gavv

5 second explanation, there's no EPROM version of the ROM chip using in intellivision carts, making manufacturing of carts much harder, iirc. gavv it was brought up a few months ago...I took the question to the wizards on the INTVPROG yahoogroup/ml and got this explanation from Joe Z., one of the better known INTV homebrew developers out there.... well, i wasn't sure exactly the full answer, so i went ahead and posed the question about Intellivision homebrew carts to the intvprog yahoogroup, and got this reply from Joe Zbiciak, programmer of 4-Tris for Intv (one of the only actual physical homebrew carts made) and the upcoming moon patrol port LunarMP: -------------- -------------- * it's done much, or is it technically much harder? Read the recent traffic on this list. Making an Atari cart is something just about anyone with an old PacMan cart, a $0.50 EPROM and a soldering iron can do. (Ok, it's just slightly more involved: You need to wire in an inverter, too, and you need to program the EPROM.) Why is it so easy to make Atari carts? The bus interface to the Atari nearly exactly matches standard off-the-shelf EPROMs, that's why. And the ROMs they used are pin-compatible with standard EPROMs, except for 1 pin (which is where that inverter comes in). Since it's so close, one can simply cannibalize an existing "common" cart (eg. Combat, PacMan) and put their own EPROM in there in the course of an evening. If you're good at it, you can make a batch without too much effort. Intellivisions aren't so lucky. They use non-standard General Instrument ROMs. As far as I know, there never were and still are not EPROM variants of these beasts. The Mattel Electronics and APh engineers used a device called a T-Card to adapt standard EPROMs to the requirements of the Intellivision. Making a new cartridge with standard EPROMs requires implementing circuits roughly equivalent to what's on a T-Card. If you've ever seen a T-Card, you'll understand why it's no small challenge to squeeze this into an acceptible form factor. Activision managed it, but their proto-cart design wasn't very flexible, and I'm pretty sure it didn't fit in a Mattel cart shell. 4-Tris manages to squeeze all that into a normal cartridge shell with modern technology. However, in both cases, neither uses a circuit board that's compatible with any original cart. Both require fabrication of circuit boards specifically for the purpose of making a homebrew cart. Also, in the case of 4-Tris' cart design, one of the components is not an old-fashioned "through-hole" device -- it's a surface mount device. That basically guarantees that an all-thumbs guy like me will have to have these assembled professionally. So that about sums it up. Regards, Joe

Pac-Man --- Decent graphics & play, even though it feels a tad different . Centipede --- pretty good Burgertime --- Dude, best Intv game ever! ^_^...see if anyone can beat my world high score of 332,900 on twingalaxies Dig Dug --- Surprisingly good translation of the game. a few issues but plays very well... Thin Ice --- wonderfully fun game.... some others i'd add.... LocoMotion or Happy Trails --- take your pick, both good strategy games. Utopia --- retrospectively nicknamed 'Civ 0.5', best imho two-player game for INTV Any of the Super Pro sports titles (especially golf,football,basketball)...great additions over the originals and 1 player makes them great gavv

Hey there, Any fans in the Indy area looking for a Vectrex? I have one in decent working shape that i bought from a friend but am not really into collecting for it, and wanted to see it go to a good home ^_^, and don't want to deal with auctioning it off on ebay elsewhere since I didn't want to deal with shipping the potentially fragile beast ^^. It also includes a 2600 driving controller and the Spinnerama collection of game hacks cartridge (one done by chris tumber that has a bunch of games modded to use the 2600 controller as a spinner). Anyone interested, send me an email with your offer, and if it works out can meet and deliver the goods ^^. thanks, gavv [email protected] (yes, despite the address-long story-I am in Indy...)

once you get past level 21 (3rd time around the 7 levels) it gets very very fast ^^. when i got my 330k+ i got to level 23. it's definitely run for your life time ^^ gavv

couple weekends ago i had a good but not 'amazing' find in terms of value (per se) ^^, i bought a CV, expansion 1,2, games & supercharger from a guy locally, and whlie everything for $125 might not seem like a great deal on closer inspection it had some really nice stuff: some of the CV games: Fortune Builder (boxed) Jukebox (boxed) monkey acadamey/smurf paint/among others (boxed) mountain king quest of quintana roo couple nice S.A. controllers the supercharger works great and had 7 of the games but what's really cool is that the games included Sword of Saros and Survival Island. woo! my first '8's gavv

to quote Captain Gloval..."Thundering Asteroids!" gavv

does that mean that dragonfire,cosmic ark, trick shot,fire fighter,fathom, etc etc etc etc will all get to be on the 'extended dance mix' of AAnthology that weren't on the PS2 AAnth? gavv

I hope someday I see you at a con where you can tell them to us all. Thanks for the updates Ken! Wasn't he the one at the CGE2002 activision panel in the audience that kept being the one that seemingly asked every other question? ... gavv

Wow! Moon Patrol for the INTV? Damn, that'll be sweet! MP has always been one of my favorite classics That sucks to hear how hard it is to do INTV homebrews though... I guess it wouldn't be very economical to manufacture an interface card of sorts that would plug into the port, and then plug a "normal" homebrew into that? I guess very few people would buy that though unless they planned on buying a decent number of homebrews (which doesn't seem likely considering the relatively small following the INTV has) --Zero actually there was the equivalent of the 2600 'cuttle cart' called the Intellicart that was made a while back that you could download roms to and play, but it hasn't been available for a long time. gavv

hey guys, well, i wasn't sure exactly the full answer, so i went ahead and posed the question about Intellivision homebrew carts to the intvprog yahoogroup, and got this reply from Joe Zbiciak, programmer of 4-Tris for Intv (one of the only actual physical homebrew carts made) and the upcoming moon patrol port LunarMP: -------------- -------------- * it's done much, or is it technically much harder? Read the recent traffic on this list. :-) Making an Atari cart is something just about anyone with an old PacMan cart, a $0.50 EPROM and a soldering iron can do. (Ok, it's just slightly more involved: You need to wire in an inverter, too, and you need to program the EPROM.) Why is it so easy to make Atari carts? The bus interface to the Atari nearly exactly matches standard off-the-shelf EPROMs, that's why. And the ROMs they used are pin-compatible with standard EPROMs, except for 1 pin (which is where that inverter comes in). Since it's so close, one can simply cannibalize an existing "common" cart (eg. Combat, PacMan) and put their own EPROM in there in the course of an evening. If you're good at it, you can make a batch without too much effort. Intellivisions aren't so lucky. They use non-standard General Instrument ROMs. As far as I know, there never were and still are not EPROM variants of these beasts. The Mattel Electronics and APh engineers used a device called a T-Card to adapt standard EPROMs to the requirements of the Intellivision. Making a new cartridge with standard EPROMs requires implementing circuits roughly equivalent to what's on a T-Card. If you've ever seen a T-Card, you'll understand why it's no small challenge to squeeze this into an acceptible form factor. Activision managed it, but their proto-cart design wasn't very flexible, and I'm pretty sure it didn't fit in a Mattel cart shell. 4-Tris manages to squeeze all that into a normal cartridge shell with modern technology. However, in both cases, neither uses a circuit board that's compatible with any original cart. Both require fabrication of circuit boards specifically for the purpose of making a homebrew cart. Also, in the case of 4-Tris' cart design, one of the components is not an old-fashioned "through-hole" device -- it's a surface mount device. That basically guarantees that an all-thumbs guy like me will have to have these assembled professionally. So that about sums it up. Regards, Joe

There are some people who judge a game machine based on a static screenshot. This misses a lot of the finer points of what a console has to do. The approach that the 2600 designers chose emphasizes animation fuidity and color choice above background graphics. The approach of most other early consoles was towards a dumber bitmap display with CPU or coprocessor muscle that was rarely fast enough to update to maintain fluid animation. the *only* reason the TIA chip and the cpu in the VCS was done like it was was for one reason, to save money in the size of the chips. It had the advantage of being flexible in certain ways, but that was mostly an unforseen byproduct at the time it was created, so sayeth david crane ^^

no need for 'hatred', sheesh, just remember that when Inty first came out and had its first generations of games (including the sports games), that event in and of itself pushed the Atari crew ahead to go and create better stuff ^^. the 'RealSports' line obviously may not have happened if it weren't for the Inty sports titles kicking their butss in '80-81. As to the controllers, while it was a radical change for the day and had its limitations (contrary to most not liking the disc, i didn't care for the 'fire buttons' too tiring to use for shooting style games), but its layout both provided for innovative control (MLB baseball) and for more creative games that couldn't be done without it (Utopia, Microsurgeon). gavv

>Category A: Worst Adaptation of an Arcade Game Pac-Man >B: Worst Activision Game Ever Checkers >C: Worst Imagic Game Ever Fathom >D: Worst Game Ever Produced for the 2600 Karate >E: Worst Sports Game Ever Home Run >F: Worst Graphics basic programming ^^ (or casino ^^) >G: Worst Game Company Froggo

Especially the "Super Pro" sports series (Super Pro Decathlon, Super Pro Football, Super Pro Basketball, etc.). I think it would be neat for Intellivision Productions to make a limited run (maybe 100 for CGE 2k3) of the billiards game that was finished but never released. I love that game on Intellivision Lives. Actually, i thought the problem with re-issuing carts had something to do with producing the rom chips used in the carts since the GI processor in the INTV used 10-bit bytes (decles), and producing those wouldn't so simple as say some generic eprom replacement like in 2600 carts. Don't know if any of that is true, it just vaguely sounds like an explanation i saw somewhere ^^. gavv

This is 100% correct. I know quite a few people who have Dreamcasts, and the ONLY ones that have had problems with them are the ones who use CD-R's in it. For some reason the DC does NOT like CD-R discs, and in a way rightfully so. Pirated games are part of the reason why the Dreamcast "failed". However, homebrew games have to go somewhere too, and I don't think most people have the means of getting their own projects duped. The moral of the story? Don't put CD-Rs in your DC! Actually I've not used CD-R's in mine, but i have had problems with it reading a legit storebought game. Luckily it was only a 3.99 copy of Maximum Pool that I had found at a Meijer, so it wasn't too heartbreaking gavv

if you really want to know , just go to http://www.warrenrobinett.com/ ^^ gavv

and also don't they realize that this 'extended mix' anthology is FOR the xbox/gamecube/pc, not another ps2 version?

display on screen what the current difficulty setting is ^^ gavv

If you do give this a try, I'd vote for going as high quality as you can get it. If you can rip to VCD ready format, even better! File size is not really a concern (on this end anyway!). well, this one would be doubtful in terms of getting superbly high quality as it would be coming from a 6hr mode VHS tape ^^ gavv

I'll give a try at capturing the Bushnell episode as a tryout. One little reason why the Bushnell and Pac-man episodes are repeated less often than other episodes, is that they (G4) had to pay NBC like $1000 per running second for the archival news footage that was used from the time (example that reporter saying 'it was inevitable when the television married the computer' etc), and they have to pay for every time it's aired. (at least that's what T-dub told me herself ^^) gavv

Just a note about the Icons episodes done: The new one ep 201 (first episode of 'second year' in tv jargon) "Atari" is absolutely fabulous. it shows off the first episode where they got to put the CGE 'data/interview goldmine' to good use, with interviews with H.S. Warshaw, David Crane, Al Alcorn, among others, plus shots from the 'museum'. ep 105, Activision, is extremely poor. They barely gloss over the formation/early days, and the only activision people that even talk on screen are 'Bobby Kotick-era' (including B.K.) execs & marketing types. They spend more time on tony hawk than all of the atari activision games and programmers combined. ep 102, Nolan Bushnell was really good, and ep 103 Pac-Man was also extremely good., ep 106 Shigeru MIyamoto was pretty good too. Other 'good' eps that might be of some interest to some here, 109 Will Wright (SimCity creator) was good, Sid Meier's was a tad dull but interesting. i don't have PVR, but i have all the icons eps on tape, and could perhaps capture some of them to divx if there's some interest. gavv

Not a bad saturday morning, went to a couple places, and hit a local used game store i've found some deals in the past, and found quite a haul this morning. No $1.50 Quadruns or anything, but a good take nonetheless. It helps that they don't price anything by rarity, just 4 carts for $10. found this morning: Bank Heist & Flash Gordon (Fox) Chuck Norris superkicks (xonox single ender) Ghostbusters Miner 2049er Marine Wars (Konami) Name this Game (US G) Cosmic Creeps (telysys) Krull (atari) and one that i almost missed since it blended in with other carts head on: Atari Video Cube now only if the colts win today, it'll be a really great day ^^ gavv

he only seemed to mention XBox and PC as future possibles. Search for 'KLove' in the user search in the forums to find the thread gavv

Yeah, the one game store around here that does buy and sell Atari, I've found some deals because they just price everything the same, 2600 carts for $3 or 4 for $10. Found some decent carts there, nothing overly rare, but found a lot of say 3s and 4s on the rarity charts. gavv

I actually like Lee Trevino's Fighting Golf. Similiar to the original nes golf, but with slightly more character variety in the play and the golfers. and besides, i began to like it even more after the Simpsons "bart shoplifting/bonestorm cart" episode because of the "Lee Corvallo's Putting Challenge" game in it ^^ gavv