Coleco

The ColecoVision was a game console from the coleco company produced in the early 80s. I think it was fairly popular in the US and although it had the same graphics capability as the MSX it was not utilised as well and the graphics tended to be a lot worse quality. The games to tend to be very playable though, and a good reminder of the games of yesteryear.

ColEm

ColEm is a port of Marat Fayzullin's ColecoVision emulator, by David Mcewen. David has recoded the plotting routines in ARM code rather than C to give it a much needed speed improvement, and has provided various display modes in different resolutions both in 16 and 256 colours, again to aid speed. A port of Marat's v1.0, David's features most of the same features, but particularly sound support. The emulator has been well converted, and doesn't show the tell-tale signs of various other ports, since it has a desktop frontend and can return to the desktop and then resume emulation very easily. The frontend provides a very good configure window where frame skip, interrupt frequency, frame rate locking, and even the Coleco BIOS which is used. Several of these System ROMs are provided with the emulator, most useful being one where the ColecoVision title screen delay has been removed which could previously fool you into believing the system had crashed, it was that slow on low end machines. Frame locking has had to be introduced to limit the emulator to 50 fps on fast machines, since the speed has been improved so much the emulator was running faster than required, which was detrimental to the gameplay.

Although the graphics don't look eactly look awe-inspiring, a lot of the games are very playable, even in the face of todays video games. The screenshot at the top of this page is from Kevtris, a simple 2 player implementation of tetris, and the screenshot at the bottom of the screen is from Pepper 2, a simple maze game. These screenshots don't best display the coleco's abilities, and I recommend you take a look at David's page, these are kept here for variety.

ColEm v1.12 3/1/99
Speed Rating: ARM 3 ARM610 ARM710 StrongARM

ColEm (70Kb ZIP file)
David Mcewen's Acorn Page
Marat Fayzullin's ColEm Page

M.E.S.S.

The ColecoVision driver has no sound emulation as yet, but the compatibility is perfectly adequate. This also is slower than David McEwen's port of ColEm, but is a completely original emulator. It's just a matter of time to see what develops, but at 85% of the normal speed on a StrongARM (as seen on the screenshot of Zaxxon), it is still perfectly usable. Since this emulator is largely written from the information available in the ColEm source code, it is fairly unlikely it will excel ColEm.

MESS

AdamEm

David McEwen has also ported v0.20 of AdamEm, a Coleco Adam emulator written by Marcel de Kogels. AdamEm can also emulate the ColecoVision, since they are very similar except that the Adam was a fully fledged computer with keyboard, rather than a games console. This is a much more competent emulator than ColEm, which emulates the hardware of the coleco range much better. A desktop frontend is present and from a menu you can select whether to boot the emulator as an Adam or ColecoVision, which ever you prefer. If you choose the Adam, it boots up to a virtual typewriter wordprocessor into which text can be typed quite easily. Otherwise it just plays the ColecoVision ROMs in the same way as ColEm.

AdamEm v0.20 2/11/98
Speed Rating: ARM 3 ARM610 ARM710 StrongARM

AdamEm (177Kb ZIP file)
David McEwen's Acorn AdamEm page
Marcel de Kogel's AdamEm Page

There is also a Colecovision emulator written in Java available.

Technical Information (Adam)
CPU - Z80 running at 3.58 Mhz
Display- 256x192 pixels, upto 16 colours
Sound - 3 channels and one white noise generator (SN76489)
RAM - 64 Kb upto 128 Kb
VRAM - 16 Kb
ROM - 8 Kb OS ROM
reference - Michael Koenig

Software:
Coleco ROMs at Dave's Video Game Classics

Recommended software:
Zaxxon, Star Wars