Geoff Oltmans

I've used the transistor inverter circuit with a Sega Light Phaser but I have to say I haven't had very good luck with it. I don't know if it's a result of connecting my 7800 through a VCR to demodulate it to composite out on a monitor, but it seems like it's slow to register a trigger event.

I think they are OK, and I've certainly used them a lot over the years. I'll also admit that in the past I converted SMS joypads to work with the 7800 and ended up using those quite a bit more, but I have gravitated back to the ProLine. I think it probably would have been a lot better if they had used microswitches or leaves instead of the awful pop-o-matic buttons.

SRAM was my first thought. All the chips in my 7800 are socketed I believe, so a quick test might be to swap the SRAMs and see if the symptom changes any.

very cool. Definitely interested!

Good to hear! Yeah, there's bound to be some issues in there. Most of the preferences menu requires you to save the changes and then relaunch the application to take effect, so bear that in mind.

In this archive is the application itself, and the SDL2 framework. The .framework needs to be copied over to the /Library/Frameworks folder before launching. Let me know how it works! AdamemSDL_macos_2_1d.zip

Just a clarification... I've had issues getting things building and working the same on both platforms at the exact same time sometimes. I *think* I'm close to having something a little more modern and maintainable at this point though.

I've been working on it off and on. Part of my problem has been the development landscapes changing on both the macOS and Windows side. Part of the issue on the Windows side of things was that SDL version 1.2 doesn't build with latest Visual Studio, so that forced me to abandon SDL 1.2 in favor of SDL 2.0. That was a long time coming, so I'm not too torn up about the additional work that created, just gave me an excuse to migrate. There's a couple issues that the migration has caused, but it by and large works the way it did before. I have built binaries for both Windows and macOS, but I need to try and get the diffs consolidated between the two. I can send you a dev build to tinker with and maybe you can help me flesh out any bugs if you're interested (or anyone else for that matter).

Thanks!

I've looked all over but I can't find this info... does anyone know what PCB part number is used for Xenophobe?

I guess this isn't too surprising given that the hues on normal colors will drift after just a minute or two of warming the console up.

Yes, I can imagine noise rejection by the tuner circuit before passing it to an LCD's image processor is very important, since it will likely introduce it's own noise when attempting to figure out how to scale the image and whatnot.

From what I've seen personally, there's a pretty big difference in RF output quality depending upon the tuner. I have an old TV with the VHF/UHF tuning knobs and I swear even though it's not the best quality set overall (it's a GE Portacolor 9"), the RF output is very clean. By comparison, the late-90's VHS RCA VCR connected to a composite monitor looks pretty noisy with the same cabling, and my modern TV ( < 3 years old) looks absolutely horrid with anything RF or composite.

I don't think the ADAM in and of itself was a mistake per se. It certainly had everything someone would want in a home computer, but the business end of things was certainly botched by rushing it to market. They had a nice installed user base with Coleco Vision that they could leverage off of, so I think that gave them a little bit of a leg up on several competitors. To me this is akin to what makes a "home computer" different from a "business computer." Those monikers are a little fuzzy in a lot of respects when you get right into it. What makes a "home computer" different than a video game console? Mainly the amount of RAM and IO they have...

Well, apparently I was mistaken. Bill says the market was doing pretty well at that time and the decision to pivot from SGM to ADAM was done before he started there.

I was trying to find it, but I think it's lost to the sands of time... You've seen the email exchange I shared with Bill Rose, and that didn't encompass everything that he told me. I was thinking that he had said that but I can't find that exchange. Either him or Howard Eglowstein. I suppose we could rattle their cages again and see if they can confirm if what I'm saying is accurate.

Well, according to one account from someone that worked at Coleco, 6-9 months before the ADAM came out the bottom fell out of Coleco Vision sales... so there must have been a good reason.

I haven't done the video mod (yet) on my 7800, but I did wire up an external reset so that I could use a ROM emulator with it (the ROM emulator will reset the target when it's finished dumping the binary into the device).

A lot of this hinges on the interests of the individual. There are variety of different machines out there, and by and large they are all fascinating or distinguished in a variety of different ways. Are you interested in the hardware architecture (graphics, CPU, sound)? The software (games, business)? The OS? The cultural significance? Nostalgia? History? Differences to their peers? So many reasons.

Everyone we knew at that time was buying a home computer instead of a games machine. The Commodore 64 might have been $200 by that time, but you couldn't do anything with it much until you added a disk drive (for another $250) and at least half or more people we knew also had a printer (another $200+) for theirs. So, the ADAM wasn't exactly at a price disadvantage compared to its peers. If you could fault Coleco for anything packaging wise it was to not have a printerless option.

Sounds a lot like a SID!

STUN Runner was the main game I bought the system for, that was pretty great. As was Xenophobe, Rampart, A.P.B., Gauntlet, California Games, Klax, and several others. Those jump out to me the most out of the ones I liked. There were plenty of good games.

Certain blasphemy! There's a ton of great games on Lynx all back from the day.

Welcome to the world of Firmware engineering.

Well, if the Lynx FAQ is to be believed then Atari stiffed them a sum of money for royalties that they took them to court over and several of the Epyx folks didn't sound too happy with Atari.