The History of ColecoVision Emulators - Part 1

ColEm (1996)

ColEm (MS-DOS)

ColEm was the first ColecoVision emulator released in February 1996 by Marat Fayzullin. Marat was developing an MSX emulator when he realized that the system was very similar to the second generation game console, and developed it. It was one of the few emulators that made its source code available for free, which helped other creators to develop video game emulators. Initially the emulator ran in DOS mode, and was later ported to other systems.

ColEm (Windows)

ColEm (Antarctic Adventure)

Among them, still in 1996, MacOS by John Stiles, Windows by Neal Danner (creator of The Virtual ColecoVision), Xfree-86-OS/2 by Krister Bergman, Unix by Joshua Thompson, and another port for MS-DOS by Marcel de Kogel, creator of ADAMem. In 1997 came the ports for OS/2 (IBM system) by Darrell Spice Jr. and the online shareware version on the Kagi website, in 1998 for Acorn by David McEwen, PC98 by Tensai and another port for MS-DOS by Firebug and in 1999 for Amiga by AmiDog. The first version for Windows shared on the emulator website appeared in August 2007, and it came together with the version for MS-DOS. This version was ported by Marat himself.

ColEm 5.6

ColEm 5.6 (Bump 'N' Jump)

Over the years, its biggest updates have been ports of its versions by it or by third parties on the emulator's page, such as for Solaris, Linux, SunOS, FreeBSD, HP-UX, Symbian, Unix, OpenPandora, PC98, PalmOS5, consoles such as Dreamcast, Nintendo Wii, portable systems such as PSP, PS Vita, GP32, GP2X, GP2X-F100, GP2X Wiz, GP2X Caanoo, portable and smartphone operating systems such as Dingux from Dingoo, Android, Pandora, UIQ3 from Sonic Ericsson and Motorola, Maemo from Nokia, on Pocket PC systems (similar to smartphones), among other systems. There are two versions of ColEm on the Play Store, one free and one paid. The paid version adds other functions to it. As of June 2020, ColEm includes the function of emulating the Coleco Adam computer, successor to the ColecoVision. Its latest version for Windows came out on March 3, 2021, and for Android in August 2024.

ADAMem (1996)

ADAMem

ADAMem, as its suggested name, is a fusion of Marat Fayzullin's ColecoVision ColEm emulator with the Adam computer emulation from the same company that produced the console. The emulator was developed by the Dutchman Marcel de Kogel. The project began in 1996, with the emulator released in October, and a second version in November, both in DOS mode. In February 1999, more than two years without updating it, he rewrote it, replacing Marat's Z80 (processor) emulation with his own processor emulator, called Z80Em. This was the last version of ADAMem, released in DOS, Linux and Unix systems. This version was ported by David McEwen to the Acorn system. In March 1999, the emulator gained a front-end to run on Windows 95 and NT, called ADAMEmMam. In October 2003, it gained a version for Xbox ported by XPort, called AdamX.

The Virtual ColecoVision / VColeco (1997)

The Virtual ColecoVision

The first ColecoVision emulation project to be created was The Virtual ColecoVision. Development of the emulator began in October 1994 by Neal Danner and continued until December 1995. In February 1996, Marat Fayzullin's open-source ColecoVision emulator ColEm was released. By this time, Neal had already spent over 400 hours working on his emulator. ColEm was important to Neal, and led him to create a port of the emulator for Windows in February 1996, called ColEm for Win32, and known as ColEmWin, because of the files bearing that name. The port had a single version. After the release of Marat's emulator and its port, he worked another 200 hours on his project, finally releasing his own emulator in July 1997, called ColEm97, in honor of Marat who provided some of her source code for its creation. Later the emulator was called ColEmWin97, but became known as ColEmWin, as it kept the same name as the files it kept in Marat's port.

Virtual ColecoVision (Options)

After that, another version was released, and four versions were released in October. Of these four, the second version added ColecoCheat, which allowed cheating in the game, as well as save states and full-screen mode, followed by other updates. In the third version, the emulator changed its name to The Virtual ColecoVision, known as VColeco and also as VColecoWin. The Win nomenclature at the end of the emulator's name was common at the time to differentiate between MS-DOS and Windows versions. This change occurred, most likely because the emulator was confused with Marat's Windows version, no longer maintained by Neal, and which was also initially known as ColEmWin. And the fourth version, which was the last version of the emulator, came with the game Cosmo Fighter 2, ripped by ADAMem's creator, Marcel de Kogel. The emulator had six versions in all.

Virtual ColecoVision (Cosmo Fighter 2)

One of the emulator's interesting features is that it emulated the Z80 processor, which was created by Neal, unlike most emulators that used Marat Fayzullin's Z80 emulator, which was already well-known in the field. The sound emulation was also done by Neal. In addition to Marat, Marcel de Kogel from ADAMem also helped with the project. The recommendation for the emulator to work properly was a Pentium 100MhZ, with DirectX, 16MB of RAM and a PCI graphics card. A good computer for 1997. With the end of the emulator in October 1997, in the same month Neal created a port of it for Java, known as The Virtual ColecoVision for Java, or simply VColecoJava. It had updates until October 1998.