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cmart604

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Posts posted by cmart604

    Intellivision Ebay Roundup

    in Intellivision / Aquarius

    Posted

    On 4/15/2024 at 10:05 AM, BigDumer said:

    Can I post non-ebay stuff here? I think so. Here is a Kijiji (Canadian site like Craigslist) post with a Tandyvision One in box and a nice collection of common French Canadian Mattel games. It has the FC B-17 Bomber and FC Bomb Squad. Also the FC box for the Intellivoice. Oh, and I think that's a US English Venture box with a French Canadian "Not for Use Sticker"...not sure I've seen that combo before. 

    https://www.kijiji.ca/v-old-video-games/mississauga-peel-region/intellivision-video-game-systems/1690917017

     

    $160 CAD is a great price, but most people posting on Kijiji expect local pick-up. I've convinced people to ship things to me over the years.


    EDIT: I don't know anything about console box variants, but I see extra lines of text on the Tandyvision box that I don't see on any pictures online. So my guess is that this is a French Canadian Tandyvision box as well. Please correct me if I am wrong on that.

    FCTandy.JPG.36269de698d070fd851507b81210803d.JPG

    Oh my! I would have paid twice that without hesitation. FC Tandy, 2 FC Intellivoice games and the Mattel Canada catalogue! Someone got an absolute steal on this. 

    Intellivision Purchases and Deals

    in Intellivision / Aquarius

    Posted

    13 hours ago, Psycho Stormtrooper- Rog said:

    I was thinking it was a bit high as well. There's one on Ebay in same condition for less than half that. But, everything in California is about double the price.

    I noticed it was in Riverside. I wonder if that is our long lost friend Chris N.?

    Good point. Could be

    Happy

    in Intellivision / Aquarius

    Posted

    2 hours ago, Crash7 said:

    I like what Tocchet is doing with them.

     

    But I would be wary of Jim Rutherford down the road, he likes to GM teams into the ground with overreaction trades, and then he bolts.

     

    He did it in Carolina, he did it in Pittsburgh, and now he's in Vancouver

    If he wins us a Cup before bolting I'm good with that. 😂

    • Haha 1

    Are the people who run the Intellivision Revolution store on this site?

    in Intellivision / Aquarius

    Posted

    2 minutes ago, Aragorn7 said:

    I doubt if there's a person here who hasn't experienced ultra slow communication and delivery. I waited 2.5 months myself before I got my order. There was no communication from Rev for two months. Now here's the truth of the matter. Rev and other homebrewers are not like a small business with a staff. Rev, as far as I know, is a lone hobbyist homebrewer, who has another job, but loves to contribute to the Intellivision community. He works around the clock (with some sleep) but there is only 24 hours in a day. If he's in the zone making game carts one game at a time in batches and then setting them up for delivery, he is not going to be checking emails routinely. I, too, was just like you and got all concerned when I didn't hear back from him. Yes, I tried all the channels too. Here's what I discovered. This is the good news: You will get your games. They will be excellent, but they will be on Rev time. He has a process that works for him. That's just how it is. Eventually he will get back with you, but it will happen when reading emails is in his rotation. 😉

    Honestly, if he put as much effort into getting these games out as he does for taking “tasteful” nudes of himself, and being President of The Bronies Club, I think we’d all see our games in a much more timely fashion. I call shenanigans! 

    • Haha 3

    New Intellivision Games from Opcode

    in Intellivision / Aquarius

    Posted

    Can't say enough about how great these Opcode boxes are. I've bought a ton of stuff from Ed and Grazie for my CV over the years and am thrilled they're getting into publishing games for the Inty now. Visited with them at PRGE back in October and was very happy to see these there. My orders have been placed. (Plural on purpose) 😎

    • Like 4

    Intellivision Variants

    in Intellivision / Aquarius

    Posted

    On 2/4/2024 at 9:10 AM, Psycho Stormtrooper- Rog said:

    I tested the game. The cart matches the instruction manual for steering.. it is original steering.

    Here it is next to an original 1113-0820 USA manual.

    Below that, are pics of the cart shell next to an original No- "Insert to this Line" MLB early cart. You can see the visual difference i was talking about. Its like a different type of plastic was used.

    20240204_103749.jpg

    20240204_103318.jpg

    20240204_103420.jpg

     

    On 2/4/2024 at 9:18 AM, Psycho Stormtrooper- Rog said:

    Manual is from ACE Chris.. yes, printed in Hong Kong.

    Here is a pic of back of manual & bottom flap.. manufactured for Mattel by Radofin.

    20240204_103835.jpg

    20240204_103102.jpg

    I just had one arrive today and I can confirm the cart is the same matte plastic with no Insert To line. ACE G1 manual and ACE 0610 box. Haven't added many to my ACE collection in a while, glad to find this. Thanks for the heads up Rog. 👍🏻

    • Like 1

    Intellivision system boxes

    in Intellivision / Aquarius

    Posted

    Awesome! I have started this project myself, and with Tarzilla's assistance I hope to have all of them documented and inventoried later this year but it's a crazy big job. So many little differences can be found, especially when you start collecting stickers on boxes essentially. 😂

    Breaking them down by box size and origin is a good place to begin. 

    • Like 1

    Original 125 release dates

    in Intellivision / Aquarius

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Walter Ives said:

     

    The authors of the cited article had no clue as to how the sausage was made.

    The compensation of the top marketing executives, from Rochlis through Morris, and even through Valeski, was determined by their ability to create and execute on a dream. Creating a dream requires making stuff up. Obtaining the position and funding to execute the dream requires demonstrating a demand. Teasing stuff to customers and generating excitement provides evidence that the demand exists. (At the end, when it starts to become obvious that you're not going to be delivering on your dream you have to arrange for some other company to score the coup of hiring you away before your failure becomes public knowledge and are compelled to seek refuge in Pollock, Louisiana or Bryan, Texas. (Cf.: Enron, Theranos). When interviewed later you have to either (1) claim credit if your successors managed to save the project or (2) frame your successors for fumessing it all up.

    Humans build on their personal experiences. Rochlis had seen people older than teenagers getting excited playing pinball, so he incorporated pinball into the dream even before GI was selected as a chip set vendor. Rochlis went to Chang and Chang went to APh (remember, Chang and APh were thick as thieves), which did some preliminary work (no surprise here, right? At the time this was all being done under the auspices of Preliminary Design, after all, and that's what the elves in Preliminary Design did, including those elves that happened to be working at APh) which reported that the EXEC framework was inappropriate and that the game would take 8K and at least six months to finish. The "at least six months" didn't register with Rochlis, but the 8K did, so no go. Rochlis erased the game from his list. Same thing with Chess, but Chess needed some extra RAM, too.

    APh was able to turn out the first eight cartridges in three months and scheduled subsequent cartridges to be done by students over their summer vacations as well. This left marketing management with the impression that all you needed to do was hire a random inexperienced body, call it a programmer and give it a cartridge name, and it would produce a compelling, saleable game in three months. But the 4K Intellivision games were tiny, under 2.5K of code if you don't include data storage for the graphics. The amount of programming effort a project takes scales as a power law, not linearly. An 8K chess game doesn't use any of that extra space for more graphics, all of the extra 4K goes toward game play. In the absence of other considerations one would reasonably expect such a game to take four or more times as long to program. For Chess one would expect more, for at the time chess algorithms were a topic of current research.

    It turns out that Rochlis had written his list of games using reappearing ink, so Chess, Pinball and others like it kept popping up as "coming soon," where "soon" meant that if there was enough market interest programming would start sometime after memory prices dropped in half. Cartridges would become available six months after program completion (after the game was written and tested the object code still had to be shipped to the Far East, be scheduled for ROM production, scheduled for cartridge assembly, returned on a slow boat from China and unloaded from ships by ornery longshoremen ogres). This general practice persisted through subsequent administrations, meaning Kissell, O'Connell, Gillis and Pirner. Morris and Valeski came later and worked on a somewhat different incentive structure.

    "Coming soon" also means something a little different for the buyers attending CES or Toy Fair than it does to players and reviewers, for the former are trying to figure out what they're going to be ordering for the next Christmas season. They're looking for product to begin arriving at their distribution facilities in September or October, so to them "soon" means "in seven or eight months," and then only if enough retailers sign up to make production worthwhile.

    So when in 1981 Prodromou predicts that 8K cartridges will soon be affordable, O'Connell says, let's really authorize development of Chess and Pinball and put them on the price list. Nobody actually knows how long development is going to take, certainly not Prodromou or O'Connell. They could ask the programmers, but as Fred Brooks says, programmers are young and the young are optimists. By this time what was once minimally restricted preliminary design has magically become a precisely schedulable activity, so beady-eyed little Jawas from the scheduling department begin wandering up and down the cubicles aisles sowing guilt as they enter fictional numbers they thought would be acceptable to management onto goldenrod-colored spreadsheets (in days of yore spreadsheets were made of paper.)

    So when O'Connell finally authorizes Pinball, he's thinking the program is going to be ready to send to be masked in three months. Never mind that any Pinball cartridge you managed to write from scratch in three months was almost certainly destined to find its way to the same southwest retirement community as the one to which Atari sent ET. On top of that, when Pinball was resurrected it was given to a recently-hired Mattel employee with a 4K budget and instructions to program it using the EXEC. Talk about being set up to fail! The EXEC was built to handle games in which all eight objects are simultaneously and independently moving and sequencing; it was not the right framework on which to build a pinball game. The fact that this would be fundamentally problematic was not communicated to the programmer and for a long time the problem was not appreciated by her management; this contributed to a need to call in the cavalry (well, more like a Mountie; for management only sent one) and an excessively long development time for that particular cartridge.

    WJI

    [As to Pinball, the original programmers of the resurrected version still live. Get them to give you a first-hand account.]

    @nurmix

    • Like 1
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