PiCOLECO - a DIY multicart for Colecovision

[aotta]

How fast! I should buy a new 3d printer... 😝

Thank you for testing!

[MMarcoux66]

6 minutes ago, aotta said:

How fast! I should buy a new 3d printer... 😝

Thank you for testing!

Anytime and thanks for sharing the projects. Yes, the Bambu Labs printers are pretty fast and have great quality. I highly recommend them.

[Marek]

I'll print it tomorrow (ab. 2h for both parts or less than 1h for the top cover in ABS on my Voron V2.4 and I highly recommend that printer, althought it's a builder's project and not an "out of the box" solution - lots of fun)

I do not have long switches, so perhaps, I'll just make and print an additional button that I insert into the hole.

Anyway, thanks a lot for quick update of the file

 

Edited September 4 by Marek

[Marek]

Yeah, works perfect now. Thank you!

[+5-11under]

If anyone is interested in purchasing one of these, I have a few available, in injection-molded shells and printed label. Available at https://videogamepcbs.com/products/36-picoleco-flash-multicart-for-the-colecovision.html

 

[leaded solder]

I just built mine this morning and tested it on my ADAM (1.0b) and it seems to work fine: I was able to play Spy Hunter and Burgertime.

 

Thanks for making this cool project!

 

The only flaky behaviour I saw was that SmartWriter seemed to freeze on a solid background colour on startup – maybe a bus conflict – but it hasn't done it on subsequent warm or cold starts.

 

I also noticed that I was only able to put about 1.7MB of ROMs onto the Pico before it started complaining about not having enough disk space (which is odd since the Ultimate RP2040 is supposed to have 16MB.) I'd prefer to have a full set on there (about 4 megs) but that just means I need to chop out all the betas and prototypes. I may reflash the UF2 and see if it's something stale on there from when I accidentally aborted a copy earlier.

 

I wrote a script to truncate the filenames to 32 characters before copying them over.

 

I'll test it on my clone later (when I remember where I put the last intact board) but I don't anticipate any problems there. Again, great work!

Edited September 21 by leaded solder

[aotta]

The purple pico clones usually come with 16mb flash, of which 15 are free as usb drive, so it's very strange the issue you got, but it's not clear for me which Pico you used.

[leaded solder]

1 hour ago, aotta said:

The purple pico clones usually come with 16mb flash, of which 15 are free as usb drive, so it's very strange the issue you got, but it's not clear for me which Pico you used.

It's a purple Pico clone – the "Ultimate Pico RP2040." It claims 128Mbit/16MByte.

 

Free disk space in the macOS Finder said it had (IIRC) around 15.7MB available, and I've definitely copied ~16MB on one of these before with the PicoCart64 firmware. When I get a chance, I will reflash the firmware and do some more testing – I did abort a copy attempt initially which may have caused problems.

Edited September 21 by leaded solder

[aotta]

Be aware that in same from alixpress arrived purple pico with different flash size, i got a couple of 8MB purple pico but never heard of 2mb flash like seems yours... could you check if the purple one you used in picoleco reports 16mb on Mac too?

[visrealm]

This looks great, @aotta. I just stumbled upon it since I have a ColecoVision coming my way shortly.

 

I've just ordered some PCBs and the Purple Pico boards (hopefully they're the as-advertised 16MB models) I verified the pinout looks the same as yours.

[leaded solder]

On 9/22/2024 at 1:02 AM, aotta said:

could you check if the purple one you used in picoleco reports 16mb on Mac too?

It does. I haven't had a chance to reflash it yet, sorry.

[aotta]

2 minutes ago, leaded solder said:

It does. I haven't had a chance to reflash it yet, sorry.

flashFS has many limits other than filename's lenght, maybe some special char in name or too many files are the cause of issue... try to copy some big file, for example a dummy.txt file bigger than 4 mb if it goes fine!

[Jess Ragan]

So hey, I finally got my ColecoVision in working order, and managed to put a lot of quality time into the PiColeco. It's good! Doesn't seem to like Genesis controllers, though. Any chance this could be fixed in a firmware update? (ColecoVision controllers suck so, so much.)

[MMarcoux66]

17 hours ago, Jess Ragan said:

So hey, I finally got my ColecoVision in working order, and managed to put a lot of quality time into the PiColeco. It's good! Doesn't seem to like Genesis controllers, though. Any chance this could be fixed in a firmware update? (ColecoVision controllers suck so, so much.)

I didn't think you could use Genesis controllers with a ColecoVision without an adapter, but I could be wrong. Either way, the PiColeco would not care as long as you use a controller compatible with the ColecoVision. Should work the same as any cartridge.

 

Atari 5200 controllers are way worse :).

Edited September 29 by MMarcoux66

[Jess Ragan]

Well, the problem is that with a Genesis controller attached, the menu keeps returning to home, possibly because it's convinced a button is being pressed that isn't actually being pressed. The Genesis controller has limited compatibility with the ColecoVision... you can put it in there, and you might even be able to start games by waggling the D-pad, but it tends to act a little squirrelly with games that require the numeric keypad. The PiColeco sees the Genesis controller, freaks out, and keeps looping back to the top menu, even if nothing's being pressed. Maybe it's just my system acting like this; note that I recently repaired my ColecoVision's controller ports and replaced the IC chips.

[Jess Ragan]

I think I may have some screwy controllers. Only half of what I got seems to work properly. (They're forty years old, what were you expecting?)

 

Anyway. I've been testing my demos and games and parts of games on the PiCOLECO, using real hardware, and it's a lot of fun seeing my creations come to life on actual hardware. It makes me want to resume work on Eye Brawls after losing interest in the project... I really would need some assistance on the sound front, though.

[Chupperson]

Hi, thanks @aotta for creating such great projects! I printed a shell for the PiCOLECO I built last night, but it doesn't seem to fit with the pins from the Pico clone soldered in. Is there something special I need to know to get the board to fit in the shell? Feels like I'm missing something since everyone else seems to be getting theirs to fit with no problem.