In 1996, I went to the thrift store and lo-and-behold, sitting on the shelf was a Colecovision! I was in one of my I don't want to collect for another system! moods. I looked in the box only to discover a few of my old favourites from my C64 days- Oil's Well and Jumpman Jr. I decided to spend the $10 and I'm glad I did! I got it home only to discover there was no power supply, and seeing how it put out three seperate voltages, I really needed it! I looked around and found an old laptop power supply and checking the outputs, it provided just what I needed. I installed it into the CV's case and now any standard wall wart will supply the juice to run it. I anxiously plugged in Donkey Kong and was amazed at the resolution and quality of the graphics! I was hooked! For some reason I still can't fathom, I knew then that I wanted to figure out what made this machine "tick".

I spent several days of if I do this that will happen trial and error to figure out exactly how the registers in the TMS9918a video chip worked. Unbeknownst to me, the MSX'ers have been doing TMS9918a for years. Only later would I find the complete programming specs for the '18a. I did figure out the sound processor and the keypad stuff, too.

After that, I programmed a few little demos to see exactly how I could make the machine do stuff, and to exercise it's periferals. I then got the idea to do Tetris sort of as a little 'for fun' project. I never intended it to be released, let alone sold, but the people on the IRC channel #RGVC convinced me to. And the rest, as they say, is history!

I was selling Kevtris carts for $20 plus $3 shipping, but have since sold out. You can download the ROM image of my game here for play on emulators or to burn into carts for non-profit use.

Screenshots

The title screen; a little modified...

Two players select skill simultaniously.

The high score screen.

Two players duke it out!