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 is a port of Marat Fayzullin's ColecoVision emulator, by David Mcewen. It is still in development, but it seems to work well. It lacks sound at the moment, but this is being worked on as is speed locking and key redefinition, but it seems perfectly playable. The latest versions of the port work on even pre-RISC PCs, and has the ability to run in just 16 colour modes (the same number of colours as the real ColeoVision can display).
The original author, Marat is still developing ColEm upto a new version 2.0, though as to when that'll be released is anyones guess!
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.
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. The
screenshot below shows the Adam's electronic typewriter (early wordprocessor
in action).
There is also a Colecovision emulator written in Java available.
Speed Rating: ARM 2 - Fails, ARM 250 - Fails, ARM 3 - Fails, ARM610 - Perfect
Emulators:
ColEm v0.20 (70Kb ZIP file)
David
Mcewen's Acorn Coleco Page
Marat Fayzullin's
Coleco Page
AdamEm 0.10
(177Kb ZIP file)
Marcel de Kogel's
AdamEm Page
Software:
Coleco
ROMs at Dave's Video Game Classics