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!
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| 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.)
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