Pong day celebration.

[Digital Fluff]

Pong is now 50 years old.

 

Got a spare ColecoVision and CRT monitor? Why not turn it into a Pong clock? Or a Tetris clock. Or a Word clock.

 

No spare ColecoVision available? Could always go for this little gadget: http://emwires.com/ESP32USB/index.html#ESP05 .

 

ROM attached. Happy Pong day.

 

 

ColecoClock.rom

[juansolo]

That's awesome, though being the possessor of probably the only PAL-60 machine (longish story), it identifies my machine as PAL, but because it runs like an NTSC machine, the clock is a little fast

[zyzzle]

Very cool! Thanks for this little "Golden Anniversary" Pong present! I remember the original Pong like it was yesterday. I got an original one back in 1972 / 73.

[Digital Fluff]

On 11/30/2022 at 10:53 PM, juansolo said:

That's awesome, though being the possessor of probably the only PAL-60 machine (longish story), it identifies my machine as PAL, but because it runs like an NTSC machine, the clock is a little fast

Is there any way to recognize this mythical machine of yours from software?

[juansolo]

2 hours ago, Digital Fluff said:

Is there any way to recognize this mythical machine of yours from software?

@marauder666 who is better at all things software than I, hacked it and created a  version of your rom so forces it into NTSC and works fine.

 

FWIW, the reason my machine is odd is that we had I think 6 colecos to fix in at one point. The one that ended up as mine was in particularly horrible condition having had something spilled in it many years ago that had done all sorts of nasty stuff to the solder. It took an lot of work to bring it back from the dead. After a lot of shuffling for various reasons, my machine ended up with a spare video chip from an NTSC machine. As mine has an RGB mod it outputs 60hz but identifies as PAL. Most things work... He had to hack Defender also as that did some weird things, though not the same as it does on a real PAL machine oddly.

 

Given I suspect it's the only one of it's kind, as you can't just drop a NTSC video chip in there and it work without RGB, it's probably not worth detecting my freaky coleco.

Edited December 2, 2022 by juansolo

[marauder666]

@Digital Fluff

Unless theres a register in the video chip that identifies 50/60hz then I don't think it will be possible to identify this machine.

BIOS is still the PAL one, which is what I looked for in your code.

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by marauder666

[zyzzle]

This realy is neat. I love having a Coleco clock!

 

I noticed a possible bug in the Tetris Clock. It sometimes randomly freezes the system, everything is frozen until reset is pressed. This occurs after anywhere from 1 minute to ~20 minutes. It seems to be random. All other modes work perfectly, ad infinitum.

 

All other modes keep great time! If it makes any difference, I'm testing this on ColEm. Can't vouch for other emulators having this bug in Tetris clock.

[marauder666]

I've run the tetris clock for 2 hours on a NTSC console, no crashes.

[zyzzle]

OK, thanks for replying. Must be my emulator, then. Running ColEm v. 5.6 in NTSC mode. It keeps perfect time otherwise.

Edited December 4, 2022 by zyzzle

[Digital Fluff]

Having played with sample sound playing for the ColecoVision a little follow-up to the Coleco clock collection.

 

This time it is a speaking clock.

 

Because of the size of the samples used it is in a separate rom file.

 

Download below.

 

 

ColecoSpeakingClock.rom