Coleco is now part of the Bridge lineup

The Bridge now will work on the Coleco console. The console does not provide constant power and ground to any pin consistently. It will hold one pin high and one low but they switch the polarity. Therefore, an external power source is needed here. Thus, the cable of choice was the intellivision. It has the same requirement and is also db9. 

Figuring out the buttons was not all that hard, mostly had that up and running in a few hours but I really wanted the wheel working. At first it seemed simple enough. You just sended out the encoder logic to the a/b signal pins. but tying this to the console poll rate seemed to be less than desired. After a great deal of work the game Turbo was working. Though running other games shows a frame rate drop times 5, where the game had dropped to 8 FPS. The wheel counts was so bad the game didn't play. 

The next obvious solution was a timer. So I put the encoder on a timer hoping I had enough time to jump out and satisfy the poll request. And I'm happy to report that worked out very well. All games now use the emulated wheel, udraw tablet, paddles, analogs sticks and the best one DH-Hero! Controllers like paddles that have a stop range will work, but its not as nice as the endless rotating DJ-Hero. For games that use SAC, I suggest a track ball controller. The difference being you need to spin in, not move it. So the two game styles are not interchangeable. You can use paddles or analog sticks but its not the same. 

So now we all can enjoy coleco without that coleco controller or the big clunky expansion board. Use any analog n64, dream cast, playstation, game cube, or the wheel that go with them. The Saturn wheel was especialy nice on the Coleco. 

Grab your Bridge here.