History of video games/Platforms/ColecoVision

Launch
The ColecoVision had been preceded by the Coleco Telstar series of consoles, where Coleco had familiarized themselves with the home gaming market.

The ColecoVision was released in June of 1982, selling for $195 USD. Console shortages were a concern for Coleco in November 1982. Despite this 500,000 units were sold in 1982. Yet shortly following this, production in the United States was briefly stopped in August 1983 to make capacity for Coleco Adam computer production, which used the same manufacturing facilities.

Legacy
Having sold 6 million units, the ColecoVision ended production in 1984 so that Coleco could focus on their Cabbage Patch Kids toy line and their Adam home computer. The ColecoVision was officially discontinued in 1985. The changing of production from ColecoVision to Coleco Adam is commonly seen as a massive blunder by Coleco. The Coleco Adam launched with a flawed design which was nearly self destructive that caused over 60% of produced units to be returned as defective. As a result the system was a massive commercial failure which helped contribute to the bankruptcy of Coleco by loosing hundreds of millions of dollars in spite of large revenue generated by other massively successful product lines.

The Coleco partnership with Nintendo lead to a prototype unit being demonstrated to Nintendo employees in Japan, inspiring Nintendo Research & Development Number 2 Department to match or exceed the capabilities of the ColecoVision during the development of the Famicom.

Though the company that created the ColecoVision went bankrupt, a few later consoles made by others would bear the Coleco brand. This included the Coleco Sonic of the 2006. This would also briefly include Chameleon of the mid 2010's before the naming rights were revoked.

Compute
The ColecoVision CPU is the 8 bit NEC D780C-1, a variant the Zilog Z80A clocked at 3.58 megahertz.

The ColecoVision has 1 kilobyte of RAM and 16 kilobytes of video RAM.

Hardware
The ColecoVision has an 8 kilobyte ROM.

A Texas Instruments TMS9928A was used for graphical output, and could display 32 sprites with 16 simultaneous colors out of 32 possible colors.

Colecovision cartridges leveraged bank switching for increased ROM sizes.

Expansion Modules

 * Expansion Module #1 allowed the ColecoVision to play Atari VCS games.
 * Expansion Module #2 was a driving wheel controller.
 * Expansion Module #3 turned the ColecoVision into the Adam computer system.

Notable games

 * Donkey Kong - Port
 * Zaxxon
 * Illusions
 * War Room
 * Rocky Super Action Boxing