Is the forum as an institution dead?

blanka

I was wondering if the forum as a phenomena is dying. I haven't seen many updates here the last months, but on other forums it is the same thing. I think it is still the best way to gather as fans of a specific subject. Where did you guys "move" your handheld talk?

Rik · Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2014 4:03 pm Post subject:

This forum has never really been high on activity, but I've been wondering the same thing... Some of the forums I'm on are still as heavily used as ever, while a lot of others seem to be just slowly dying... I know in some of my hobbies the focus has moved to places like Facebook where people just chat back and forth in FB groups (something I don't really care for).

Other cases it's just that there isn't a huge amount to chat about... Which may be the case here. Other than 'Can you ID this game' or I have this game forsale/wanted, there's not always a lot to say. And the occasional handheld question will end up on places like Atari Age, Digital Press, even Assemblergames... And maybe a few forums I'm not on (I assume there's ones for just Coleco/Colecovision for example, so some talk might exist there...) I think some of it is just spread around with the casual collectors.

Although I did get to meet one of the people responsible for designing the Coleco Donkey Kong mini arcade over the weekend, that was pretty cool... Smile

I'll be posting more info about that soon (finally determined exactly what Coleco designed in house, and just used from elsewhere...)

blanka · Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2014 1:38 pm Post subject:

I'm really curious. I assume the tech stuff was done by Gakken?

Rik · Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2014 10:13 pm Post subject:

Donkey Kong and Ms Pac Man was done completely in house. I don't know if they actually had an in-house programming team, but I think they did for DK at least.

Frogger we know was just licensed from Gakken, Pac-Man was a 'joint effort' with another company (probably Gakken, she didn't say specifically), and Galaxian was also just licensed from an outside company, although I don't think I've seen another VFD Galaxian that is exactly the same (unless I'm forgetting something).

Donkey Kong was the one they seemed to guard closely (the entire license). All versions of DK released by Coleco were designed and programmed internally (handheld, Colecovision, Atari, whatever other system Coleco released it on).

The lady I met (Jennell Jaquays) was actually responsible for designing the layout of the VFD display.
Here's a talk she did at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo last year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb1EiRtUL28
She briefly mentions the handhelds around 6 minutes in, but I think most of the talk is about Coleco Vision. They did a similar talk at Classic Gaming Expo a couple of weeks ago, so I was able to ask more specific questions about the handhelds.

DK Jr designing scrapped early on in favor of just licensing it from Nintendo. Berzerk and Omega Chase never really got into the design stage from what she remembers, just that they were going to be next to work on, but the whole market kind of died and they never went anywhere..

Retrotime1987 · Posted: Thu Sep 25, 2014 2:08 am Post subject:

I hope we're not dying.

Linda · Posted: Mon Nov 17, 2014 7:15 pm Post subject:

I have some games in my office at work and this applications engineer came by and starting telling me how he wrote the code for the Coleco boxing and another game. I think it was Coleco hockey. He has copies of the games at home. I've known him for a couple years, we walk together at lunch time and we never talked about vintage games until he saw them in my office. I'll have to ask him more about it, see if he could post something on the forum.

Linda · Posted: Mon Nov 17, 2014 7:19 pm Post subject:

We don't die we multiply. Life just gets in the way sometimes.
I just completed a new game room with a built-in Library shelf with the sliding ladder. It's cool/ I will share pictures soon. I'm finally able to display bout 75% of my collection.

Regards,
Linda