thegamepeddler

Thanks! Hopefully the devs will get around to adding export features and I'll be able to make this more widely available.

The Atari logo font is hand drawn. (messed up the R a little XD) The font for the various control panel labels is a Dreams font and just happens to be VERY close to the font used on the VCS.

Made this a while back and have been meaning to share, but hadnt got around to it. A bit of fun for anyone interested in viewing. I chose the heavy sixer because its my favorite and my heavy sixer back in the day always had the best video quality of any of the VCSs/2600s I owned.

Considering eBay ditched my original account, I'm a bit surprised this one still exists. I'm even more surprised that I remember the password! Anyway, cutting to the chase: I have three auctions up on eBay. This represents some rare/unusual stuff. A circa 2000 ColecoVision Dacman complete. A circa 2000 ColecoVision Steamroller complete, and a retail sealed, new-in-box Atari 2600 Ice Hockey complete with retail tags and all that jazz. The auctions: eBay Auction -- Item Number: 302581098352 eBay Auction -- Item Number: 302581106034 eBay Auction -- Item Number: 302581113936 Short story long: I originally got back into classic gaming in the late 90's because I was obsessed with my neighbor's ColecoVision round abouts 82-83 when he got it. In large part this was because he and my older brother would torture me with it. They would promise to let me play and then ALWAYS renege at the last minute. This thing was AWESOME back in the day! I got to play Smurf like 1 time for 5 minutes and that burned ColecoVision into my psyche forever. Fast forward about 15 years, and I decide to look it up on eBay. They were only about $30-40! I bought one, and got absolutely hooked. I wanted to know more about it. I also hunted for classic gaming stuff at thrift stores and garage sales relentlessly. And those were the salad days, man. This stuff was out there in the wild for the taking, and almost everyone thought it was junk. So I seriously bought everything I saw. Later that year, the retro craze exploded, and prices were going through the roof. That Xmas I made something like 2 grand on eBay selling the stuff I found in thrift stores, which was a big deal back then in the days before power sellers and mountains of Chinese crap. Really I got into it kind of late, so most of the really interesting, truly rare stuff had already been found, but I had a lot of fun hunting. I started going through eBay, auction by auction, trying to find good deals on lots. I realized there's tons of analytical data there, and most ColecoVision price and rarity guides didn't line up with what was happening on eBay. So I started compiling the data, and came up with The Game Peddler's Guide to ColecoVision. I put it together as an HTML file, and charged $1.25 for it. It was so ridiculous, but something like a dozen people bought it! That's how crazy things were in classic gaming at the time. The lunacy of it. The stupidity of it. The audacity of it. Anyway, I continued buying, fixing, and reselling. I continued to refine my guide. I was lucky enough to be around for the first CGE, and since I live in southern California, I had the fortune to attend. I don't think I got my copy of Steamroller there. I'm pretty sure it came in the mail some time after the show. The game I wanted at CGE was Ms. Space Fury. But I missed it because my friend and I were so overwhelmed by the smokiness of The Plaza, we had to take a break, which happened to coincide with when MSF went on sale at the show. I talked to Daniel Bienvenu fairly regularly at that point through email or aim or icq or something. I was always interested in ColecoVision's true potential, and would constantly grill him about what the hardware could do since he was the programming expert at the time. These conversations, and my respect for him are how I came about acquiring the Dacman copy. I don't remember how I got the Ice Hockey. It was probably in one of the many eBay or auction lots I bought containing classic gaming stuff. The exact timing on this is fuzzy, but at some point I took my substantial classic gaming horde and put it into storage. It was a fair amount of stuff. I had a 19" crt monitor box filled to the brim with Atari 2600 carts. I had at least one of every major console from the 2600 to Playstation. I didn't ever really have a lot of rare stuff, nor did I really collect it. I enjoyed getting good deals, fixing items up, and turning them over. (and I liked playing them!) Some people gave me flak for it. I provided a service to a willing audience, and I had fun doing it. Anyway, this storage unit was costing me, so I threw the entire lot, EVERYTHING I had, on eBay. It sold for $600. For the life of me I can't remember the name of the guy that bought it, but it was someone I was familiar with from the classic gaming community. He drove about 300 miles from Fresno to pick this stuff up with a horse trailer. It was hilarious. We loaded everything up onto the trailer, and that was the end of my classic gaming eBay days. I hung onto a few things: the 3 games mentioned, and a fully functional Vectrex that I found in a thrift store for $10. I offer the games to a new owner rather than have them sit in my closet half-forgetten any longer. The Vectrex is mine to keep. Think of it as the cart hunter's equivalent of a 10-point buck. There are two consoles in my living room: My PS4 Pro and my freakin' VECTREX! Thanks for listening. EDIT: You know, it's funny, but I just read through a bunch of stuff, and apparently I'm fairly hazy on some of these events. I have several posts on here from 2006. I don't remember that AT ALL. Now I'm not sure if I was at the first CGE or CGE 2k. I THOUGHT I only went to one, but I could swear I was at the one where Ms. Space Fury was released. That was apparently 2003? and I KNOW I was at one before that. I posted a pic on these forums in '06 taken at CGE 2k1, and I'm nearly positive *I* took that picture. Memory is a strange thing. EDIT2: oh, while going through my old posts, I came across Will Berdan. I'm pretty sure he's the one that bought all my stuff. His eBay handle was different than here, I believe, but have no recollection what. EDIT3: more research into my own past... I believe what happened is that I received both Dacman and Steamroller in 2000 by mail. I attended CGE 2k1, and only 2k1, which is where I missed nabbing a first run Ms. Space Fury by about 5 minutes. Break from the smoke story is true.

I'd be willing to help out on that.

A few years back I bought a sealed Quest For Quintana Roo for ColecoVision from a guy. It turns out he had 3 boxes of 15 each just sitting around his house; all old store stock he had gotten ahold of somehow. I guess there is quite a bit of that still floating around.

They're not as easy to get ahold of as they used to be. I just recently bid $50 for a lot of 51 games on eBay that included 36 Donkey Kongs, and I freakin' lost!

Once upon a time, I had a silver label Telegames Skiing that looked like a legitimate original cart. The label fit the cartridge, etc, although if I recall correctly it was an Activision case alot like that Tournament Tennis in the pic. Telegames at one time did produce boxes for their games. I think anything that didn't come in a box, but rather a plastic bag automatically doesn't cut it for collectibility. Precendence, for sure, has to be given to Telegames releases: Alcazar, Amazing Bumpman, Boulder Dash, Rock 'n' Bolt, Skiing, and Strike It. You could also argue for Tank Wars and Cosmic Crisis, since no one seems to be sure as to whether or not Bit Corp. ever actually released them to retail. Telegames did own the rights to these games, so anything they did with them has to count as legitimate, but how much do random casings with cheap black and white labels count as collectible? The biggest value in cataloging such copies is really in the ability to avoid them. As far as eColeco is concerned, I started waiting for his stock to run out in '01...

Smurfs side-scrolling? No, not really. The action stops between screens, much like Pitfall. Once the action stops, then the screen scrolls -- but this is just a programming gimic; it is not a part of the gameplay. There is no actual scrolling during the gameplay. Oh, I willing to admit it isn't much of a scroller. It isn't much of a platformer for that matter. But, it does do both.

World's first side-scrolling platformer (same genre that Super Mario Bros. falls under). It's novel for a few turns around the block. For instance, some jumping over objects such as grass blades is required, however if the grass blades touch you, you DIE. The sound in Gargamel's castle is pretty cool too.

And now we FINALLY understand why our moms always nagged us about putting our toys away when we were done playing with them. Great condition.

From what I've been seeing, the guys who recondition or "refurbish" consoles, get quite a chunk of change for them. They even offer warranties. I think people stumble a bit on the shipping, so it's probably best to keep the extra hardware to a minimum. Just console and games. Lastly, I've noticed that if you sneak a decent rare cart into the auction, it can spark some extra bidding from people who are only interested in it alone. I've noticed the same thing with Q*Bert's Qubes and Mr. Do!'s Castle. Although Jungle Hunt seems to be the lastest craze, despite being no rarer. And, collectively, those carts are really only second tier as far as rare carts go, as you pointed out.

I have to wonder if some titles are programmed specifically for the number of cycles in PAL or NTSC. Perhaps some games play faster on PAL consoles? It would be interesting to see them side by each.

Do they all have the standard CBS case, with the thumb wells at the top? eColeco puts CBS style labels on some of their carts, but they use the regular Coleco casing. Of course, with ColecoVision, it doesn't really matter, PAL and NTSC carts are interchangable.

This is also in the CV faqs. It states that CV controllers are incompatible with the Dina/Personal Arcade due to the built-in controllers being wired differently. Because of that, all Super Action games are incompatible with the system. The built-in is Meteoric Shower, which was likely never released in the U.S., but possibly in extremely limited numbers in Europe and Australia.