Looking for any technical information on the Teleng Colourstars

[gorf68]

This is probably going to come to nothing, but I'm looking for any technical documentation on the 1979 Teleng Colourstars UK, TV games Pong type system.

The first system I ever had, as a ten year old.

It only ever had Seven cartridges made for it, as far as I know, and the circuity for the games on each cartridge came on the cartridge, no CPU in the console. This makes it both highly programable and not easy to get started with.

 

Yes, I may be mad, but I'd quite like to try and program a game for this.. I think I would also have to emulate hardware, to a certain extent, as well as write the code for the games. Which opens up possibilities if there is any documentation about this system at all. Because I can find none.

 

Anybody?

[Knowledge]

I am pretty certain this was a General Instruments GIMINI system, which was common and was probably produced for Teleng by a Hong Kong manufacturer like Radofin or United Appliance Limited.   I am not sure if you can program a game, but here is the PDF of the circuit layouts for standard GIMINI systems, courtesy of Pong-Story.

http://www.pong-story.com/GIMINI1978.pdf

 

[gorf68]

Thanks, a very quick look at that PDF shows this is definitely for something very similar.

 

My idea was to see if I could build a cartridge using an FPGA that at least generates a video signal.

I've not long started with FPGA stuff though, so my skill set  may not be up to this!

An idea for a long-term project, at least for me

[CatPix]

Those are probably just a reskin of a PC-50* system. The games weren’t even running from CPU, but logic gates integrated in one chip.

I suppose using a FPGA to make one and also produce the composite video signal would be feasible; and probably intriguing because since the console is just a fancy adapter for power, game pads input and TV-RF out, mean you could do games with as much resolution as your FPGA allows… Not colr colors. because there were two kinds of systems : black and white, and colour; they are the same, except that the colour models include a grayscale to color chip. so youêll be limited to the 8 color palette of the chip.

Edited February 21, 2022 by CatPix