DZ-Jay

I'm sorry for the continued delay. I had an updated review offline ready to go a few months back, but did not had a chance to post it then, and eventually life conspired to make me forget it. As some of you may know, @intvdave graciously took my feedback to heart and worked to improve the game even more. I have (finally) updated the first post to reflect my review of the final version of the game. TL;DR: The game is awesome! Go buy it! -dZ.

Looks very good! I am so impressed, and I can't wait to play it. The original C64 Ghostbusters from Activision was always one of my very favorite games back in the 1980s. I played that thing over and over and over, and finished it many times. I'm not too sure about some of the colour choices on the building façade, but I suppose it's hard to pick good colours from the Intellivision palette. That said, you may want to dispense with the green, and focus more on a subdued palette. The colour combinations used in the original seem more mellow. For instance, Notice that they most they use for highlights is a bit of yellow; otherwise it's mostly gray, black, white and red. -dZ.

Whoa! That's a lot of information on a lot of variants! Thanks.

Yup, those are it. I got plenty of those. I think I bought an Intellivision lot from Britain once. -dZ.

Gotcha. That's kind of what I thought too, thanks. -dZ.

Ah, I understand. So they are not "cheaper re-prints," but actual international first edition releases. Gotcha! I'll update my database, thanks. -dZ.

To match with the original C64 version (which, in my opinion, is the canonical version), you should go with the third one. Looks very good!

Hmm ... OK, honestly, I don't remember very well. I do recall vaguely having a private conversation with him about it back then and asking if I could have a copy, and he telling me that I probably wouldn't like it because it was a bootleg of an unreleased game, and back then I wasn't really into those ... ... but I can see now that I have a copy, so I guess we transacted. Anyway, is it considered an IntelligentVision or INTV Corp. release? -dZ.

Oh, another question ... I have a CIB copy of "Deep Pockets Super Pro Poll & Billiards" which I seem to remember purchasing from David Harley, back when he published it. However, the box says "Distributed by INTV Corp." I'm confused now, is it an "IntelligentVision" title, or an "INTV Corp." title? INTV Funhouse seems to think it's an IntelligentVision title, which I thought as well, but I wanted to hear how others categorize it. Also, I have a CIB copy of Wizard of Wor, which I don't remember where or when I got it, but I think @Rev pushed on me when I bought other stuff from him. It says "CBS Electronics" and all the copyrights notices point to legitimate sources, but I think that's all fake because as far as I know, it's just another home-brew. Can someone tell me who's the actual publisher of Wizard of Wor? -dZ.

Thank you all for the comments. I have one more question ... I know that INTV Corp. and Intellivision, Inc. were doing re-prints of the original Mattel Electronics games, but I also have a couple of Sports Network games from Mattel Electronics without their major brand licenses, like "Golf" and "Soccer." Are those considered "re-prints," or should I categorize them as the others just part of the original set? (OMG! My OCD is kicking in ... I think I'm in trouble now ...) 😱

Awwww shucks! I completely missed that in INTV Funhouse. I also see Sears and CBS there as well, which I thought were missing. Dang! I'll now go dwell on my shame in a corner. 😳 Thanks! -dZ.

I'm finally getting around to organizing my collection and updating my games inventory, and I came across something odd. Everywhere I've looked for games lists, "Intellivision, Inc." is never included as a publisher. For example: https://history.blueskyrangers.com/game-list.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intellivision_games https://intvfunhouse.com/games/ I see "INTV Corp." but not "Intellivision, Inc." However, among my CIB games I have distinct ones that include the imprint of "Mattel Electronics," "INTV Corp." and "Intellivision, Inc." I imagine that such thoroughly maintained lists as the ones above would not miss something so obvious, so I was wondering what was the reason for this. Is it that those are just re-prints of original Mattel Electronics games? If so, why is "Blue Sky Rangers, Inc." often included, but not "Intellivision, Inc." (or "Sears Roebuck & Co.," for that matter")? As I said, I'm trying to organize my collection and I want to be as accurate as possible, and what I've tried to do is include the name of the publisher as imprinted in the box rather. Does anybody have any suggestions on how to classify the games by Publisher? -dZ.

Wow, that's great! Is the FAQ already available?

I had just a few, then I bought more, so I still need to figure out how to organize them. In any case, here's my home-brew collection. Enjoy! The base collection: The stragglers: The crown jewels:

True. To be honest, it was a rush job at the time: I thought it was clever to have the script place the candies randomly, so that I didn't have to come up with some hand-designed scheme. Of course, I also thought that I would ever only have to run that script once to build the final production ROM. The best laid schemes of mice and men, as they say ...

I wouldn't worry about that. The candies are in different spots on most versions of the ROM. That's because the script I created to build the maze data, placed the candies randomly, and it did not occurred to me that every time I ran it, it would be different (silly, I know, but I had bigger fish to fry then). After a few ROM releases, I fixed the script to seed the randomizer with a static value, so the random sequence is the same every time. I mostly noticed when I tried to build a table of maximum scores for each stage to manage the high-score competitions, and realized that it was futile with all these different versions out there having different amounts of candy in each screen. Whoops! The earlier builds, especially three different cartridge releases -- the original, and the two with bug fixes -- have different candy placements. The first screenshot that @Gernot posted is from the early prototype, which is also different. dZ.

I think languages that have distinct operators for bitwise and logical operations. VB.Net or C#? I don't know. But even then, what does it even mean to say "(10 || 13)"? It is either a bitwise operation or a logical expression; and in either case, the results would be functionally equivalent. I do not know of any language that allows you to compare compare one term with all elements within a set using purely logical operators. The closest thing I can think of is the "in set" operator, like some functional languages (and Pascal) have. Still that's an explicit operation in a set. I think that @Zendocon's point was that a naive or inexperienced programmer may commit such a mistake, not knowing really knowing how logical expressions work in practice. I would agree with that, but then again, that just suggests they should read the manual. dZ.

I wonder if it is a timing issue with the way that the vertical blanking interrupt is implemented in the emulator. Or perhaps something more prosaic: it seems that in those example cases of striped cards, the actual card is blank -- but is not in GROM. It is 8 bytes with zero data loaded into GRAM. Perhaps there is some issue with the way that GRAM writes are implemented. 🤗

Hmm ... that's very strange indeed. Those cards should actually point to a blank card in GRAM. The one in the maze includes additional bits in the BACKTAB word, but the one in the introduction sequence does not. The only think I can imagine could cause the problem is that the load of those blank cards failed which are, coincidentally, loaded last during initalization. However, in both cases, it seems it failed in the same way: skipping every other line. It's as if instead of all zeros, the card in GRAM is loaded with alternating $0000 and $FFFF bytes. That is very strange. -dZ.

Well, there are no "boolean" variables in IntyBASIC. If you define "A" and "B" as integers in C, you will get the same effect: a bitwise operation. But your point is very valid: programmers should keep in mind that in IntyBASIC logical "truth" is represented by any non-zero value in most circumstances. It is only given a precise value of "-1" when assigning the result of a logical expression to a variable, or when using such result as part of a greater expression, as I mentioned in my prior examples. -dZ.

OK, I'm going to ignore that @carlsson mentioned it already, and post it anyway ... Cattle Cart 3 - If you missed the original release of the critically acclaimed bovine combat trilogy, do not fret! You finally get your chance to experience the thrill and excitement of navigating your herd across the vast expanses of land, sea, and space! As the name suggests, the Cattle Cart 3 includes all three titles of the trilogy: Sea Cattle, Space Cattle, and Armor Cattle.

OMG! I wish I had thought of it. Darn! 😂😂😂

Get ready for an exciting new adventure in bovine combat! From the developers that brought you the spectacular strategy simulation hits Sea Cattle and Space Cattle, comes the thrilling culmination of their trilogy ... Armor Cattle - Use your tanks and heavy artillery to guide your herd of steel-plated cows across the battlefield, in search of greener pastures. OK, that's it. I've seen to have run out of "Battle" titles. 😆

Can you provide some details and screenshots of the problem with "Christmas Carol"? Perhaps I can help troubleshoot it. "Christmas Carol" does not use bank-switching, but it does use the expanded 42K memory that modern home-brews use. It also stores additional game-state within (expectedly) unused bits in the BACKTAB screen data. Those bits are ignored by the hardware in the standard Intellivision consoles, so an emulator that does not properly replicate that behaviour would not display the game properly. -dZ.

One thing to note is that comparisons against zero are generally more efficient, if just slightly so, especially in DO/WHILE. This is because comparing against zero is a native CPU operation, while comparing against constants require loading the values into CPU registers first. Also, complex logical expressions with multiple terms are less efficient than nesting them one at a time. This is because something like the following: IF (A=B) AND (C=D) THEN Requires each term to be evaluated and then assigned a temporary logical value of zero (false) or true (-1) before performing the AND operation. In essence, the evaluated result of each term is normalized to a logical value in order to evaluate the greater expression. This is in contrast to writing the same like this: IF (A=B) THEN IF (C=D) THEN ... Which does not need to normalize or store any interim results: each term is evaluated and the results are directly applied to either process the inner block, or skip it. -dZ.