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Team Pixelboy News Bulletin - December 25th 2015


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Season's Greetings, ColecoVision fanatics! :D

 

I'd like to start by wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, or at least happy holidays if you're not of the christian persuasion. :)

 

 

GIFTS! GIFTS! WHERE ARE THE GIFTS???

 

As most of you are well aware, Christmas morning is always a time for gifts from Team Pixelboy, and today is no exception. Find attached at the end of this post the ROMs of Wonder Boy, Mopiranger, Module Man and... The Black Onyx! But how am I supposed to play that last one under emulation, you ask? It's true that The Black Onyx cannot be played on the AtariMax SD cart, because it doesn't support Team Pixelboy's Activision PCB with savegame EEPROM, but surprise! You can play it right now with the CoolCV emulator! I'm not 100% sure where the EEPROM savegame file is created, but I think it's in the user's "Documents" folder on Windows.

 

Anyway, I hope you'll enjoy these new free ROMs, but the gifts don't stop there, my friends! As I hinted many times this past year, today you get to find out what the Mystery games are! Keep on reading below for the juicy details, and you can consult the new sections which I added to teampixelboy.com for these new upcoming games for extra info. :D

 

 

MYSTERY GAME #1 REVEALED!

 

Mystery Game #1 comes from Antoni Burguera (the creator of Caos Begins) and it's called Children of the Night. I could explain what the game is all about, but I'd rather let the video below do the talking for me. :)

 

https://youtu.be/7C13JT0lFCY

 

As you may have noticed in the video, the game will require the Super Game Module. It will be a sizeable 128K MegaCart adventure, with a password system to save your progress, so expect to spend several hours playing this one. The software is roughly 75% done, currently. It should also be noted that the video only shows a few types of enemies, but the final game will offer much more enemy diversity, both in terms of appearance and behavior.

 

 

MYSTERY GAME #2 REVEALED!

 

Mystery Game #2 is being programmed from scratch by Armando Pérez (creator of Majikazo and the MSX/Coleco versions of Operation Wolf) and I'm very proud to present this new addition to the ColecoVision homebrew library! Say hello to... WIZARD OF WOR!!!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v30el4_6lIU

 

Armando went to great lengths to reproduce the arcade experience, by including many features from the arcade game, such as player 2 being controlled by the CPU when the game is played in single-player mode. As far as I know, this will be the only home version of Wizard of Wor to have that CPU-player-2 feature. This will also be a 128K MegaCart game, in order to include speech samples taken straight from the arcade game. The software is actually very far along, about 90% done. I'll be needing beta-testers within a month or two to test this baby, that much is certain. Wizard of Wor will be a Coleco vaporware no more! ;)

 

 

MYSTERY GAME #3 REVEALED!

 

Wait, what?!?! A third mystery game? This one will only stay a mystery for a second, because I'm revealing it right now. :)

 

Those who have been following Team Pixelboy from the beginning know that I've always wanted to release a certain Intellivision game on the ColecoVision, and thanks to my expert coder friend Mystery Man, it's finally going to happen!

 

I'm talking about Utopia, of course. :D

 

Mystery Man started working on this recently, and the early alpha prototype he showed me doesn't do much, but it's a promising start. The first two pictures below were taken from this alpha prototype, while the third pic is a mockup of what the game will probably look like once it's finished.

 

utopia_demo_1.pngutopia_demo_2.pngutopia_demo_3.png

 

Mystery Man and I talked about possibly adding a one-player-versus-CPU mode to the game (the original Intellivision game was a two-player game, with the single-player mode being more of a practice mode) and it was decided that Mystery Man will code the regular two-player mode first, and then we'll see how much space is left on the 32K cart. If there's not enough room to cram some extra artificial intelligence for a versus-CPU mode, we'll just leave it as-is. In any case, the Super Game Module will probably NOT be required for this game.

 

 

CLOSING COMMENTS

 

I could post more news here, but I'd rather keep the rest for the next Team Pixelboy News Bulletin, which will be posted on January 1st 2016. For now, I just want to mention two things:

 

1) You may recall the five Super Tank prototype carts that I presented in the previous Team Pixelboy News Bulletin (on November 1st 2015). I now have everything I need to go ahead with the eBay auctions, but now is not really a good time to put stuff on eBay, with everyone putting their disposable money on their Christmas budget. January is even worse, with many people paying off their credit card debts. So I'll just hold onto these Super Tank protos until February 2016. There's no rush anyhow. :)

 

2) I'll talk more about the 2016 release schedule next week (in the next news bulletin) but right now I want to say that the manuals of all the February releases are done except for Mecha-9 (I'm currently working on that one) and Ghostbusters. So I don't expect any additional delays regarding the games to be released in February, except maybe for Ghostbusters (crossing my fingers...).

 

 

This concludes this Team Pixelboy News Bulletin. We now return you to your regular forum activities. :D

wonder_boy_colecovision.zip

mopiranger_colecovision.zip

module_man_colecovision.zip

black_onyx_colecovision.zip

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And if you are still accepting pre-order money for the mystery games 1 and 2 let me know since I now know I want them both . I would be glad to pay now .

Send me an e-mail and we'll discuss adding the games to your list of pre-orders.

 

This applies to everyone else who may want to pre-order these mystery-no-longer games. ;)

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Wizard of Wor.. at long last, I am sooo Excited! Best ColecoVision news I've heard so far, I'm definitely in for a copy.

Children Of The Night looks absolutely amazing, in for a copy of that as well.

Utopia would be great if it had 1 player option, I'd be in if so.

 

Thanks for the wonderful news and the ROMS, Luc. Merry Christmas to everybody! :)

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Yah I would echo this. We've been pleading in the Inty forums for someone to make a one player version for the Inty, a Super Pro Utopia if you would.

I'm also hoping there will be enough room in the cart for the one-player mode. However, as strange as it may sound, I don't have a lot of actual experience with the game myself, so what I would like to do is start a thread in the Intellivision sub-forum and try to gather suggestions from Utopia experts about how the CPU should behave in order to give some good competition to the player. But it's way too early to start such a forum thread now. :)

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I'm also hoping there will be enough room in the cart for the one-player mode. However, as strange as it may sound, I don't have a lot of actual experience with the game myself, so what I would like to do is start a thread in the Intellivision sub-forum and try to gather suggestions from Utopia experts about how the CPU should behave in order to give some good competition to the player. But it's way too early to start such a forum thread now. :)

Sounds good. I believe there may already be a thread with some ideas for you. We can look it up when the time is right.

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Great news Luc.

:-D

 

Also a merry Christmas to you.

 

About Wizard Of Wor, will the speech require the new SGM from "Juice2839" or will it work fine on Eduardo's SGM. ?

 

Thanks for the ROMS.

:)

The speech will be done in the "traditional" way. The speech chip in juice's SGM clone will not be used, but the game will function with both SGMs.

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Holy cow that Children of the Night graphic is very well made. I'm so getting that game when it is complete.

Just want to second that! I love seeing "NES Quality" Action/RPG games on the ColecoVision. Curious to see how that game controls. At one point during the video, it almost looked as though there was a Robotron style control where you can shoot in one direction while move in another, but that might have just been a special weapon or something. Either way, it looks great!

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