Why is the importance of ColecoVision almost never brought up historically?

[godslabrat]

As has been said before, “generations” are arbitrary distinctions made after-the-fact, to suit the purpose of the discussion at hand. It doesn’t matter if you consider the CV and the NES to be the same generation or not— nothing changes. The hardware and software and marketing history remain the same no matter how you classify them. You can consider thenColeco to be second generation or third or fifteenth— it still died in 1984, with its remains being drug into 1985.

 

Again, the comparison to the NES is just muddying any point you want to make. If you like the Coleco, just say why.

[JaguarVision]

I see no indication in old press or it's software releases that it died in 84.

 

It seems as I said Adam was what dropped them out of electronics.

Edited October 29, 2017 by JaguarVision

[JaguarVision]

Double

Edited October 29, 2017 by JaguarVision

[mr_me]

JV,

 

You seem like a good guy, and were glad to have you here on Atariage. Its all right to have a soft spot for underdog systems (I love a few myself) but your tone seems slightly resentful of the systems that did perform and go on to be market leaders. You act surprised that the Coleco or Jag didnt do as well as their competitors, but all you need to see why is to look at history. If you like the Coleco and Jag, thats awesome, but its no mystery why the rest of the world looked at them and said Lol, no.

 

It might be best to express, from your own perspective, why you like these systems, and leave the comparisons out of it.

The coleco vision was the market leader in 1982 and 1983, even outselling the famicom. Yes, that was the famicom's first year and they weren't competing against each other. We don't have data for 1984 but the japanese and american markets were going in different directions. Coleco's problems were not due to the coleco vision.

 

Helper chips and add-ons are really the same thing. It does make more sense to buy it once as an add-on rather than again and again with each cartridge but in practice it didn't work that way. It also helps when you have a monopoly and can charge whatever you want for cartridges. Or even better make your partners pay for it. Making a technical comparison between systems with and without such improvements is fair.

 

This thread isn't really about comparing coleco vision and the famicom/nes. However, unlike nintendo, coleco took some technology that was a few years old without an attempt to improve it in making the coleco vision. Coleco depended on others' game ideas to sell cartridges and really sell the system. There were some original game ideas thanks to third party developers. But it was too little too late.

[Keatah]

Expansion chips in carts are a grey area. The original Channel F engineering definition of a cartridge is that the cartridges houses the removable/replaceable program store for a fixed-function computer. A cartridge is a convenient and consumer-friendly way of doing that. No pins to break, durable housing, no bare chips to handle. So precisely what happens when you change the architecture of the computer by using an enhancement chip or co-processor?

 

Do you have a next generation computer or a next generation cartridge? Or both?

 

And what is the significance (in assigning a generation number) of a system designed from the start with expansion chips/processors in mind like the SNES + SuperFX vs one that is not like VCS + ARM?

Edited October 29, 2017 by Keatah

[JaguarVision]

Too late for what? To beat Atari? Well yes with the head start it had. Or do you mean to compete with the NES? I mean I guess that depends. With the planned expanded cartridges how close was it to the 7800?

 

I mean one thing to consider if Coleco continued in 86 is a large library and already having the 7800's main selling point before it even came out.

[Keatah]

To bunch your panties up:

 

1st generation cartridge = ROM

2nd generation cartridge = ROM + RAM

3rd generation cartridge = ROM + RAM + CPU

[zylon]

I do feel that had Coleco been in better financial shape, the Colecovision could have run years longer. There clearly was a market for it as shown by continued sales of 2600's (then Jrs), INTV Corp consoles, 7800s, etc. They likely could've sold Gemini's into the 90s. It was all just more of the same old games in different packaging. It's only really after these systems, that we finally got something different. Blame those damn Cabbage Patch Kids, not the console. I really don't feel that I owe any of my current gaming experiences to Coleco's endeavor. Nothing I see today that the CV was "1st" to do.

We went from a used Sears 2600, to a Tandyvision, a 2600 Jr(for family), to a C64 as that's where it seemed to be headed anyways. Computers were being taught in schools that I went to, so it was the way to go. We came back to consoles in 89-92 after seeing some, then current systems running the same games we had on C64.

Edited October 29, 2017 by zylon

[Flojomojo]

To bunch your panties up:

 

1st generation cartridge = ROM

2nd generation cartridge = ROM + RAM

3rd generation cartridge = ROM + RAM + CPU

Nice. So when did ROM+RAM start? Do Odyssey 2's "expanded memory cartridges" count?

[CatPix]

Expanded memory I think simply mean that there is more ROM, not added RAM.

Some carts on then 1292 APVS, and the Chess cart for the channel F both have added RAM.

That would be somewhere between 1978 and 1980 then, so adding RAM is almost as old as cartridges themselves.

Pitfall II add a processor for sound, so even adding a chip to beef up fonctions beyond ROM and RAM is at least as old as 1984.

Edited October 29, 2017 by CatPix

[mr_me]

Too late for what? To beat Atari? Well yes with the head start it had. Or do you mean to compete with the NES? I mean I guess that depends. With the planned expanded cartridges how close was it to the 7800?

 

I mean one thing to consider if Coleco continued in 86 is a large library and already having the 7800's main selling point before it even came out.

The coleco vision did beat Atari. It didn't stick around long enough to compete against NES. You can discuss what could have happened, but we have to judge it on what it was and that includes the game library as it was.

 

Edit:

Regarding generations, the Coleco vision should at least be in the same generation as the sega sg-1000.

Edited October 29, 2017 by mr_me

[Cobra Kai]

[Keatah]

Expanded memory I think simply mean that there is more ROM, not added RAM.

 

"Expanded memory" means exactly that expanded memory. It doesn't specify what kind of memory.

 

Expanded ROM memory would still mean 1st generation cartridges. Or it means the 1st type of cartridge.

 

Cartridges with standard ROM and extra RAM are a different beast. Here we're going beyond the removable program store and now adding in other parts to the computer.

[Video]

Weren't a lot of CBS carts including extra ram? Of course the supercharger had extra ram. Of course any cart that was bigger than 4k had to have extra programming to make the 2600 read bigger. Added hardware in carts isn't new to Nintendo. Its just a neat way to get a system to do extra stuff it might not can do, or have trouble with stock. Coleco Had expansions, if it ran another year or two it could have had more.

[+Sauron]

Moving to the ColecoVision forum.

[zzip]

The History Channel doesn't have time for things like the ColecoVision when there are more important things the masses need to know about like Nazi flying saucers, aliens in Nazi flying saucers, Nazis in aliens in Nazi flying saucers, and Bigfoot.

 

There should be a law that when your cable channels programming no longer matches its name, they should at least be forced to change the name..

[zzip]

I'm not creating arbitrary lines. The CV/NES comparisons should be a stock hardware when talking about which is more powerful. Helper chips ARE @add ons no matter how much you want to deny that. It's not a simple memory bump stock NES cannot run those games.

 

A CV game like Alcazar can run on a stock coleco, Zelda can't run on a stock NES

 

Just for the sake of argument, would it have been possible to use the Coleco expansion port to create helper chips that might have helped the CV been competitive with NES games using such chips, had the CV stayed on the market long enough for that to happen, of course.

[pacman000]

Yes when the argument is to say the CV and the NES aren't the same gen by using a YouTube video of smb3 as an example it does matter. As seen earlier in the thread.

 

The NES capable games of 83 and 86 are in the same really as the ColecoVision. Comparing Turbo to smb3 is completely ignoring the core hardware of both. Which are both third generation.

Forgive me for that; I should've looked for a video of games available when the Famicom was released.

[zzip]

As has been said before, “generations” are arbitrary distinctions made after-the-fact, to suit the purpose of the discussion at hand. It doesn’t matter if you consider the CV and the NES to be the same generation or not— nothing changes. The hardware and software and marketing history remain the same no matter how you classify them. You can consider thenColeco to be second generation or third or fifteenth— it still died in 1984, with its remains being drug into 1985.

 

No, the generation distinctions are not made after the fact. When new consoles are launched, the talk is all "next-gen" this, "next-gen" that. Point is, people know at the time when a new generation is happening. This was true in 1982 as well, you can find numerous references in the press about CV+5200 being "third wave" systems. Implying distinction between them and all the systems that came before.

 

Somewhere along the line this was forgotten, and they got lumped in with the 1977-era systems even though they are clearly a leap above them, and closer to the NES in tech than they are to the 2600/Channel F

[Bill Loguidice]

 

Just for the sake of argument, would it have been possible to use the Coleco expansion port to create helper chips that might have helped the CV been competitive with NES games using such chips, had the CV stayed on the market long enough for that to happen, of course.

 

The Expansion Port was and can literally be used to make the ColecoVision into an entirely different system. The key difference here is that an add-on will always be under-supported since you'll usually always want to target the largest user base, while inexpensive in-cartridge helper chips can always be utilized when needed because you know 100% of the user base can make use of it.

 

I suspect that if things worked out differently, Coleco could have released a ColecoVision 2 and simply created a run of expansion modules that gave existing ColecoVision users the same capabilities. That's really the only logical solution to the add-on problem.

[Geoff Oltmans]

I always have a lot of fun with these types of discussions, so I'll weigh in with my two cents:

 

The CV was absolutely a very capable and influential system. As some others have indicated, the fact that its library relies heavily on arcade ports is not a crutch, that was the holy grail of home machines: to make decent arcade ports! Surely the CV at this point in time was one of if not the best machine for this. You also can't underestimate the importance of having Donkey Kong as a pack-in. That's a good reason many people bought the machine for sure.

 

The other point I'd like to make is that the CV's life was cut short by the video game crash. This is not as some people claim a result of bad quality games in the market. For sure there were, but I think it has more to do with the buying public's preferences at that time. At that time my parents bought a home computer instead of video game system and a vast majority of the people we knew did the same! The reasons were simple: the price of home video game consoles were in the same league as a home computer, and the likes of the Commodore 64 or TI 99/4A meant that you could have the same game playing ability AND be able to use the computer for real work too (word processing was reason #1 in our family, followed by playing games). Which brings me to my next point: the Coleco ADAM was the exact right play to make at this point in time. Coleco was trying to give people what they wanted: an affordable complete computer system that could also play arcade quality games. Unfortunately they needed probably 1-2 months more to work the kinks out before the Christmas buying season, but the ADAM is NOT the reason that Coleco failed at the video game business, the business environment shifted radically in a short period of time leaving all the players to catch up to buying preferences.

[SignGuy81]

 

I suspect that if things worked out differently, Coleco could have released a ColecoVision 2 and simply created a run of expansion modules that gave existing ColecoVision users the same capabilities. That's really the only logical solution to the add-on problem.

 

I agree mostly but it would kinda be like if the Saturn was going to be the same as 32X and the SegaCD, and the modules(32X and SegaCD combined) turned the Sega Genesis into a Sega Saturn so you could either get the addons or buy a complete new system. But to make a next generation system with competing hardware it had to be much better than the addons which is why we got a Saturn and not a Neptune. It would probably be the same type of scenario there because if not whatever would come next to compete with a CV2 would leave it in the dust, the same way as if Sega's next gen console was a Neptune and not the Saturn.

Edited October 30, 2017 by SignGuy81

[zzip]

The Expansion Port was and can literally be used to make the ColecoVision into an entirely different system. The key difference here is that an add-on will always be under-supported since you'll usually always want to target the largest user base, while inexpensive in-cartridge helper chips can always be utilized when needed because you know 100% of the user base can make use of it.

 

I suspect that if things worked out differently, Coleco could have released a ColecoVision 2 and simply created a run of expansion modules that gave existing ColecoVision users the same capabilities. That's really the only logical solution to the add-on problem.

What if companies shipped "game carts" that plugged into the expansion port instead of the cart slot and included "helper chips" that way? Would that have been a feasible way to keep up with NES without splitting the playerbase by requiring a separate peripheral?

 

I'm talking the game and extra HW is on a single cart that plugs into the expansion port

[Bill Loguidice]

 

I agree mostly but it would kinda be like if the Saturn was going to be the same as 32X and the SegaCD, and the modules(32X and SegaCD combined) turned the Sega Genesis into a Sega Saturn so you could either get the addons or buy a complete new system. But to make a next generation system with competing hardware it had to be much better than the addons which is why we got a Saturn and not a Neptune. It would probably be the same type of scenario there not sure.

 

The difference here is that ColecoVision 2 would be a new system that could also run ColecoVision games and be architectured in such a way that an expansion module could also be made for the original ColecoVision to keep Coleco's original promises. It would be similar to how Sega went from the SG-1000/SC-3000 to the Mark III/SMS and then the Genesis, just with a consideration for the previous model. The difference is is that on the ColecoVision you have an expansion port that should have no trouble handling the next leap in technology, with no real limitations, versus add-ons like the Sega CD and 32X that did. Now, to keep that up with a ColecoVision 3 would almost certainly be a step too far, but at the very least you could sate ColecoVision owners for at least one generation.

 

I do think Sega is a good example of a step too far. I think the Sega CD made sense on some level (as did the Turbo CD), but adding the 32X into the mix was too much. They should have simply took the slight hit in sales and focused on the Saturn. Of course, hindsight and all that.

[Bill Loguidice]

What if companies shipped "game carts" that plugged into the expansion port instead of the cart slot and included "helper chips" that way? Would that have been a feasible way to keep up with NES without splitting the playerbase by requiring a separate peripheral?

 

I'm talking the game and extra HW is on a single cart that plugs into the expansion port

 

That could definitely work, but I doubt it would be particularly cost-effective in the Coleco model, and not to mention bulky (though I guess the Neo Geo AES was the king of bulky cartridges). Other systems like the TI-99/4a, for instance, had cartridges that bypassed the cartridge port and used the expansion port instead. Certainly everything is there and more in the Coleco's expansion port, but I just don't think the economics of the time would have worked in its favor, which is why the one-time expense of an expansion module would have been the solution instead. The Famicom had the advantage of being designed for something like this from the start with minimal fuss and relative expense.