Fool's Errand

 

The Bart Simpson elephant is BACK, baby!
(image from some Russian site. Look,
I can't read Cyrillic, okay?)

In "I can't believe it's not an April Fool's joke" news, real life 007 villain Vladimir Putin intends to make a Russian game console to offset his country's loss of the Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo Switch brands. Note that the last time Russia was associated with video game consoles, it was for the Dendy, an NES knock-off from about twenty years and three console cycles ago. To say that Russia will be at a technological disadvantage with their own game machine is a magnificent understatement, but at least this new Putin-approved machine is sure to have the eye-catchingly soulless industrial design of Russian consumer technology.

Russia's ATAM computer. You know how
the Commodore VIC-20 was the friendly
computer? This is the exact opposite of that.
(image from the Lunduke Journal of Technology)

Speaking of hardware that's well past its sell by date, there's now a BASIC compiler for the ColecoVision, and it's got me thinking about making software for that system. The only problems are the limitations inherent in both the compiler and the console itself. It's unclear how much of the ColecoVision's power can be tapped by CV Basic in its early state of development, but what is clear are the galling limitations of the system's VDP display chip, no matter what you use to write code for it.

The VDP can't do a lot of things that people have taken for granted in video games since the Nintendo Entertainment System. The NES can display up to four colors in an 8x8 pixel square... the ColecoVision can only show two colors in that same space, although they can be two different colors per row. The NES has fifty-five colors in its palette, while the the ColecoVision has just sixteen off-putting hues. The NES can scroll graphics smoothly in any direction, while the ColecoVision lurches the screen along in eight pixel increments.

The ColecoVision is hamstrung by the limited graphics hardware of the early 1980s, and that makes effective game design on the machine all the more difficult. Tiles can't just be dropped anywhere you please to create a picture... they must be strategically set so as to avoid color clash, giving artwork on the ColecoVision a stiff geometric appearance. You'll note that compared to the arcade version of Donkey Kong, the home version of DK looks more squared off and compressed into a frame. The designers couldn't make him look more arcade accurate than this... it was literally not possible on the hardware.

However, there are workarounds. It turns out that the ColecoVision's sprites can be used as a Band-Aid, covering up those glaring color deficiencies and resulting in more detailed and natural artwork. CV Basic creator Oscar "Nanochess" Toledo demonstrated this by taking an old drawing of my cartoon character Byron in the jaws of a Heiankyo alien, and turned it into this ColecoVision pixel art.

If this looks a little plain, keep in mind that this is literally as good as the ColecoVision can make this drawing look, and that's with tile shifting and twenty-six overlaid sprites. (If you don't like the drawing itself, sorry, but I can't help you there.)

My point is that even with the aid of a BASIC compiler, making games for the ColecoVision is thirsty work. Things that would come easily on the NES or Master System just don't on the Coleco's system... you have to fight the hardware every step of the way to bring your ideas to life, which is why making a game for this particular system is an unappetizing prospect. 

It's also why I'm so consistently impressed with what Eduardo Mello can do with the ColecoVision, using the Super Game Module for a modest performance boost. Considering how the official port of Time Pilot turned out on the ColecoVision (poorly), his own stunningly close conversion seems like witchcraft.