DZ-Jay
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Posts posted by DZ-Jay
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Sounds interesting. I may be interested once I finish Christmas Carol.
Are there game technical specs, or do we have to reverse-engineer them based on observations of the arcade?
I would say reverse engineer
OK, I'm still in. However, I won't be able to work on it for at least a couple of months while I finish Christmas Carol. I'll spend some time in MAME figuring out the game.
There are three screens, right?
jungle, river, mountain and village if I remember well
Yeah. As you were posting I was editing my previous message with the four screens. Seems simple enough. I'll have to play it now with a programmer's critical eye.
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Sounds interesting. I may be interested once I finish Christmas Carol.
Are there game technical specs, or do we have to reverse-engineer them based on observations of the arcade?
I would say reverse engineer
OK, I'm still in. Send me a PM with some details. However, I won't be able to work on it for at least a couple of months while I finish Christmas Carol.
As far as I recall, there only four screens: Swinging from trees, swimming with crocodiles, running up the hill with rocks, and the cannibals with the cauldron. Right? I'll spend some time in MAME to figure it out.
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Sounds interesting. I may be interested once I finish Christmas Carol.
Are there game technical specs, or do we have to reverse-engineer them based on observations of the arcade?
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is there any people able/interested in developing (official) Moon Lander for intellivision?
I can propose a revenue on this, so let me know
What is Moon Lander? Is it like the classic vector graphics Lunar Lander simulation?
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What is "Front Line"?
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This is an issue I had when I wanted to hook my Intellivision to my Commodore 1702 monitor. What I did was run the signal through an old VCR. That broke it up into audio/video outputs for me.
That's an idea. I'm sure I have an extra VCR for this somewhere.
Thanks,
-dZ.
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As I understand it, developing games for the Intellivoice was a very expensive process, which in turn made the games more expensive. There was already a huge investment in the recording and voice processing facility, and the ROMs chips required more space in order to accommodate the sampled data.
However, the worse part was that it came right before the bubble burst--once Mattel Electronics started hemorrhaging money, it was natural for them to discontinue one of their most expensive enterprises.
By then, Intellivoice games have not sold so well, so it wasn't clear that it was going to pay off. According to the Wikipedia article, the various problems that resulted in a lackluster reception were:
- The digitized voice data required bigger and more expensive ROMs.
- The Intellivoice module itself was a costly add-on.
- Due to the limits of ROM space, the sampling rate of voices was so low that it made them sound mostly robotic and mechanical, reducing their appeal.
- Mattel refused to support 3rd-party development by restricting access to programming interfaces and documentation, making it almost impossible for 3rd-parties to make games for it.
-dZ.
- The digitized voice data required bigger and more expensive ROMs.
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The TI version also TALKS!
At the start, "Paging Dr. Levine" As in Rick Levine, the programmer.
The voice warns you of the status and critical areas that you need to address.
I wish the Intellivision version used the intellivoice... 3rd party support may have saved it.... or at least pushed a little more hardware and that may have pushed more software..... you get were I am going.
Holy crap, I can imagine it. It would indeed be awesome if Microsurgeon were one of the Intellivoice games! I've always liked Microsurgeon, and that would make it better.
-dZ.
in the Fantasilandia world, keith from Intellivision production could give us the microsurgeon source for adding those features
As long as we're dreaming, I wish some home-brewer would just redo the game with voice and other amenities (especially with a more granular controller response).
Oh, and a pony for everyone.
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I can tell you that Frog Bog was very popular in my household, among 6 to 9 year old kids. My little sisters loved playing it, and I in turned enjoyed it also.
-dZ.
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The TI version also TALKS!
At the start, "Paging Dr. Levine" As in Rick Levine, the programmer.
The voice warns you of the status and critical areas that you need to address.
I wish the Intellivision version used the intellivoice... 3rd party support may have saved it.... or at least pushed a little more hardware and that may have pushed more software..... you get were I am going.
Holy crap, I can imagine it. It would indeed be awesome if Microsurgeon were one of the Intellivoice games! I've always liked Microsurgeon, and that would make it better.
-dZ.
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OK, I hooked up all like i had before, except for the Intellivision. It turns out my receiver does not accept Coaxial cables (wtf?) and expects all analog devices to be separated into audio-left, audio-right, and video RCA inputs. My RF-Mod switch box expects the same.
It seems I will not be able to hook up the Intellivision directly without that stupid "TV-Game" switch box it came with back in 1982. Is there a way to split the Intellivision RCA cable into video and audio signals?
-dZ.
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Thanks all. I hate having to play with cables every time I want to play a game, so I typically just hook it all up once and just use a switch box. Seems that I'll continue with that in the future.
-dZ.
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Wow! I had no idea that was a multiplatform game, either. And the TI! Pretty impressive. I'd love to see a screenshot for comparison.
The TI version. I have it. It seems OK, but I didn't play it for too long. I have the INTV one too, but don't remember how it compares offhand.
Well, first off, I see more than one screen. The Intellivision version only has the "status" (text) screen, and the body screen.
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Hello. This is my first post, what a great site!
I am having problems with an Intellivision I console I recently purchased. After inserting the cart and powering up I get a black screen on the TV. When the reset button is pushed, the game appears to be fine. I was worried about the blank screen of death, so I played the game for an hour or so with no issues. I tested all 16 games and had the same result.
After reading posts with similar issues I cleaned all the carts and unit pins. I also adjusted the positioning of the carts with no luck.
Any advise or help would be greatly appreciated. The system is in great cosmetic shape and I would hate to toss it. The controllers work flawlessly.
Jeremy
The short response is that this is normal.
The longer and more technical response is that the Master Component is a little temperamental in the way it reads the cartridges. As opposed to other consoles, the Intellivision cartridges are not just dumb data; they contain chips that aid the EXEC in loading the ROM. Depending on the state of the contacts, and the way that the cartridge is plugged in, this may cause misreads or timing issues. Hitting the "Reset" button a few times forces the initialization routine to be re-executed, and thus an initially bad connection is given another chance.
Try plugging the cartridge without pushing it in all the way. Try to aim as close as possible to insert up to the marker line in the cartridge.
-dZ.
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i only hook up one sytem at a time.
Oh! I must confess that that never occurred to me. I always thought that you guys would have some sort of "game room" rigged up with all your "toys."
Thanks,
-dZ.
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Anybody? I can't be the only one trying to hook multiple vintage consoles to an HD TV...
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I can assure you that the Intellivision font is owned by whoever owns the intellectual property acquired from Mattel, possibly Intellivision Productions.
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My question is:
how you go from a MIDI file to DECLE code for intv?
I have a MIDI tune and need to put it in intellivision!
That's a good question that I'm sure Arnauld will be able to answer. He originally converted a MIDI file I gave him with the theme song for Christmas Carol into his tracker data. He said that he used some tool he made for it.
Unfortunately, I don't know such tool. I've re-tracked the theme since then by hand. What I do is I open the MIDI file in Logic and it breaks it down as tracker data with the channels, rows, and note events. I then take these and make the DECLE data using some macros Arnauld prepared for his tracker.
-dZ.
OK, I looked through my e-mail archives and I found that Arnauld told me he converted the MIDI file into a MOD file using OpenMPT. He also mentioned that the tracker format follows the XM format introduced by Fast Tracker II, but without sample files.
I don't know if he lurks in this forum, so perhaps you want to ask him directly?
-dZ.
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My question is:
how you go from a MIDI file to DECLE code for intv?
I have a MIDI tune and need to put it in intellivision!
That's a good question that I'm sure Arnauld will be able to answer. He originally converted a MIDI file I gave him with the theme song for Christmas Carol into his tracker data. He said that he used some tool he made for it.
Unfortunately, I don't know such tool. I've re-tracked the theme since then by hand. What I do is I open the MIDI file in Logic and it breaks it down as tracker data with the channels, rows, and note events. I then take these and make the DECLE data using some macros Arnauld prepared for his tracker.
-dZ.
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Looks awesome! I'll be willing to beta test whenever you have a ROM ready.
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So I wanted to show what kinds of games could be made for the Aquarius by mocking up some screens. Here is my first shot at it. I hand edited and modified the colors and then placed characters in the right place and ran it through the converter. I think this game could be made.Sure, that should be perfectly feasible on the Aquarius.
The only trouble is, being a cartridge version of Strip Poker, you won't be able to go into the filesystem and change the graphics file names so the naked ones show up first, like you could with the disk versions.
(Oops ... did I just say that aloud?!)
OMG! I was just came to post something like that when I saw your comment. Ah, the memories on the C=64 when I was 12 years old. LOL!
You know I learned to play poker in that thing, and I learned to be good at it.
-dZ.
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The AY-3-891x is a very interesting family of audio chips, far ahead of anything Atari had at the time. They seem to be capable of a lot more than they were ever pushed to do in the Intellivision, and I imagine that's mainly because the music composition tools (to the extent they even existed) weren't nearly as sophisticated at the time.
The tracker you linked to seems to be Intellivision source code, but has anyone tried to use a PC-side utility to create the music data? I've been looking at Vortex Tracker II as a potential composition tool for Intellivision and Aquarius music. It was apparently designed mainly for the 128K ZX Spectrum+ (which used an AY-3-8910), but since it's the same chip, perhaps it can be used for the Intellivision/Aquarius also.
I think Arnauld had a PC tracking software that he uses. His Intv tracker follows a format very close to the classic Amiga MODs. As I understand it, he uses a simple tool to convert the binary into Intv DECLE data for his tracker.
-dZ.
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So I have the following systems:
- Intellivision I
- Intellivision II
- ColecoVision
- Atari VCS
- PlayStation 2
- PlayStation 3
- GameCube
- Wii
And they're all in my living room and it's a mess! (And that is not counting the receiver, the surround-sound system, the DVD player, and Apple TV, and the dozen or so direct-to-tv all-in-one games-in-a-controller).
What is the best way to hook them all up nicely so that I can play them at a whim? I currently have one of those RF Modulator switch boxes that supports up to 4 or 5 systems, but it's intended for the older stuff, so it doesn't have any digital jacks, just RCAs.
I just bought my first flat-screen HD TV which forced me to unhook everything and re-assess the situation. What's a good switching box or something like that to organize my consoles and entertainment system in a comprehensive way?
-dZ.
- Intellivision I
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I wouldn't spend too much money on expensive cables. Don't fall for "high-end" claims. I think most cheap cables nowadays are gold-plated anyway.
I have had success using shielded cables vs. unshielded ones when it comes to RF connections.
Yes, me too. Shielded cables work better. I also prefer gold-plated because I've had more than one cheap set start rusting at the tips.
My point was that he should not fall for things like Monster Cables that charge you $50.00 or more for a cable that is not perceivably better than the $3.00 one you purchased at the local hardware store. Even most cheap cables come shielded and gold-plated, just have to check the specs on the package.
-dZ.
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jungle hunt developers?
in Intellivision Programming
Posted
Wow, I had forgotten about the monkey. I'll need to fire up MAME tonight and check it out. Jungle Hunt was always one of my favorite arcade games.
-dZ.