in this video you are addressing Pat as a bad guy who clearly had the etiquette of Not mentioning you in person, nor your company at name.

You bought down Pat to your convention. You basically paid him for hanging out with you and gave him the chance of selling stuff. I mean, if someone offered me those things, then why not? I can be your friend for a paid vacation where I can enjoy and sell my things. One thing though, that's not friendship, that's something totally different.

So for all of you people who has just as less life as I do and have actually read this comment, please understand that this guy is nothing but a nobody who is talking about a "scene" and a "community" which he clearly is trying to milk out every little penny he can out of. Be aware and stay away from this guy. He is so far from genuine as the definition goes.

For Christ sake. At least show yourself some dignity and get out of this "community"....

[evilotto1973]

Anybody else notice that you can't see the comments on the last Chameleon Facebook post? I posted one, and can only see my own post.

It says there are 418 posts right now.

[galax]

"the rumors and hate speech we dealt with before "

So it was just rumors and they were haters... until the evidence was indefensible... and only then it became a problem defending RVGS/CC/MK?

How about admitting you were wrong in the first instance? That it wasn't ever hate speech, rather determined requests for the truth. Others have been big enough to do that.

He does, it's all good stuff - apart from a little more pointless Piko/CV defence force stuff - nobody did those things he's saying there, there was no huge backlash against Piko and CV simply because they were making games that might appear on RVGS/CC. There's nothing to support that kind of statement. It's a complete red herring.

 

There were a few trolls who appeared on here to bash Piko, they went away pretty quickly though. Yeah 'hate speech' is a bit of an exaggeration, but there were a few people who were pretty against the RVGS based on more 'gut feeling' (that turned out to be correct, and that's me included) than hard evidence.

 

The frying pan meme image is the best one to come out of this so far by the way, genius!

 

Suspicions confirmed, this project is on par with the kids who drew pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog on their letters to the editor of Electronic Gaming Monthly in the early 1990s, full of dreams and wishes. "Coleco" has no native skills, so they were hoping they could find some basement coder "out there" and exploit them.

 

How did this guy come into the "Coleco" name? More money than sense? It's like something out of a "what would you do if you won the Powerball" daydream. The stuff of underpants gnomes.

 

Sure, he sounds like a "decent guy," but so does Mike Kennedy. I think "nice guy" comes standard. Personally, I would aim higher than "not obvious evil psychopath."

 

Well Chris comes off as not being not a liar at least; that's a low bar but in my opinion Mike, John and 'Lee' fail fail to meet that.

 

Sure he's got some money from somewhere, and he's bought a cool brand that he doesn't know much about. It's a bit harsh to say he wants to 'exploit' the person he partners with though; many bedroom coders would dream about partnering with a real brand and bringing their product to the world. The ones that wouldn't want this wouldn't let themselves be exploited.

 

I remember a professor of mine saying that the point of financial markets is to connect together people who have money but no ideas, with people who have ideas but no money. Crowdfunding does the same job when it works. Even if Chris isn't willing to invest any more money, someone put quite a bit into the brand, and as we saw from the press reaction the brand is important; the CC got much more mainstream press attention even than the RVGS, which itself got a lot more than most homebrew projects.

 

Anybody else notice that you can't see the comments on the last Chameleon Facebook post? I posted one, and can only see my own post.

It says there are 418 posts right now.

 

Yes, a couple of weeks ago- comments are being moderated and never approved.

[+5-11under]

They probably do have something, but I doubt that something could do everything they said and at that pricepoint

 

They might have something. I'm waiting (well, not really) for Mike to show up and say "Look at this. I told you so!". That'd be fine, but I would ask him why he didn't provide a proper update around the end of February or sometime after that, when many of his potential customers were becoming disenfranchised to the point of never wanting to support this project with upfront money ever, no matter what? Was it just so he could say "I told you so"?

 

In the meantime, however, I haven't seen any evidence that they have anything. At all.

/besides Jaguar shell