ColecoVision 128-in-1 Flash Cart Now Available!

[gulag picture radio]

I promise that I would if my Coleco weren't in storage. I'm trying my best to get it so that I can try out the FLASH cart, and the awesome demos and homebrews that are out there. I can hardly wait to see what kind of bankswitching magic you've come up with!

[oesii]

I'm guilty of the same thing, my Colecovision and Adam are both in storage and my flash cart is still in the mailing box. I need to get those things out so I can try some of the cool stuff out there.

[Pixelboy]

I received my USB cart today, so I promptly plugged in my CV and tried it with a few ROMs, and it works great! Thanks for making this USB cart a reality, classics!

 

Among the games I tried, there was Matt Patrol, and I only now realize what a technical tour-de-force this game is! It's got everything from smooth scrolling to parallax, practically no flicker, and great music to boot! The control is a little stiff, especially when you want to jump, but I got the hang of it quickly enough.

 

One other thing I learned from using my CV today: It's not a good idea to plug a CV on a flat-screen TV! The picture got mixed up and scrambled every time I turned the CV on, no matter what cartridge I used, and since I bought the flat-screen TV a few months ago, I naturally assumed that my CV was having technical difficulties. Imagine my surprise when the picture was still scrambled after unplugging the CV and plugging in my DVD player! After turning the TV on and off a few times, it finally went back to normal, so all is well that ends well (I hope!). I also tried my CV on an older regular TV, and it works fine, so the moral of the story is: I'm never plugging my CV on my flat-screen TV ever again!

 

So nobody has wanted to try my spiffy little demo in their flash cart? Just one download of the source so far and no download of the binary? It took me since Sunday afternoon to figure it out, and a whole evening to throw it together.

I tried it just now, and all I got was a garbled screen. Am I missing something? I just put the "banker.asm.bin" file in slot #1 of the USB cart, since there was no specific instructions attached to the BIN file...

[Bruce Tomlin]

I tried it just now, and all I got was a garbled screen. Am I missing something? I just put the "banker.asm.bin" file in slot #1 of the USB cart, since there was no specific instructions attached to the BIN file...

That's what it's supposed to do. It goes through each bank of the cartridge and copies the first 768 bytes to the screen, and keeps doing this in a loop.

[Pixelboy]

That's what it's supposed to do. It goes through each bank of the cartridge and copies the first 768 bytes to the screen, and keeps doing this in a loop.

So having this garbage onscreen is actually the expected and correct behavior? LOL!! I never thought I'd hear that one day!

[ghsqb]

I received my USB cart today, thanks very much.

 

Likely won't have an opportunity for a wek or so to test it, but if I run into any issues, I'll be sure to ask for help.

[+5-11under]

I got mine last night. I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but it looks great. One thing I appreciated, is that I didn't have to pay any extra Canada Post charges, or duty.

5-11under

[classics]

Well, that was interesting.

 

Tried your bin on a few carts today and it worked as expected for me.

 

Steve

[classics]

Here is the initial release of the source code for a command line utility.

 

Its hardly been tested at all, but does compile and work ok for me on Redhat 8 and a recent install of Fedora and Ubuntu. The Ubuntu test was in a vmware machine though.

 

If anyone wants to make a GUI interface feel free.

 

Steve

colecocli.zip

[Bruce Tomlin]

Here's a version with all the compiler warnings fixed.

 

text += strlen(text++); ??????? bad, bad, bad!

 

And for those trying to get it to compile on OS X, stick these lines in. I ripped this out of my assembler. (I haven't actually tried it with a cartridge yet.)

 

#include <stdio.h>

int ReadLine(FILE *file, char *line, int max)
{
int c = 0;
int len = 0;

	while (max > 1)
	{
		c = fgetc(file);
		*line = 0;
		switch(c)
		{
			case EOF:
				if (len == 0) return 0;
			case '\n':
				return 1;
			case '\r':
				break;
			default:
				*line++ = c;
				max--;
				len++;
				break;
		}
	}
	while (c != EOF && c != '\n')
		c = fgetc(file);

return 1;
}

int getline(char **line_buffer, int *line_buffer_length, FILE *f)
{
int result;
result = ReadLine(f,*line_buffer,*line_buffer_length);
return (result != 0);
}

colecocli.zip

[classics]

Here's a version with all the compiler warnings fixed.

 

What warnings did you get?

 

Steve

[Bruce Tomlin]

What warnings did you get?

Lots of 'em. Just try compiling it with "-Wall" to turn on all the warnings. There was stuff from the minor "better put a parentheses around the assignment in that if statement" and pointer signedness warnings, to functions that weren't guaranteed to return a value and that "text += strlen(text++)" thing which depends on execution order and is more confusing than "text += strlen(text) + 1" anyhow.

[classics]

Wow, thanks for cleaning it up.

 

Steve