Barbarricade for Master System & ColecoVision

6/16/2026: I'm attempting a fix for brick nubs in the ColecoVision version of Barbarricade (the ROM is titled "Coleco Barbarricade 6-16-26"). This doesn't remove them completely, but seems to make them less frequent. (Knock on wood.)

6/16/2026: We have a release candidate for Master Barbarricade, and it's a good'un! Check out the versus mode, Battle Barbarricade, a really technique-dense take on the classic table tennis game that Atari gets mad if I mention. I've sought to bring the atmosphere of a real sports match in the versus mode with cheering and incidental music. Also, firing at bricks will most certainly destroy them now!

6/15/2026: Master System version now has rudimentary applause effects after every goal in Battle Barbarricade. Balance has been altered, so the beam in versus mode leaves opponents stunned for longer (and it may not even be long enough!).

6/15/2026: Preliminary ColecoVision version of Barbarricade with fixed analog support. I'll run this by Willie and see if he has any luck.

6/14/2026: Oscar just fixed the problem with the two player buttons! We is eatin' good tonight!

Okay, so here's the deal. When you play Master Barbarricade, there are two modes... the standard single player campaign (holds in a dry heave) and a versus mode where two players can compete in a very table tennis-y experience. I can't legally call it Pong, but that's also because it's expanded from that very basic concept. Safety bricks line the goals, and the players can elect to fire a beam at each other to stun them and help insure victory. (Time it badly and it either doesn't fire, or it leaves YOU stunned!)

I'm going solo with this one, so I have no idea if the game is a brilliant two player experience or something that should have been left on the cutting room floor. No matter! Surely it exists, and surely you can play it!

The ColecoVision version is still up in the air, by the way. Oscar's working on a fix for the trackball control, or may have already finished it... one or the other. I'll ask him if the latest builds of the prologue and epilogue have the revised code.

6/14/2026: Experimenting with a special versus mode in Master Barbarricade. Unfortunately, there are currently some I/O issues in CVBasic, so what you're getting here isn't quite how I envisioned it.

Anyway, press button 2 on controller 1 to start Battle Barbarricade. (It was supposed to be button 1 on controller 2, but it'll get there.) Player one plays as Slim on the bottom, and player two plays Batrina on the top. The object is to get the ball into your opponent's goal, first chipping away at the bricks surrounding it. The difference between this and a certain other table tennis inspired video game is that your paddles also have offensive capabilities. Hold button two (or for player two... sigh... down) and release it for a beam that temporarily stuns your rival. It could also be used to smash bricks, but it doesn't do that right now. I'm workshopping this, but I'm leaning toward yes on this.

Battle Barbarricade is a best of five contest. First player to score three goals wins, and there are no ties, because really, how could there be? 

We're down to about 4K on the ROM, and no, I'm not doing bankswitching on this if I can avoid it. There's a pretty good amount of game here already, and with an entirely new mode it doesn't realistically need more content. What it DOES need are cheers and applause from a digital audience in the versus mode, and I honestly don't know how to get that ambiance from the SN7 chip. I'll keep (heh) batting away at it.

6/12/2026: Getting annoyed by the intro? So was the creator, so he (me) let the player jump through it by pressing a button.

6/12/2026: Stages aren't automatically unlocked now; you'll have to enter a code, which is ...? The Clean Sweep stage also can be unlocked with a code, which is ...?

6/11/2026: Green bricks wink at you after bricks are set. (Hey, I thought it was cute.)

6/10/2026: Neat new feature! Press the left button while holding the ball to serve left, and the right button to serve right. It gives you more freedom to aim your ball at those pesky bricks you otherwise couldn't reach.

6/9/2026: Okay, well that was easier than expected. There were a few lines where the prefix number 14336 (the Master System version of 6144, and the start of onscreen VRAM) was not added where it was supposed to be, resulting in weird trails from elsewhere in the memory map. Thing about these Z80s, is if you haven't supplied it a proper range, it will read data outside that range, and all hell breaks loose.

But yeah, I've done some preliminary testing and everything seems peachy. There's like, 10 or 12K of storage remaining? I was thinking of adding some graphics wank for the heck of it, but the Master System version of Barbarricade is fully functional and ready to go!

6/9/2026: Sneak preview of the Master System version of Barbarricade is now available! Just pop it into your favorite emulator or the Master System itself to check it out. There are no bricks in the preview; just the final battle with Nolan Contendre. Fun, though! And you can see the improvements the Sega VDP makes to the graphics!

6/6/2026: There are issues with the roller controller on real hardware... like Cabbage Patch Kids, rolling the wheel/trackball/dial shifts the system into turbo, effectively making it unplayable. I tested this with an old demo I made and sure enough, it too gets an unwelcome speed boost whenever you turn an analog controller.

Barbarricade is still perfectly playable with a digital controller... but this was obviously not my intention when I made this. So I'm demoting the final build to a late beta build, until the issues can be fixed. Many apologies for this!

6/3/2026: Changed timing on the "carrot" display notices. Changed timing on pre-stage notices. This is (famous last words) the last build of Barbarricade.

6/2/2026: Near-release candidate "databarb" changes the way bricks are shown, from PRINT statements to DATA statements. That gave me just enough space to add a hidden mode. See if you can find it!

5/31/2026: Last update of the month, barring any major unforeseen flaws. This seeks to fix stab trailing and changes sprites for the coin and bonus icon, so that both can exist at the same time. Issues yet to be addressed: bricks don't always break in the exact place they should (the sprite is drawn slightly off position) and annoying brick "nubs" remain an annoyance.

5/30/2026: Augh! Well, that 'splains a thing or two. I was drawing stabs outside the boundaries of the screen. GearColeco doesn't care if you do this! Real hardware DOES care, and crashes! But that error should be a thing of the past now. Definitely explains all the corrupt text, too.

5/29/2026: I recently discovered that while Barbarricade works just fine on the GearColeco emulator, it does NOT work with an actual ColecoVision... it crashes whenever a stab appears. (Thanks to Willie from ArcadeUSA for finding this; I've confirmed it on my own system.)

What this means is that the game requires more testing. I've built an SG-1000 port (codename: Canary) to see if the behavior persists across both ColecoVision and Master System/SG-1000. Considering the similarities of the two systems, there's no reason to believe it'll work properly on those formats.

Canary does work on GearColeco's Sega-fied cousin GearSystem, though. And there are three speeds for Slim, to make up for the loss of true analog control. Move left or right and Slim sweeps across the playfield. Hold button one while doing this and Slim zips from left to right and back in the blink of an eye. Hold button two and Slim slows to a crawl for finesse shots.

EDIT: I just tested the SG-1000 version on my Master System. Runs fine there; I cleared several stages without incident. So... what's going on here...?

5/27/2026: Shortened ending and made it less self-indulgent. Improved deflection against concrete blocks... now it bounces off on a Y-axis first, more in keeping with other Breakanoids. Barely hidden level select. Added animation in the intro screen. X Marks the Spot level made more reasonable.

5/27/2026: Added an introduction screen, leaving... 84 bytes left. That's not even a sentence. GEEZ. Going to have to find places where I can chip away and get myself more space.

5/26/2026: So, little mistake in past builds. The ball was supposed to increase in speed by 10% when it struck the top of the screen. I had it set to increase in speed by 10% after striking the right side of the screen, which is kind of useless. That's since been fixed. Also, you get 20,000 points for beating Nolan Bushnell Contendre, and Slim gets more annoyed when his monologue about how much he hates cryptic, overreaching 2600 games gets skipped for the ending.

File size is very, very close to the ColecoVision house limit of 32K. There's very little I COULD add, and hopefully more won't be necessary at this point. Silly me, I thought I could squeeze this into 16K! After adding Nolan, that ship pretty much sailed. There's no reason to limit myself to 16K aside from the Heyerdahl-like need to do things the way they would have been done in 1982, but screw that, there's no reason to limit myself when 1) Later ColecoVision cartridges did go up to 32K and 2) It's not 1982 anymore, why even pretend that it is? If I've got the storage to spare, I'm filling it with all the creative juice I can squeeze out of my head.

Also! Barbarricade marks the fifth game I've completed for the ColecoVision. That's more than Micro Fun, more than Epyx, more than friggin' Atarisoft (give or take a few protos we never got commercially). And you know what? I'd say every one of my games is well above average for this hardware. Sure beats the hell out of anything Sunrise made for this tub. 

Here's the kicker. I don't even like the ColecoVision that much! I've grown to appreciate it over the last few years, though. It's pretty much the ground floor for game design... any system before that is just too deficient to bother with, although I have seen some pretty impressive Intellivision games which manage to get that stone wheel rolling at a fast clip. My floor is the ColecoVision, though, and it's a pretty solid one. It does everything you need a game system to do (if not more than that) and working with the hardware is dead simple, as there's almost no hardware there. You get what you get, and it's just enough for effective game design.

My preference in the early 1980s was the Atari 5200, a game system liked by very few players, but with advantages over the ColecoVision hardware that still present themselves forty years later. For one, it has colors... a rich, full spectrum of bright colors that please the eye. The ColecoVision has sixteen shades of suck... hope you like barf and pee instead of the orange and yellow you really wanted!

Sega's line of game consoles has strong family ties with the ColecoVision, with the SG-1000 effectively being one and the Master System being backward compatible with that. And I think Sega's hardware compares to Nintendo's the same way Coleco's hardware did Atari's. The Super NES had all kinds of amenities absent from the Genesis, and the color output is far superior, just like it was on Atari's systems. However, the Genesis gets the job done, and what it can't do, it can fake. (If you've got the mastery of mathematics. My mastery of math is roughly at the ColecoVision level.)

5/25/2026: Minor dialog changes. There was a typo, and also I felt like ranting about stupidly cryptic Atari 2600 games. They made a sci-fi Legend of Zelda for the Atari 2600. They may as well have ported the game to an abacus.

5/24/2026: And just like that, Barbarricade is finished. At least, it's as finished as it's gonna get with just 1K of storage left on the ROM. Some additional testing and tuning is necessary, as it always is, but this is pretty much what you're getting. Enjoy your Memorial Day, folks!

5/24/2026: It's the "so close to finished I can barely stand it" build! You can play from start to finish, and if you lose halfway to the boss, your progress is retained until you power off.  Needs more sound effects and music. Needs an elaborate death sequence for the boss. Past that, really close to finished!

5/22/2026 (again): Barbarricade now has carrot bonuses! "Carrots" are like Easter Eggs, hidden treats for performing incredible feats! See if you can find all three!

5/22/2026: Stage design tweaks. Every stage should be complete-able (curse you, spellcheck!), from one to twelve. (Ten was giving me fits.) Even more angles for the ball, at a maximum of four horizontal pixels per frame. Boss graphics are in the file but not yet introduced to the game. 

5/20/2026: Experimental build "Barb" makes deflections from Slim more granular.

5/20/2026: Stage select, mostly for my testing convenience. Some stages work pretty well, while others are destined for the scrap bin.

5/19/2026: Full set of stages. Stage designs need to be adjusted for maximum fun-nicity. Still missing music, an end game (boss/ending), animation for the title screen, and various other bits of polish. May touch up the deflection tech for the ball for finer control.

5/18/2026: There's currently seven stages, with an extra five planned. I'm working on finding the proper balance for the new stages, because there have been instances where the ball gets stuck, or just won't break the last damn brick.

5/17/2026: Added a sound effect for the stab death.

As befitting a game system of its vintage, the ColecoVision has several brick breaker games. None of the official ones (including Bit's Strike It! and Spectravideo's perplexing Flipper Slipper) have analog control, though, which is kind of important for a game in this genre. 

However, I'm in the process of filling that gap in the system's library, with Barbarricade. This game is a lot like your average Break-a-noid, with Slim Van Der Batt sending a tiny wrecking ball into rows of bricks. The difference is that the bricks don't just wait for you to pound them into gravel. Every three serves, they'll move one step closer to Slim, giving him less time to recover the ball. Worse yet, while some colored bricks have handy bonuses, others release deadly stabs, while others still send the ball BACK to you at double the speed.

Can you finish all three stages with five balls in this beta demo? Coming soon, more rounds, more music, more hidden goodies, and more fun!