ColecoDS - Improved

[wavemotion]

Version 10.5f with more improvements to the ZX Spectrum driver... this system is so quirky! Floating bus tricks, memory contention when the ULA is trying to read screen memory while the CPU is operating out of the same bank, crazy interrupt vector tables that have to be 257 bytes of all the same value so you guarantee when the random data on the bus is seen when an interrupt occurs, you vector to the right place... it's nuts. And I love it!

The world doesn't need another DS Spectrum emulator. But it might get one anyway. I can't control what drives my passion - and it's so many hundreds of hours that if I don't have passion, I may as well nap instead.

 

[Cris1997XX]

I wish you had just as much passion for the Commodore 64 or MSX2, we might get new excellent emulators
But oh well, I can't wait to see what you'll do next

 

[wavemotion]

I've got up a daily build of ColecoDS that adds support for the Casio PV-1000.

Saying the PV-1000 is 'Coleco-like' is a bit of a stretch. It's got the Z80 running at 3.58MHz but instead of the ubiquitous TMS9918, it's got a NEC D65010G031 that is tile-based. The tiles are made up mostly from the game cartridge with an additional 32 tiles that can be created at run-time in RAM. As such, it had even more scrolling challenges than the TMS9918 and, worse, it had to lock the CPU out during video rendering so the 3.58MHz Z80 was being stalled out except for vertical blank and horizontal blank areas. The system supported up to 32K carts and had 2K of RAM but half of that was used for video rendering so it ends up roughly similar to the CV specs for memory.

I've seen reports that the PV-1000 was pulled from store shelves after just a few weeks - though I think that's probably exaggerated. But for sure it didn't last more than a year and only 13 commercial games were produced for it.

The system had no BIOS and so no special files are needed. Rename Casio PV-1000 roms as ".pv1" for them to load in the emulator.

Sound is double-emulated and is quite imperfect. At least until I write a new specialized sound driver.

 

[wavemotion]

It's done... should be a fully functional PV-1000 emulator and I even got the sound mostly right

V10.8: 04-Sep-2025 by wavemotion-dave

• Added support for the PV-1000. No BIOS needed - rename PV-1000 roms to .PV1 so they load properly.

 

[wavemotion]

V10.9: 12-Sep-2025 by wavemotion-dave

• Added SLIDE-N-GLIDE joystick handling for improved cornering in maze/ladder games.
• Added 'DEFINE KEYS' to the DS Mini-Menu so you can change keys in-game.
• New Adam memory configurations to cover 64K up to 1MB
• Added compression of save/load states for improved SD utilization.
• Added compression of config file for improved SD utilization and increased number of available config slots (2300)
• Improved high score file handling so we don't waste as much memory and increased the number of available HS slots to 1500.
• Lots of minor cleanup and improvements under the hood as time permitted.

 

[Cris1997XX]

I know this is probably going to sound stupid, but I can't boot into the emulator. I tried to put the colecovision bios in the places mentioned on the github page, yet it still doesn't work

 

[wavemotion]

I know this is probably going to sound stupid, but I can't boot into the emulator. I tried to put the colecovision bios in the places mentioned on the github page, yet it still doesn't work

It should really be that simple... at a minimum you need coleco.rom (exactly so named) in the place you keep your BIOS files - I keep mine in /roms/bios directory.

The other BIOS files are not required but helpful to allow all the cousin systems to play properly.