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It's pipe, slippers and rocking chair time this week, as I regale you young 'uns with more tales from the olden days. So if you're sitting comfortably, I'll begin.This week, Rantmedia Games, makers of Vectrex Regeneration, an iOS app that emulates the classic vector graphic console, Kickstarted one for Colecovision, one of my favourite old consoles. Whether or not they'll be successful remains to be seen - I most certainly hope the app will go the distance - but hearing Colecovision being mentioned reminded me of just how devastating unfortunate timing can be to a machine - great though it may be.
Released by the Connecticut Leather Company, a business that had struck gold selling ridiculously popular, phenomenally ugly Cabbage Patch Kids dolls in the very early 80s, Colecovision was one of the last of the second-gen systems. That means it shares a place in gaming history with the likes of the Atari VCS, the console that kicked off that generation some five years prior. But despite being considered a peer to Atari's faux wood clad console, it's technically much closer to the machines that appeared less than a year later and essentially ushered in the third generation of consoles: the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega's much lesser-known SG-1000. What I find very interesting, being of a seriously nerdy bent, is that Sega's SG-1000 console is pretty much a Colecovision clone, sharing largely the same technology, and apparently even able to play Colecovision games (though I have never seen this myself). Getting even more nerdy, when Sega launched its Master System in 1985, it was powered by Colecovision's CPU and featured the same sound chip. Indeed, the only real difference between Coleco and the Master System is that the latter has a slightly better GPU. Which is much of the reason why the Japanese version of the Master System was backwards compatible with the SG-1000.
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