a fully accurate conversion of Donkey Kong to be played in homes. Led by Masayuki Uemura, Nintendo's R&D2 team began work on a home system in 1982, ambitiously targeted to be less expensive than its competitors, yet with performance that could not be surpassed by its competitors for at least a year. The console began development under the codename Project GAMECOM. Uemura analyzed the innards of rival consoles, including the Atari 2600 and Magnavox Odyssey, sidestepping their primitive technology. Their main competition was the Epoch Cassette Vision, the best-selling console in Japan at the time, with Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi telling employees he wanted them to develop a console both more powerful and cheaper than the Cassette Vision. Nintendo R&D2 engineer Katsuya Nakakawa analized the IC chips of the more powerful Donkey Kong arcade hardware, concluding that it would be possible to use them as a basis for their console. Another Nintendo R&D2 engineer, Takao Sawano, proposed that the D-pad of Nintendo's Game & Watch handheld devices should be adapted for the console. Meanwhile in North America, the toy manufacturer Coleco was working on a new home console to compete with the Atari 2600 and which would be capable of handling fairly accurate ports of arcade games. Coleco demonstrated a prototype of the ColecoVision to Nintendo R&D2 engineers, who were impressed by the smoothly animated graphics. It left a strong impression on Sawano and Uemara, who had the ColecoVision in mind while working on Nintendo's new console in Japan. However, while the ColecoVision was a significant improvement over the Atari 2600, there was still no console comparable to the original Donkey Kong arcade hardware. Nevertheless, the bundled port of Donkey Kong helped the ColecoVision become a major success in North America. Uemura sent the engineers Katsuya Nakakawa and Masahiro Ootake to meet with Ricoh, a semiconductor manufacturer that had previously worked with Nintendo on arcade games. One of Ricoh's supervisors was Hiromitsu Yagi, a former Mitsubishi Electronics engineer who had previously designed the large-scale integration (LSI) chips for the Nintendo Color TV-Game consoles in the 1970s. To determine the system specifications of the new console, Nakakawa and Masahiro brought along a Donkey Kong arcade machine for Ricoh to analyze, in order to help build a console more powerful than any consoles at the time and which would be comparable to the Donkey Kong arcade hardware. Uemura initially thought of using