ColecoVision has no reset button

[meshuggahtas]

Reset button where I would use: Tomarc the Barbarian starts the game in 3 possible place (one of the bottom 3 rooms). According to the manual, the * (star) key should start the game, but it's also started instantly and I can't do anything besides this.

Yes, this is a 2 bug in 1 issue.

[alyosha-tas]

.........................ColecoVision OTL

Well I guess I've procrastinated fixing this core for long enough. The Turbo controller never did work right and the whole core is really old and outdated. I guess it's finally time to bring it up to par with the rest of BizHawk.

[alyosha-tas]

http://www.atarihq.com/danb/files/colecovision.pdf

As far as I can tell from these schematics, reset just triggers the reset pins on various chips in the console. From the emulator's point of view, this is equivalent to a hard reset (I'm pretty sure anyway.)

The game does appear to auto-start itself, as it does so in every video I can find of it. I don't know why the manual indicates that the game doesn't start automatically in this way.

The '*' key can restart the game after a game over though, which can change where you start.

So, I'm not sure there are actually any bugs here to fix. I guess it couldn't hurt to add in the reset button though,

[meshuggahtas]

Thank you for investigating the issue and sorry for my initial assumptions being wrong (as I refered to the manual).

Either way, let me write down my informations I collected so far regarding this, note that these might be invalids

• There is a ROM that includes both Tomarc and Motocross in one cartridge. It's probably made (only?) for Coleco (maybe for a2600??)
• My initial assumption came also from the fact that many sites includes their screenshot as Tomarc sitting in the middle of the screen (as he would when first spawned in a cave) starting in either at the very left side (bottom row 1st cave) or the middle (bottom row 2nd cave) while BizHawk currently starts at bottom row 3rd cave.

[alyosha-tas]

It looks like what you are referring to is a so called 'double ender' cart. It looks like it's just 2 seperate carts stuck together, not a combo cart in the usual sense (multple ROMs with a selection menu.)

Here is a video of Tomarc starting in the third cave. The video starts from the loading screen so it's not clear if this was from power on or reset. It does demonstrate that the player can start there at least.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DRIAL9I8i0

Also, I played around with using the '*' key to reset after dying, and I do sometimes start in the other 2 caves. So at least for that case it is possible to start in other caves.

I guess the real question here is if Tomarc starts in a consistent place at power on and if hitting reset has a different effect then power cycle. I don't have hardware to test though, so I have no way of answering those questions. Colecovision behaviour is not thoroughly documented as far as I can find.