The posts are pretty blunt about mistakes made and maybe we can all learn a little from reading about them. Unfortunately, the original PCB didn’t take that into account for the sound chip, so a new board revision solved that problem. That is the Z80’s D0 pin connects to D7 and D7 connects to D0. The ColecoVision apparently did the same thing with its video and audio chips.

You just care that when you ask for one, you get it. After all, you don’t care that location 0 and 1 in your EPROM are actually in adjacent cells. We remember scrambling EPROMS on circuit boards to make layout easier. But that’s a nitpick, especially in the context of the Z80 CPU used here.īy the time the PCBs arrived, the total price tag was up to just over $68 Canadian. In addition, it isn’t uncommon to have several devices read at the same time (for example, some CPUs have two copies of each register). Two chips are enabled at a time, one writer and one reader. We’d argue that the statement, “…only one chip on a bus is supposed to be enabled at a time…” is a little misleading, however. admits he didn’t fully understand how address and data buses worked in a system like this when starting this project, and he documents what he learned and winds up with a pretty succinct summary of bus operation. The design goal was to use composite video, a single power supply, and reduce the size of the board, mainly by using surface mount parts where possible. Rather than repair and modify an original unit, it was cheaper and much more educational to build new. According to the price of a unit in working order is high even though over 2 million were made because of several design problems that make them less likely to survive the decades. However, in either configuration, the game console was the brains of the operation. It even had a daisy wheel printer in that configuration. The ColecoVision was a game console that famously could be expanded into a nice - for its day - personal computer.

He did and you can read about the results in great detail since he wrote up two posts, one covering the design and one covering the construction. Found some ColecoVision game cartridges at a flea market, and like most of us would, thought, “I’ll build a ColecoVision console from scratch to play them!” Well, maybe most of us would think of that, but not actually do it.

Time pilot colecovision