Intellivision as Serial Terminal

[+DZ-Jay]

Good news everyone!! And unlike on Futurama where that is meant for something bad, this is actually something good. WE HAVE CONNECTION WITH AN INTELLIVISION AND A BBS!!

 

And I'm sure some are asking "What's a BBS", well, allow me to demonstrate...

 

http://youtu.be/Ui2vTuvzi34

 

Thank you InTVNut for writing this terminal program and giving a reason to use the serial port on the Cuttle Cart 3.

 

Made an adaptor to allow null modem with loop back handshaking. The information was found here:

 

http://www.lammertbies.nl/comm/info/RS-232_null_modem.html

 

And I used the 25 pin version of this, just a note, the pin 2 and pin 3 should switch, that was all that needs correcting to make this work:

 

http://www.pccompci.com/rs232-cable-technology.html

 

Here is what it looked like:

2014-01-04 13.11.56.jpg

 

Here is what it looked like all hooked up to the CC3 serial cable and with a 9 pin to 25 pin adaptor to the modem:

 

2014-01-04 08.31.07.jpg

 

And on the Prison Board BBS we like to log in with all kinds of retro computers and equipment. It was a awesome moment to post the following message from an INTELLIVISION ECS KEYBOARD!

 

Screen shot 2014-01-04 at 1.06.54 PM.png

 

Awesome stuff! Thanks again InTVNut, look forward to seeing how else we can refine this new use for an Intellivision.

 

 

 

That's neat! And... just like intvnut suggested, totally useless from the 20 column screen!

 

-dZ.

[doctorclu]

Not bad for a start though. InTVNut has some ideas on how to make the terminal more user friendly/usable.

 

In the meantime, I was playing with it more this morning and found ways to make it effective in the meantime.

 

The BBS service, in this case the Prison Board BBS (972-329-0781 or telnet://rdfig.net) can be adjusted for the user. The BBS thrives on retro computer users so Ruben, the guy who runs the service, is very supportive of different computer types.

 

And now he can add the Intellivision to the list of computers.

 

So you get past the login parts (takes only a minute or so), get to the mail menu and hit Y for settings.

 

What I found that works best is to change the amount of lines in option 4 from 24 lines to 4 lines. This makes it where the screen pauses and gives the user a chance to read the information.

 

 

Changing option 13 to "regular" menu gives a shortened version of the menu that still gives a person with a 20x 12 screen a reminder of what options are available.

 

As a guide to anyone interested in trying this in the future (and if the Prison Board is still around when this is tried..) here is the full menu of options available at the main menu:

 

 

That is basically it. Adjust the service to the Intellivision and it is a lot more usable. So far I've been able to get on, send out an E-mail message from the Prison Board service, and even telnet out to another BBS from there. Sadly you would need to set the screen size on all other BBSs to what is needed, but once that is set should be more usuable.

 

Now if I can just hack a better keyboard.

[doctorclu]

Just a fun fan moment, Intellivision in a all ascii IRC chat room.

 

Basically a true IRC chat for Atari with gateways to access by telnet (irc.atarinet.com) that has port 800 for full VT-100 and 80x24 support and port 400 for ascii only support. Great for getting retro computers into the chat room.

 

So far not able to get the 800 port to work with the ECS term, but it fun going through the 400 port.

 

Edited January 5, 2014 by doctorclu

[+DZ-Jay]

Just a fun fan moment, Intellivision in a all ascii IRC chat room.

 

Basically a true IRC chat for Atari with gateways to access by telnet (irc.atarinet.com) that has port 800 for full VT-100 and 80x24 support and port 400 for ascii only support. Great for getting retro computers into the chat room.

 

So far not able to get the 800 port to work with the ECS term, but it fun going through the 400 port.

 

2014-01-05 15.12.46.jpg

 

Haha! Send them a picture of the crappy ECS and the pathetic specifications for a laugh!

 

-dZ.

[doctorclu]

Yeh I sent a link to the guy I was talking to complete with a picture of the ECS. His response back was "Eh... if it makes you happy".

 

Of course I was happy. One of my major hobbies is calling BBSs and out of all the wild computers that I have connected to a BBS and from there out to the internet I think the Intellivision is by far the coolest and most unique.

[bikeguychicago]

Shall we play a game?

[doctorclu]

Shall we play a game?

 

That is the movie that led to my BBS hobby (Wargames).

[Tempest]

This is super cool, how did I miss this before?

 

Any other developments happening for the ECS?

[S1500]

You sir, are thinking outside of the cartridge shell. Kudos to you.

[doctorclu]

Nothing yet, though at some point I would like to get to a shell account, Lynx from there and write a message in this messagebase with an Intellivision. I think that would be cool.

 

Other than that, I have thought of submitting this to the Intellivisionaires Podcast for their news segment. As far as I know this is the first time an Intellivision has communicated on a BBS, IRC chat, etc. Just a neat feature made possible by IntvNut's terminal program and my stubbornness as a BBS hobbyist. And we can thank the Cuttle Cart 3 for the onboard serial port. That was simply some great planning ahead on that part.

Edited April 10, 2014 by doctorclu

[doctorclu]

Test message from a Lynx browser (regular computer)

[doctorclu]

Looking at the first message from an Intellivision keyboard on Aatarige. Was hell getting here but where thres a whip theres a way.

[doctorclu]

(back on regular computer)

And for that little feat you just need:
The Intellivision and ECS
Cuttle Cart 3 (thank you again Chad for the great device)
InTVNut's Terminal program.
Cable to hook into the CC3 serial port, and a loop back adaptor (since the hardware handshaking is not fully supported)

A Modem greatly helps.

Call into a BBS like the Prison Board (972-329-0781) with telnet out. Set the BBS to 4 lines instead of 24 to accommodate that awesome 12x20 screen of the Intellivision. Thanks again to sysop Ruben for his awesome ongoing support of the retro computer community.

Telnet to a free Lynx (all text) web browser like:
telnet://lynx.scramworks.net (thanks guys!)

[When you activate the Lynx Browser there is a clear screen code that crashes the Intellivision, just something not yet recognized on the Terminal program. Don't worry, this clear code only happened once. The modem will retain the call while you power the Intellivision off, back on, and reload the Terminal program. You can then use the "G" command to go to a website and enter your web address at this point.]

At this stage if you ever want to try this you are best to do this while doing the same thing on a "newer" computer so you can see what the heck you're doing. Found out from InTVNut that to tab in the Terminal program is Control I, and let me tell you, that got used a LOT here. Just tab through the first page abit to get the forums, then the next page tab till you sign in, then a whole LOT of tabs till you get to the entry fields for name and password and then tab a few more times to sign in.
(Remember, control H is delete and control M is return.)

After about four tries I was signed in. Then I got lost. So with the "G" command on the Lynx browser you can go to a web address and typed in the web address specifically for this page. Only took three tries with the craptacular ECS keyboard.

Got to the page, tabbed till it gave the option to reply. Got a new page, and tabbed through everything, past the search field, tabbed more, there was another text entry field and was actually the THIRD entry field, and typed the message. Tabbed off of the text field and to "Add Reply".


This is what a Lynx Internet Browser looks like on the Intellivision Terminal.

Anyway, just wanted it to be said the Intellivision had gotten on a web forum and left a message to give one other amazing thing the Intellivision can do. Maybe not easily, but it can be done.

As I think of the game systems, of course something like the Dreamcast and Sega Saturn users have posted messages on here. Naturally for Atari computer users this is a piece of cake. An Atari 800 especially with recent versions of Ice-T (term program) could have Lynx browsed onto here with little problem, and the ST has graphical web browsers with java support. But I know even an Atari Jaguar (1993) can't claim to have posted a message on Atariage.

I can't think of many game systems that were not straight up computers to start with that can claim to have posted on the message area that was about the game system. Especially not one originally from 1979.

But naturally I would love to see an Atari VCS or Odyssey 2 try.

Edited April 11, 2014 by doctorclu

[+intvsteve]

Woohoo! Awesome work! May have to gather more info to try this some day.

[+DZ-Jay]

That was awesome! Now, what would have impressed the pants out of me would have been if you had made that long post from the Intellivision.

 

Seriously, great work, doctorclu! Another notch for the Intellivision, that brings it above the Atari VCS and the ColecoVision!

 

-dZ.

[bikeguychicago]

Now if someone could only find a Tutorvision with it's enhacced fonts and try the same thing....

 

Hmm....

[+Gemintronic]

Instead of connecting to a BBS maybe slave the Inty to a Raspberry Pi. You could use the keyboard/mouse interface from the Pi and use the Inty display/sound/joystick.

[intvnut]

Now if someone could only find a Tutorvision with it's enhacced fonts and try the same thing....

 

If you don't mind taking a soldering iron to your Intellivision, you can upgrade it to have the same capability. The STIC hardware has the capability to display 256 GRAM cards. It just doesn't have enough RAM connected to it....

[doctorclu]

Actually I don't mind taking a soldering iron to it and would love a new font set. Would games still be playable?

 

Is there anywhere that details the process?

 

And as far as the Terminal goes, wasn't 20x12 the tile limitation anyway?

[+intvsteve]

I think intvnut posted about this on the intvprog Yahoo newsgroup in detail awhile back. IIRC there were two different aspects to the modification. One provides access to more GRAM cards and the other doubles the vertical resolution, I think. Can't recall the details regarding compatibility.

Edited April 11, 2014 by intvsteve

[doctorclu]

Sweet!!! If someone has a link, I want to try this.

 

Still curious, better fonts or not, if that would allow more tiles in the Terminal for better text display.

[intvnut]

Actually I don't mind taking a soldering iron to it and would love a new font set. Would games still be playable?

 

Is there anywhere that details the process?

 

As intvsteve mentioned above, I did detail a couple hacks I did to the Intellivision on INTVPROG (and I think here also, under the Programming forum), that can expand the amount of GRAM cards. In those hacks, I merely enabled the RAM that is already built into Intellivision 2s and later Intellivision 1s, doubling the GRAM space. (Details: The original Intellivision 1 GRAM consisted of 2 256-byte GTE SRAM chips. The Intellivision 2 used a pair of 2114 1Kx4 SRAMs. Later Intellivision 1 / INTV System 3 main boards apparently adopted that tweak. I imagine those GTE SRAMs got hard to source.)

 

I haven't actually put together a formalized process for upgrading an Intellivision to 256 GRAM cards. Existing games would not be able to take advantage of it. Also, the hack would need some way of switching on/off, as some existing games would not display correctly—they store flag bits and other things in the bits that would be used to select from the larger space of GRAM cards. So, I don't have a canned, ready set of directions to hand you. Sorry. But, I do have a direction I can point you if you want to start hacking yourself.

 

 

And as far as the Terminal goes, wasn't 20x12 the tile limitation anyway?

 

Yes and no. If you want to use character based graphics (ie. load up a font into GRAM or even replace GROM with a nice font), where each of the 20x12 tiles in BACKTAB holds a single character, then all you can do is change the pictures associated with the characters, and not change how big they are.

 

If you have at least 240 GRAM tiles available to you, you can instead treat the display as a bitmap. Put GRAM card 0 in BACKTAB position 0, GRAM card 1 in position 1, etc., filling each of the 240 positions in BACKTAB with a dedicated GRAM card. (Anyone who has programmed a TMS9918A VDP (Colecovision, TI-99/4A, MSX) might recognize this as the same strategy used by "Graphics II" mode.)

 

In this mode, now you can turn each pixel on and off independently. You can't set their colors independently, though; colors are still controlled by the 20x12 character grid, so for a terminal application, you're probably best off going monochrome. For other applications, you have to be careful about planning how you use color.

 

I'm pretty sure this is the approach that the TutorVision used.

 

So, in this mode, you could develop a tiny bitmap font, and use that to cram more text on the screen. The only real issue is that it's hard to get a readable fixed-width font in fewer than 5 pixels wide and 6 pixels tall (see my avatar for an example of a font at approximately that scale), so the most you could get to on a 159x92 display is probably 32x15 character resolution. Still, that's an improvement, however small.

Edited April 11, 2014 by intvnut

[+intvsteve]

Here's one link (dang, harder to find than I thought:

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/intvprog/conversations/messages/5884

[doctorclu]

Here's one link (dang, harder to find than I thought:

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/intvprog/conversations/messages/5884

 

Thanks for finding that!

 

...

So, in this mode, you could develop a tiny bitmap font, and use that to cram more text on the screen. The only real issue is that it's hard to get a readable fixed-width font in fewer than 5 pixels wide and 6 pixels tall (see my avatar for an example of a font at approximately that scale), so the most you could get to on a 159x92 display is probably 32x15 character resolution. Still, that's an improvement, however small.

 

So is there such a thing as flicker effect on the Intellivision? That is generally what they used on the Atari 800 to get the 80 column text on term programs. A bit hard on the eyes after a while, but got the job done.

[doctorclu]

Here's one link (dang, harder to find than I thought:

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/intvprog/conversations/messages/5884

 

From that link:

"The Intellivision 2 (well, at least the Intellivision 2s I've looked inside) can support up to 128 GRAM tiles, rather than 64, but it requires hardware modification. See, the Intellivision 2 uses 1K RAMs in place of the 256 byte RAMs that were in the original. To force strict compatibility with the original Intellivision, Mattel tied the extra address lines to ground."

 

This is hilarious. I have generally not been a big fan of the Intellivision 2 (liking the original best), and I think I had two pass through my possession in times past. One was left out in the rain and was in bad shape and I might have given that to someone as parts. But all and all, wishing I had a Intellivision 2 to try this out now.

 

Besides, would match my ECS better.

 

All and all, a good find that the ram was already there, but just govened down to be compatible with the older Intellivisions.