All the fixins... or, Happy Coleco-ween!

Hello, all you happy gamers. Jess here. I'm sorry it's been a while since you've heard from me... I'm just trying to hold myself together during a stressful election. Judging from my prolonged absence, you can already tell that's been a losing battle.

When I'm not clutching my chest from heart palpitations and chewing my fingers down to the knuckle, I've been distracting myself with system repairs and modifications. I've been wrestling with this damn ColecoVision for the better part of the year, but after multiple modifications (and an equal number of maddening malfunctions), I think I've finally tamed this wild beast. Behold!

Note that the stock power switch, a flimsy slider infamous for its frustrating flakiness (here's a tissue for all that spittle, by the way), has been replaced with a manly red rocker, with solid construction and a satisfying tactile response. Flip the system on and you'll hear a loud click that resonates through the ColecoVision, making it clear to both it and you that the console is, in fact, on. 

Unfortunately, the switch didn't fit in the crappy stock switch's hole, forcing me to open it up with power tools (ho ho ho). After getting a little too aggressive with said power tools, I had to repair the oversized gap with hot glue and melted plastic before the switch would fit tightly in the system's body. So the ColecoVision isn't exactly stock from the factory, but it WORKS, and that's what counts. When you start a game, it actually starts, instead of barfing random tiles all over your screen, like it did here...

Pardon the finger. I think I earned that profanity, considering that the ColecoVision prevented me from testing my other homebrew gaming gadget.

 

This is my custom made ColecoVision joystick, built from the remains of a Hori Playstation 3 stick, a handful of arcade buttons, and the EZ Coleco joystick adapter from EdLaddin. Twenty five dollars gets you a circuit board and a membrane keypad, which let you turn an unloved game controller thrown into the back of a closet into something you might actually use.

No lie, I hated this joystick when I first bought it. It was better for fighting games than the standard Playstation 3 Dual Shock, but not nearly enough to make it worth dragging this behemoth out for a couple of merely adequate games of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 or Capcom vs. SNK 2. In keeping with Hori tradition, the buttons don't have micro switches, but rather smoosh into rubber pads set over a circuit board, like an oversized joypad. 

I'll just state for the record that this is a lousy way to design what's advertised as an arcade joystick. Mad Catz never did this. ASCII didn't do this. Pelican didn't do this for its high end products, even though they looked like this. Even my crappy iCade, designed as an accessory for Apple tablets, doesn't do this. It's a little insulting that Hori thought it was fine and dandy to put membrane contacts in its arcade joysticks, especially considering their reputations as better than average third party controllers. Apparently nobody who buys Hori products has ever compared them to real arcade hardware, because brother, that's not what they're giving you. 

Luckily for me, the shell of Hori's joystick can be repurposed with a little drilling (keep your stick on the ice). Competing joysticks are said to be more mod-friendly, and it was certainly no picnic drilling a gap for the membrane keypad's ribbon cable, but I managed... and with all my fingers intact! Good, because I'll need one of those if the stupid system doesn't work.

Now I've got a perfectly decent ColecoVision joystick; one that brings some measure of arcade quality to an experience Coleco marketed as the "arcade experience at home." It's doubled my scores in DK Arcade, the sensational conversion of Donkey Kong by Opcode Games that should have been what ColecoVision owners had gotten right out of the box. It's made games like Frenzy that used to be a struggle with the stock controller a joy. It's still not the best arcade joystick I currently own- the Street Fighter IV stick with Sanwa parts that I bought from ShopGoodwill still wears that crown- but it's better than any ColecoVision controller that existed in 1983. It's not even a contest.

Oh yeah, I've done some mods not specifically related to the ColecoVision, although they're not ones I would have willingly made. A couple months ago, the Seagate Game Drive I had plugged into my Xbox Series decided that it was tired of living (it must have been following the election, too...) and randomly disconnected from the system, before refusing to work with it entirely. I had all my Xbox 360 games on you, you bastard! You want me to re-download fifteen years of games, on the microscopic internal storage Microsoft gives you by default? Oh no, Mr. Seagate. You will live again... even if I have to resurrect you as a zombie. It's bad enough that I lost all my games... I'm not paying another sixty bucks for another damn hard drive!

The reaper shall be left wanting! In the name of
all that is thrifty, you shall live again!
(image from Collider)
(yes, that's the smarmy alien who gets
killed a lot on Deep Space Nine)

 

So I took that drive out of its enclosure (and the Seagate people don't make this easy, believe me...), formatted it, and popped it into another enclosure I had lying around. Crash boom bang, the drive worked in its new home, and has continued to work for over a month. My best guess is that the connectors inside Seagate's enclosure got all melty when set atop the Xbox Series, but the actual hard drive survived the heat. One might suggest that Seagate should take these issues into account during the design process, rather than just shipping them out to stores as ticking time bombs, but whatever. As long as the drive keeps working, and as long as I'm not forking over another fistful of money, I'll live. 

(If the damn election doesn't kill me.)

This Connecticut Leather Chafes!

I owned an Atari 5200 years before I had a ColecoVision, and the 5200 never gave me the kinds of problems the ColecoVision has. This machine may be the preferred console of the early 1980s for most gamers, but thanks to its substandard build quality, the ColecoVision is a system that quite literally hasn't aged well. 

The stuff of nightmares. Yes, the 5200
controller is bad, but the ColecoVision
controller isn't necessarily less bad.
(image from Wikipedia)

The first things to go are the controller interface chips. The tiniest static discharge (say, from unplugging the awful stock controller and replacing it with something that doesn't prompt white hot rage) will damage them, affecting the system's ability to read any controllers. Sure you can replace them, but removing calcified components from the ColecoVision mainboard is a massive pain, and will likely result in damaged traces which could keep the system from functioning at all.

Next to meet the Grim Reaper is the power switch, which eventually fails due to wear and the industrial grease inside drying into clumps of oily goo. If your power switch no longer works, you're not playing ColecoVision games, necessitating a replacement. You used to be able to run down to the local Radio Shack and get an improved one (some even have lights inside, a welcome addition to a system with no LED indicators), but without a ready source for electronic components, your options are limited to Amazon and eBay. Have fun waiting for them to arrive.

Garbled graphics and faulty chips!
That's how you know it's a Coleco!
(image from AtariAge)

Oh, but there's more! The ColecoVision is known for failing video RAM. If you don't have working VRAM, you get a garbled up mess of a picture, not far removed from an NES game with dirty cartridge pins. Or because the pins inside the NES are bent out of shape and no longer make proper contact. Or because you didn't stack an NES game on top of the first one to hold it in place. Or because you coughed too loudly, offending the NES. (Okay, so the ColecoVision isn't the only system with aggravating hardware issues.)

Forty years after its release, the ColecoVision is an endless parade of hardware faults. I suspect we're going to see that happen to a LOT of game systems in the immediate future. Hell, the ColecoVision's second cousin, the Game Gear, is almost impossible to find in working condition thirty years later, thanks to leaking capacitors. Sega's not repairing that crap for you twenty years after it dropped out of the console race, so it's on you to fix the problems... if the capacitor acid hasn't already burned its way through vital circuits.

I'm painfully reminded of the scene from
Cowboy Bebop when Spike and Jet retrieve
ancient 20th century technology. Hey, I
remember when that stuff just came out,
and- uh, never mind. Forget I said that.
(image from Overthinking Cowboy Bebop)

Then there are the game systems that came from the factory broken, like the early Xbox 360 with its red light of death, and the Playstation 2 with its disc read errors, forcing you to open the system and turn the potentiometer in just the right amount, so you can play Chulip instead of God of War. At least the ColecoVision had the courtesy to die long after it was discontinued by the manufacturer... Xbox 360 and Playstation 2 games were still on store shelves when my two systems took a dirt nap.

Remember when you were younger, and you couldn't fathom these cutting edge systems breaking down from old age? Hell, I couldn't imagine playing The Legend of Zelda long enough to wear out the internal save battery, yet here we are, in an era of bit rot, dead batteries, leaking capacitors, and optical lenses that have developed cataracts. What was science-fiction in 1990s gaming fanzines has become a painful reality. That game system you cherished so as a child will probably die before you do.

Welcome to the future of gaming, ladies and gentlemen. It's been hell on the past.