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Atari 2600 on the Collectorvision Console


keithbk

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I had read where the Collectorvision Console was fully capable of playing both Colecovision and Atari 2600 cartridges and was wondering if anyone had any experience with this new fan-created system, including the use of original/aftermarket 2600 joysticks, paddles, etc with the console.

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I have one of those with my Colecovision. I don't think it can hook into the Collectorvision, however.

 

The more I have looked into the Collectorvision, it appears it only plays Atari 2600 Roms through an SD Card, but plays actual Colecovision cartridges.

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8 minutes ago, keithbk said:

I have one of those with my Colecovision. I don't think it can hook into the Collectorvision, however.

 

The more I have looked into the Collectorvision, it appears it only plays Atari 2600 Roms through an SD Card, but plays actual Colecovision cartridges.

Check the release thread. There are a lot of people posting about it there.  And yes at this time it will only play 2600 on SD card but they are working on a cartridge port adapter. 

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3 hours ago, Karl G said:

They showed it in action on Wednesday's ZeroPage Homebrew stream. It seems to have some limitations that would affect compatibility with many modern homebrews. I believe it's a FPGA solution that can't do ARM-based games, and doesn't handle early HMOVEs correctly.

I think in theory it can, but there hasn’t been much work in implementing modern 2600 cart technology from SD cards in FPGA. I think the best at this point is that analogue has come up with the DPC implementation for pitfall 2 that I’m not sure mist or mister has yet.  I think they made one a few month ago where you use a *.p2 extension. A cart adapter should solve a lot of these problems with special cart compatibility. I would be interested to know the compatibility of the one or two fpga 2600s one-offs that have a cart slot. I think Metal Jesus had one that looked like a Walkman. 

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You can't play Atari carts on the Phoenix, only ROMs through an SD card and the quality is all over the place.  Some games are near perfect such as Demon Attack.  Some have minor graphical issues such as Spider Fighter's "Bonus 500" text looks like an alien language.  Some are almost unplayable.  Cosmic Ark is completely missing the alarm to warn you of a meteor attack if you spend too long on a planet for example.  CollectorVision are working on a cartridge adapter, which I've seen photos of but they say it will be a "long time" before it's out and who knows how long that is.  Also have no idea if it will allow me to play all my Atari2600 carts on the Phoenix, including homebrews.  I hope so.

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1 hour ago, insertclevernamehere said:

You can't play Atari carts on the Phoenix, only ROMs through an SD card and the quality is all over the place.  Some games are near perfect such as Demon Attack.  Some have minor graphical issues such as Spider Fighter's "Bonus 500" text looks like an alien language.  Some are almost unplayable.  Cosmic Ark is completely missing the alarm to warn you of a meteor attack if you spend too long on a planet for example.  CollectorVision are working on a cartridge adapter, which I've seen photos of but they say it will be a "long time" before it's out and who knows how long that is.  Also have no idea if it will allow me to play all my Atari2600 carts on the Phoenix, including homebrews.  I hope so.

Have you tried the versions in the Phoenix 2600 conversions pack I posted in the Phoenix release thread? There are over 500 games. 

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2 hours ago, Swami said:

Have you tried the versions in the Phoenix 2600 conversions pack I posted in the Phoenix release thread? There are over 500 games. 

No.  Do they all work well?  Can I download the games individually if I don't want all 500?  I didn't even know there were that many Atari2600 games.  

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1 hour ago, insertclevernamehere said:

No.  Do they all work well?  Can I download the games individually if I don't want all 500?  I didn't even know there were that many Atari2600 games.  

Maybe 5% or so have glitches from barely noticeable to mild. They come in a single zip file, but it is only 2.8 MB, so you can download it to your pc and then take individual files out. Between originals and homebrews there are over 1000 games. I think most of the paddle games don’t work well though, as with the joystick they usually have only 3 or 4 positions rather than continuous movement, but I haven’t checked them all. For some you need to turn on the superchip option or reset after loading. 

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16 hours ago, AtariLeaf said:

I thought I read the cart adapter will be out next year.  I believe all current homebrews will work with it in theory but I could be wrong 

Ooh, I hope so.  Next year, even if it is this time next year, wouldn't be so bad.  That would be within an expected timeframe but beyond that, I will experience increasing levels of impatience, disappointment etc, the longer the wait.

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It looks like there is still work to be done on the FPGA-implementation of the Atari 2600 in the Collectorvision Phoenix.

 

From the short test on ZeroPage Homebrew's stream, I could see that even simple games have annoying glitches.

Things I noticed :

  • CTRLPF score-mode is not supported (i.e. where the left half of the playfield gets a different color than the right half)
  • 48-bit sprites are messed up (i.e. where both player graphic registers use 3 close-copies to create a 48-bit wide sprite)

If even these basic things don't work correctly, I doubt if this FPGA-implementation is ready for prime time.

I think the MiST implementation of the 2600 has the same issues, so maybe this was copied over to the Collectorvision Phoenix?

 

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On 11/8/2019 at 5:07 PM, Swami said:

Have you tried the versions in the Phoenix 2600 conversions pack I posted in the Phoenix release thread? There are over 500 games. 

So I deleted the ROMs I was having issues with and replaced them with yours.  I didn't download the whole thing, just the ROMs I wanted.  Unfortunately they either have exactly the same issues or are even worse.  I will list the ones I have tried below.

 

Yars' Revenge - The shield around the Qotile has a weird effect on it.  It isn't a solid colour.  It's just an aesthetic thing but gameplay wise, when you fire, the missile doesn't behave how it should.  It either goes past the far right of the screen and reappears on the left or just stops part way across the screen.  No change with your ROM.

Cosmic Ark - No warning alarm on planet surface on either ROM.

Asteroids - My ROM just scrolled rapidly through the game varieties and pressing start would have no effect.  Your ROM displayed a screen filled with flickering Asteroids and again, start would not start the game.

Pitfall - my version had only one sound effect.  Not good on an already sfx minimalist game.  Your version just gave me a black screen and a loud screeching noise.  

Air Sea Battle - both versions have the shots originate to the right of your gun.  On my 14" crt, it's at least an inch off.

I have not yet tried your versions of Astroblast or Combat.  Don't know why I'm having trouble with these specific games even when I've tried different ROMs.

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46 minutes ago, insertclevernamehere said:

So I deleted the ROMs I was having issues with and replaced them with yours.  I didn't download the whole thing, just the ROMs I wanted.  Unfortunately they either have exactly the same issues or are even worse.  I will list the ones I have tried below.

 

Yars' Revenge - The shield around the Qotile has a weird effect on it.  It isn't a solid colour.  It's just an aesthetic thing but gameplay wise, when you fire, the missile doesn't behave how it should.  It either goes past the far right of the screen and reappears on the left or just stops part way across the screen.  No change with your ROM.

Cosmic Ark - No warning alarm on planet surface on either ROM.

Asteroids - My ROM just scrolled rapidly through the game varieties and pressing start would have no effect.  Your ROM displayed a screen filled with flickering Asteroids and again, start would not start the game.

Pitfall - my version had only one sound effect.  Not good on an already sfx minimalist game.  Your version just gave me a black screen and a loud screeching noise.  

Air Sea Battle - both versions have the shots originate to the right of your gun.  On my 14" crt, it's at least an inch off.

I have not yet tried your versions of Astroblast or Combat.  Don't know why I'm having trouble with these specific games even when I've tried different ROMs.

I'll try to check through the ones you mentioned in the next few days. They were fixed by other people for the flashback portable sd card, so they needed the bank-switching fixed to something simple. With 500 games, I have not tried most of them. Could be incompatibilities between the flashback portable and Phoenix with some, but I hoped many of the bank-switch hacks would be improvements.

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On 11/8/2019 at 10:18 AM, chewy said:

how did the adapter work- how could atari vcs game work on a colecovision, is there a vcs of some sort in the adapter?

It was literally just a 2600 that used the ColecoVision for power and as an AV passthrough. The 2600 adapters for the 5200 and Intellivision work in the exact same way.

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On 11/14/2019 at 12:24 PM, insertclevernamehere said:

So I deleted the ROMs I was having issues with and replaced them with yours.  I didn't download the whole thing, just the ROMs I wanted.  Unfortunately they either have exactly the same issues or are even worse.  I will list the ones I have tried below.

 

Yars' Revenge - The shield around the Qotile has a weird effect on it.  It isn't a solid colour.  It's just an aesthetic thing but gameplay wise, when you fire, the missile doesn't behave how it should.  It either goes past the far right of the screen and reappears on the left or just stops part way across the screen.  No change with your ROM.

Cosmic Ark - No warning alarm on planet surface on either ROM.

Asteroids - My ROM just scrolled rapidly through the game varieties and pressing start would have no effect.  Your ROM displayed a screen filled with flickering Asteroids and again, start would not start the game.

Pitfall - my version had only one sound effect.  Not good on an already sfx minimalist game.  Your version just gave me a black screen and a loud screeching noise.  

Air Sea Battle - both versions have the shots originate to the right of your gun.  On my 14" crt, it's at least an inch off.

I have not yet tried your versions of Astroblast or Combat.  Don't know why I'm having trouble with these specific games even when I've tried different ROMs.

I tried Yars revenge and it worked okay. A slight glitch of firing from the back wall. Shield was a solid color.

Pitfall worked, but again, with only one sound. I think that has to be fixed in the core. I think you may have loaded Pitfall 2 by mistake, which doesn't work on the portable or FPGA, it must have been in there left over somehow. Otherwise, sometimes the games just load wrong and you have to load a different ROM and then go back and reload the first again.

Cosmic Ark. Plays well except sometimes I get warning sound, sometimes there is a clicking in its place.

Asteroids work perfect

Air Sea Battle, I see the same thing as you.

Astroblast seems stuck on paddle mode so fires when you move left and the ship doesn't move, even though it works on portable.

 

On the portable Yars doesn't have the firing from the right side glitch and Cosmic Ark always has a warning sound but has a rainbow line moving back and forth.

 

As far as the difference in our experience, with Yars and Asteroids, I have the first core from two weeks ago and haven't updated. Otherwise I can't say. Here is another Portable ROM set you can try to see if anything works better, although most are probably the same. Like I said, I had nothing to do with programming the ROMS, just hoping the bank-switch fixes on the portable hacks would work on the Phoenix. Hopefully, the core gets better soon.

Game.zip

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On 11/16/2019 at 1:28 AM, Swami said:

I tried Yars revenge and it worked okay. A slight glitch of firing from the back wall. Shield was a solid color.

Pitfall worked, but again, with only one sound. I think that has to be fixed in the core. I think you may have loaded Pitfall 2 by mistake, which doesn't work on the portable or FPGA, it must have been in there left over somehow. Otherwise, sometimes the games just load wrong and you have to load a different ROM and then go back and reload the first again.

Cosmic Ark. Plays well except sometimes I get warning sound, sometimes there is a clicking in its place.

Asteroids work perfect

Air Sea Battle, I see the same thing as you.

Astroblast seems stuck on paddle mode so fires when you move left and the ship doesn't move, even though it works on portable.

 

On the portable Yars doesn't have the firing from the right side glitch and Cosmic Ark always has a warning sound but has a rainbow line moving back and forth.

 

As far as the difference in our experience, with Yars and Asteroids, I have the first core from two weeks ago and haven't updated. Otherwise I can't say. Here is another Portable ROM set you can try to see if anything works better, although most are probably the same. Like I said, I had nothing to do with programming the ROMS, just hoping the bank-switch fixes on the portable hacks would work on the Phoenix. Hopefully, the core gets better soon.

Game.zip 3.83 MB · 1 download

Thanks for checking them out.  Weird how I'm having problems with some you are not.  I did update the core before trying your ROMs, but I doubt doing that would reintroduce the same problems I had from the previous ROMs that I tried on the earlier core. Something else must be going on.  As you say, hopefully the core will get better.  Gave myself a new game this weekend though.  Spy Hunter for the CV.  Had it for the C64 many years ago and this is the first time I've played it again since then.  Such a good game so will be playing nothing but that and other CV games for the next couple of weeks.  Absolutely no problems with my SH cart or the ROM or indeed, any ROM I have checked out so far on the CV core.?

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  • 1 year later...
On 9/18/2021 at 4:39 PM, Poestyle said:

Before I mess around with my Phoenix , how should I go about putting 2600 roms on the SD card ? Do they all go on the root of the card ? Do I make a 2600 folder and then a games or roms folder inside that folder ? 

Ok , I looked at the card and see that it is already setup . 

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