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All first-party cartridges and most third-party software titles feature a 12-second pause before presenting the game select screen.

This delay results from an intentional loop in the console's BIOS to enable on-screen display of the ColecoVision brand.

Companies like Parker Brothers, Activision, and Micro Fun bypassed this loop, which necessitated embedding portions of the BIOS outside the delay loop, further reducing storage available to actual game programming.