Taylor the Gaming Guy Posted March 28, 2020 Share Posted March 28, 2020 Hello to all, I've seen some MSX and SG-1000 conversions for the ColecoVision. I was just wondering if there would be any converters in ROM format and sold for the ColecoVision. These three consoles are Z80 processors themselves. Other converters might be the Sord M5, the Casio PV-2000, or the Memotech MTX512. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pixelboy Posted March 28, 2020 Share Posted March 28, 2020 They may all use the Z80, but their respective architectures are different enough that porting a game from one machine to another is not straightforward enough to have ROM conversion software that can handle anything. There's a lot of "human intervention" required in porting a game adequately. But that's not to say that it's not possible to automate a certain percentage of the work. However, so many of the good MSX and SG-1000 games have already been ported to the ColecoVision that the pertinence of such "partial" ROM conversion software is questionable, if any homebrewer was to develop such tools that could be made public for others. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Taylor the Gaming Guy Posted March 28, 2020 Author Share Posted March 28, 2020 1 hour ago, Pixelboy said: They may all use the Z80, but their respective architectures are different enough that porting a game from one machine to another is not straightforward enough to have ROM conversion software that can handle anything. There's a lot of "human intervention" required in porting a game adequately. But that's not to say that it's not possible to automate a certain percentage of the work. However, so many of the good MSX and SG-1000 games have already been ported to the ColecoVision that the pertinence of such "partial" ROM conversion software is questionable, if any homebrewer was to develop such tools that could be made public for others. Thanks for the message Pixelboy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nitrofurano Posted March 31, 2020 Share Posted March 31, 2020 i guess it would be not that offtopic if i mention here an experience i started years ago, and shared in some smspower threads, like https://www.smspower.org/forums/14522-OperationTaiwanLateReleasesPart6 and https://www.smspower.org/forums/16445-MSXToSMSHacks - the task there wasn't that difficult, since there were msx1 games converted to sg1000/mastersystem in Taiwan and South Korea back in the 80's, that was simply a kind of msx1 bios converted to sg1000 hardware combined with the game rom - since the game rom kept pristine, it was easy to get the bios part combined with other games, and some of these converted games worked fine - as far as i know, i guess, some games acesses i/o ports directly instead of calling the bios routines, and situations like that, so that's why games like Alpha Roid, Tensai Rabbian Daifunsen, and etc., got more difficult to convert than Hyper Rally and Bosconian - and since sg1000 has no bios, and roms always start from 0x0000, it gets way easier than converting to ColecoVision, that has a bios (a crappy bios imho, but exists anyway...) - so i guess that's why msx1 games always needed to be disassembled, edited, and assembled back again, and having it in a constant iteration testing process until working? and perhaps converting an msx1 game to ColecoVision is simpler than converting to ZX-Spectrum? (King's Valley, converted from Retroworks, is simply amazing, imho, very very worth playing - http://www.retroworks.es/php/game_en.php?id=4 - - so i guess the method used on this conversion to ZX-Spectrum might be very similar to that used on the conversions from msx1 to colecovision, only considering that the ZX-Spectrum hardware is more limited, since there are no hardware sprites, having different colours, etc. ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nitrofurano Posted March 31, 2020 Share Posted March 31, 2020 about King's Valley, interesting was this "conversion" to c64 - might be an interesting process of converting the z80 assembly code to 6502 with the c64 hardware specifications in mind: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Taylor the Gaming Guy Posted April 7, 2020 Author Share Posted April 7, 2020 On 3/31/2020 at 6:41 PM, nitrofurano said: about King's Valley, interesting was this "conversion" to c64 - might be an interesting process of converting the z80 assembly code to 6502 with the c64 hardware specifications in mind: TBH, the ZX version is good including the C64 (although it was just rewritten). I've done some MSX to SMS conversions on the MSX to SMS Hacks forum. I'm trying to work on Taiwanese MSX DahJee ports. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nitrofurano Posted May 27, 2020 Share Posted May 27, 2020 hi there! i guess we had some forum conversation there in the smspower forum! and sure! this conversion to c64 is really amazing, i wished to see more conversions/ports like that! about msx to sms, i'm still curious why some conversions are not working, like Alpharoid, Tensai Rabbian Daifunsen, Bouken Roman, etc. - perhaps they use some i/o ports directly instead of bios routines calls? i didn't analyze the z80 disassembly of them yet Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Taylor the Gaming Guy Posted May 30, 2020 Author Share Posted May 30, 2020 On 5/27/2020 at 12:39 PM, nitrofurano said: hi there! i guess we had some forum conversation there in the smspower forum! and sure! this conversion to c64 is really amazing, i wished to see more conversions/ports like that! about msx to sms, i'm still curious why some conversions are not working, like Alpharoid, Tensai Rabbian Daifunsen, Bouken Roman, etc. - perhaps they use some i/o ports directly instead of bios routines calls? i didn't analyze the z80 disassembly of them yet Bouken Roman works on Aaronix 1, Aaronix 2, and Joy Soft. I also wonder what forum conversation we're talking about, maybe MSX2SMS. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Taylor the Gaming Guy Posted July 31, 2020 Author Share Posted July 31, 2020 Y'know, I really was wondering if you guys were porting the MSX games from MSX code to CV code, or there is BIOS code inside the MSX to Coleco games. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruce Tomlin Posted August 26, 2020 Share Posted August 26, 2020 Yeah, no. The hardware may be similar but it's all mixed up. In particular, CV puts the VDP interrupt on NMI, which is super stupid because reading the VDP status register in between bytes will break loading the VDP address register, and that's kind of what you need to do when you get a VDP interrupt. The controllers aren't even wired the same. When I ported Girl's Garden, I had to make it set a flag, then keep checking for the flag in the main game code. I also had to turn EI and DI into macros. And SG-1000 has no ROM at all, it just boots the cartridge. I was so happy that the guy hadn't discovered RLE graphics compression, it gave me a lot of space for that crap. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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