The ColecoVision

When it was introduced by Coleco in 1982, the ColecoVision was one of the most advanced consoles on the market, superior to its main competitors, the Intellivision, the Atari 5200, and the aging Atari 2600/VCS. Coleco, however, was hit hard by the crash of the video game market in 1983 and the failure of the home computer version of the Colecovision, the Coleco Adam. The hardware was discontinued in 1984, and Coleco went out of business a few years later. The BitCorp Dina and the Telegames Personal Arcade are hardware clones released during the 1980s that also play SG-1000 games.

System Configuration

You need a System ROM for the ColecoVision to work.

Emulation

Input devices: Besides the standard controller (two-button joystick plus keypad), bee emulates the Driving Controller, the Roller Controller, and the Super Action Controller. The Driving Controller (steering wheel and pedal) was plugged into port 1, while a standard controller in port 2 was used by some games to navigate menus and change gears. The Roller Controller is a huge trackball that needed to be plugged into both input ports, while the original controllers could be attached to the Roller Controller. The Super Action Controllers were mostly used for sport games. They had joystick with four (rather than two) colour-coded buttons (usually used to choose an also colour-coded player), a keypad, and a wheel (to adjust player speed); co-ordination overkill!

Limitations: Only the NTSC version is emulated. However, as games were designed to work both on NTSC and PAL machines, there should be no major compatibility problems.

Accuracy: Emulation quality is quite high, all games seem to work well.

ROM Database

The ROM database contains about 350 entries, and it should be quite complete and accurate.

Links

The best source of information on ColecoVision is:

Colecovision FAQ

Here are two alternative emulators:

	MEKA
	MESS