fabulous_Muller
-
Posts
59 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Blogs
Gallery
Events
Store
Posts posted by fabulous_Muller
-
-
-
Some from Brazil , later I'll send more. These are all from Veja magazine '83,'84 .
-
3
-
-
Today I stumbled at a pole position gameplay video , where I left a comment against a ridiculous observation that VCS 2600 was faster than intellivision so that's why the VCS pole position was better and Intv was not good for this kind of game (race). Anyway pole position here really sucks and seeing other ports I know Intv can do better. In fact by just playing Auto racing it's obvious enough that it can be better. I know Carl it's very good to fix these things and maybe with some luck, and our insistence, he can put a mod for PP in his queue. What do you think Carl ? rgds..
-
Even if LV Poker & Blackjack is a nice game, I guess it wouldn't have been so common in North America and Europe if it wasn't shipped with the console.
AFAIK, LV Poker & Blackjack never came with the console in Brazil
Yes , triple action was default and mine came also with soccer , which we call football here. But that's was a limited promo .
-
I do lust after more ShockVision Carts!
Imagine when you find the intellivision ones .
-
C'mon , Now I know why the prices sky rocket here ! You're buying it all.
I do lust after more ShockVision Carts!
Another shipment came in. These are mostly Atari 2600 (which I don't collect) but when you buy lots you have to take all of it.
The Blackjack is really hard to come by, this one is Digimed and the SNAFU is Digimed also. It's funny that the most prolific game in the US is a very HTF in another country.
There are 2 different Tron DD in Digiplay. The back of the box and the overlays are different. Note the one overlay still has the Disney trademark line but they dropped the Mattel trademark line.
I think the Atari 2600 Intellivision carts are really cool.
-
44 next month. And interesting stories to share: My father gave me the INTV I when I was 9, it was one of the most surprisingly things he has ever done to me. He and I don't know till today why he made it. He just can't remember and as he was ( and is) such a penny pincher That I think he was abducted by a superior race or something like that. Interesting that I was the only boy in a giant radius with that console as it was more expansive that the VCS and my neighborhood that time was not very pretty , a decadent one indeed. So I got cartidges only on my birthdays or Christmas and to not go crazy I had to rent but nearest rental shop was 9 miles away and There is only 2 lines (bus) that make that route (even today, what a lack of development !). One line pass from hour to hour and the other one each 20 to 30 min. I can still fell the smell of the shop even today, it was a mixture of lavender with new plastic. The shop was divided in 3 sections, one for VCS 2600 , one for Intellevision and one for Odissey and I still remember the way the labels were organized , the carts were behind the counter and you have to choose the label and give to the attendant which picked the cart, inserted into the console, tested and gave back to you. A lot of games were just cart and manual (no box and no overlay). This journey took a round trip of at least 2 hours and a some courage to make it. Boy, what you do when you have 9 ! Generally I was carrying a school bag with an English dictionary inside it , because a lot of carts were smuggled and with English instructions so I took that return time to read the manual, as I was learning English with private classes that helped me improve my skills.
The rental shops started to broke by 1985 and and I started to gather money by all possible means (selling remnant of wires of a popular one, pass under the bus roulette was another) and when we finally move from that neighborhood at 86 I had kind of 25 carts. Continue to buy because there was a medium network called fotomania that still had some inventory till the 90's and I bought some of their carts and I think I got near 40. After we move my console broke and I didn't find anybody to repair, so I became from 86 to 94 without play a single game, but still hold my carts because I had some hopes. In 89 I went to a tech school and learned electronics earning a tech degree but I never got the console working because I couldn't find the schematics. In 94 the internet finally appeared in the country and one of the first things I remember to find was some intellivision sites. I bought a working console at that time I think I paid 30 dollars (if I knew how it would cost today!) from US but it was NTSC and It played back and white so I have to wait another way to change my TV console and play again but that time I was already working and didn't play so much. Some time later I broke up badly with my parents, went to live alone and married. When I get in peace some years later , one the first things that I asked was for my console and my young sister said she throw everything away because that was garbage old stuff , I felt very bad and didn't know if she told the truth or if she sold my collection or gave to my other brother but I lost and started everything again and today I had 18 carts, I guess, but I finally will put my hands at the LTO flash and I think I will have great times again. I think I remains with this console because of all happiness that came back to my mind when I'm playing.
I can't say that I became electronics tech ,and computer engineer after, just because of the console but it had a huge influence on those paths, Till today I have the good habit of read all the manuals , datasheet and so, without any problem, hate or impatience, in fact I hate to power anything that does not have a manual, it helped me persisted on my goals to learn english (I even was awarded a plate when I was 9 for outstanding performance) and it still pushes me up to learn microcontrollers (MCU's). The CP1600 is an outstanding piece of hardware , ahead of its time, it's a GI(general instrument) product which became Microchip which is one of the biggest MCU's companies in the world and it holds a core very similar to the PIC family that is one of most popular microcontroller lines of all times and still a top selling product. Well, that's a good partner for all this journey, how one can't love it after all this ? Cheers..
-
8
-
-
Hi Powerpak, here goes the switchbox and the pipe:
It was a classic way to connect through the VCR in the 80's . If you bend the cable and nothing happens , you Intv RF output is in good shape. So, probably is something related to unbalanced impedance. If could find the switchbox you could eliminate this too.
None of the TV settings make a difference in the effect. And the picture doesn't respond in any way when I twist the coax cable/connector.
I don't know what you mean by a switchbox and a pipe. Sounds like you're referring to a resistor?
I'll keep tinkering with it, but right now I'm just psyched to be playing the INTV 2 again.
-
That's weird , but not so much weird . It's most difficult to have this problems on CRT than on LED TV sets. Can be a lot of things , but start by the basics. As intvsteve said try first to make some adjustments on the tv set , try to find if your TV has a channel fine tuning , most of TV set has , put your intv in ch3 or ch4 , select fine tuning and goes up or down and see if gets better. Try with color and brightness too. If none of this work , is it possible to find a regular RCA cable, a switchbox and a pipe ( a 300 to 75 ohms adapter) to check if works ? Maybe some impedance balance either. Last but not least , if you twist lightly the cable edge on the console , does it flicks or get any response on the TV ? I have to remove the entire RF module once because the output connector was a little bit loose and I have to re-sold it to eliminate some problems.
Hope this helps ...Thanks for weighing in. I already ordered one from intvnut, figured it would be good to have a fresh one even if it doesn't make a difference in this case.
Also thought I'd try to upload some pics just to make sure we're all talking about the same phenomenon. I don't remember the picture being this off 30 years ago, but you know how that goes
It's a good 1/4" off on my tiny 13" TV, so very noticeable. If this is what everybody's looks like (barring the AV mod), then maybe that's as good as it gets for now.
Here are the pics, hard to get an accurate pic, neither gives the impression of what it looks like in person (for example, the second Tron guy looks like he has a less pronounced ghost/shadow, but every object on the screen has it). Added a line next to the "D" to show how far it goes. Theres a Red area and then a darker (blue?) area.
-
Hi powerpack and welcome to the forum. Could you pls describe a little more your set. TV model ? Are you using the RF switch Box or a ballon (adapter coax to antenna) ? Any rust on the edges ?
-
I've since tried Q-bert and Soccer which both worked yesterday but not today. Both don't go past the startup screen. Do you know which chip is the EXEC ROM as I might have one to try?=1
+1 bet on exec , but just having another unit to swap chips.
-
I heard, I read about, but I had never seen them , till now...
-
I can't see these Shockvision games ever being legal ....they seem like pirate carts despite appearing to be official.
Completely right. They were pirat..coffcoffcoff "produced" in a weird time without any legal authorization. It was a kind of consensus those time , many companies "producing" garage cartidges from Intv, VCS and etc. What impress me is that they seem to use a regular rom chip (much easier to copy in series) , the reason why there is an adapter and we have difficulties to reproduce this method even now. That's why I asked for a inside picture.
-
ColecoNut , I think the best would be buy a local (Brazil) pal-m to NTSC converter. The dollar is 4 to 1 so, probably it would worth. PAL-M is kind trick and only 2 countries in the world used it. China is not one of them , hence the failures. Is better to spend a little bit more and buy one that will gonna work.
-
Is it possible for any of you with this carts to open up one and take some descent shots of them inside ?
-
Thanks for digging those videos out. They look identical to the original versions in terms gameplay... Did I miss something though?
I contacted the guy that posted the videos and he did it because he is selling the console + the carts. At the zaxxon video comments on you tube he replied my comments with the shop links. 1.000,00 BRL (250 USD) . 1 console + 15 loose carts. I don't have all this available now.
-
We will have to send Rev and Cmart in an Indiana Jones mission to Brazil including whips... errrr, better not
Most Like Mission : Impossible. Almost impossible to find one of these nowadays....
-
1
-
-
Folks , I'm taking my first steps with RASP PI and I'm almost sure that we could wire the controllers direct to GPIO ports. The ultimate PC is a great interface but if you look at Raphaël Assénat's usb adaptor, which is open sourced , it's wired to the atmega8-16XX ports , which then makes the USB interface witht pc. As the rasp has so many ports available is kind of write the drive and probably will read the controller directly. I'm not specialist on rasp (yet) but the GPIO docs all use python as examples and as I'm still learning python so maybe I could do something more to next year. But I'll give it a try for sure by the next months. But fell free to do it if you could.
-
1
-
-
Great event people, one question : Without counting people of this list , how is the interesting of the public ? Have anybody notice what it is ?
-
There's no denying Dave Rolfe played a key role in the development (and success) of the Intellivision. I don't think anyone would question that.
I've interviewed him twice on the podcast; episode 7 (Baseballs) and episode 13 (Poker & Blackjack). Even so, I could probably interview him another 10 times and still be interested in what he has to say.
He also developed a couple early arcade games; Star Fire and Fire One. Both are worth checking out - either via MAME or just a YouTube video.
And of course, there's Beamrider for the Intellivision, and Steamroller for the Colecovision.
I intend to have him on the show again. He's always been very generous and accommodating when asked.
Very good , probably you could have a sole program , there is so much that he can tell us about the exec and if he going to talk about beamrider and steamrider, things go far. Maybe you could do a hangout , it would be more light than a 3 or 4 hours of phone talking.
cheers...
-
1
-
-
There is no single "Father of the Intellivision." In fact, you would have to cram in that title hardware component designers like David Chandler, tool makers and programmers like Tom Loughry (who also was a significant contributor to many games himself), graphics artists, sound effects engineers, music programmers, etc., etc., etc.
I also remember from one of the interviews that Dave Warhol essentially wrote his own version of the EXEC, assembler, and linker when INTV Corp. took over the torch.
You could argue that without any single one of them the project would have continued and become as successful is it was, but you cannot deny that the synergy of all their contributions combined helped shape the Intellivision into what we remember it today.
I admire all of them, and would bestow the credit among them equally.
-dZ.
Dz , I didn't mean to diminish anyone but the other systems we had very clear who did what and who started it all and talking about intellivision this is always something kind "obscure". I don't know who thought about have the exec , probably it was Dave's idea, but it was and still is a very cleaver solution. And if the other Dave (warhol) wrote his own version , he is also a very intelligent guy but the exec was already there you know. kind like Freedos or one modified version of a PC-at bios that I did somewhere, works made after are also good, help a lot, but we have at least something to look at as a reference. When starting it all, it's always more complicated. Obviously that if we gonna look at the success of a project there are many people involved, but when talking about hardware and software there are some specific people that are necessary to have a project and it was more in this sense that I raised the question about Dave. To me is very clear that he is one the respobsibles to the existance of the system as it was. Anyway good questions to raise to Dave in a near future.
-
Last month I was searching about the all mighty 16 positions capability of the intellivision disc controller when I found an interesting post where Stargunner did an interesting quote : "The exec is a one man show. Dave Rolfe wrote exec and baseball at the same time" Oh my god I just found a way to materialize a recent dream : Read one book about Intellivision published by Platform studies series from MIT press. And I tell you why it's so important to have this book and how Dave could help. I was aware about this series due to the excellent book Race the beam : The Atari computer System by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost. I have already mentioned that before. I also mentioned that intellivision is quoted only 3 times in this book , one where all the VCS rivals are cited in one line and other two where VCS is praised to have a superior color palette against the humble 16 color palette from Intellivision.Yes , VCS produces a beautiful Sunset background image but they forget to mention that you have to imagine that a square block is a human being ( that's another history..), anyway I wrote a letter to Mr. Robison asking him to help, because I was very concerned about a book teaching MIT and Georgia tech students how good the VCS was, even when compared to so called superior systems. I wrote professor Bogost an email and he promptly said that would be very happy to have a book about intellivision but he didn't know the system so well to wrote a book about it. But, if I knew this person they could try to have a partnership to write the book. Well finally I got the right person to that : Dave Rolfe.
Stargunner post let me smell a rat and I went deeper and found that he was pretty right. And more , if somebody can be name father of the intellivision this man is Dave ! I always knew Dave for have writing baseball and beamrider (which I love) but man , the guy is a beast. I listening to his interview in Intellivisionaries podcast (ep.7) and there is nothing else to say : trust the man ! Curiously , Dave is always cited as one of the intellivision programmers and so but he didn't deserve to be one prog he is "THE programmer" . He wrote all the exec, he taught the others, the first programmers, how to use it and he still remembers everything quite well. I don't know what secrets he may have to hold or not due to legal and everything but , correct me if I failed, I never saw a detailed guide about how the exec works and so on ,written by Dave. What are the matter with this folks ? I know that Dave it's some kind of modest guy , because come on , I have seen people that didn't make that much and appears to have discovered "the perpetual motion machine" , but if you go to Dave site , it seems that " yes, I made something good at the past but you know, I was there and was hired to do so, etc.." and come on , the guy started all. Pls folks I think Dave deserves a proper recognition for his work from the game community and I haven't see this yet. Keith Robison seems to get more credit that anyone else when talking about intellivision and I don't have any doubt that he was and is an important person to the community but I think Dave deserves a little bit more for his ahead of time work at the exec. Well done Mr. Rolfe , congratulations ! You deserve to be at the World Video Game hall of fame and I'll vote on the exec for next year. It's a masterpiece !.
Thanks...
-
Hi folks..
Before the internet I din't even know that there was 2 variants available. Just played the "realistic" one which for me was the only one for years, Even now I didn't played the other. I don't know how could people complaining because if a 9 yrs boy find pretty normal to go right , as a real car wheel , when you are going down the screen when the curve is for the right , so... nothing absurd and that's all funny of the game. And how abouth the phanton circuits ? , when it ends in a (neck)tie. How many hours I spend going from one circuit to another between the trees, it requires a high level break control skill to do that. So high that I simply cannot succeed nowadays
, requires some deep training...-
1
-
-
I did some more exploring with my Flashback today, using the PDF Manuals provided by this thread. I feel like I have a lot of unresolved feelings about Intellivision and these experiences of trying out the games is bringing them back.
At the time the Intellivision system was starting to hit the stores in a big way, I was working at an electronics repair shop as an apprentice fixing car stereos, home audio equipment and similar pieces of gear. The guy who was teaching me was very enthusiastic about Intellivision. I was from an Atari family, with an original 1977 Heavy Sixer (I still have it), but within a year I would be married and moving to another state to attend college, so it wasn't like I was going to be coming up with the 300 bucks to buy one even if I was all psyched about Mattel ushering the future of home computing electronics.
I also felt there was a little bit of snootiness coming from the Mattel crowd... ...Intellivision was the Mercedes to Atari's "Chevy" - it was going to grow beyond a mere home video game system and become the center of home computing and entertainment for the enlightened family of the future. I felt a lot of a similar vibe from Apple in 1984 when they introduced Macintosh - the "Computer for the Rest of Us"... ...those of us who have spare cash in the 2015 equivalent of about $10,000. Of course, to be fair, businesses that were buying IBM compatibles around that time were spending between two and five thousand dollars for their systems, and Macintosh was supposed to be a professional computer system (...even though at the time of its release, there wasn't any software to support that usage model)... ...but I digress.
I'm fascinated by the relationship between the Intellivision CPU and the PDP-11. I'm wondering if Mattel was thinking there would be a bunch of hungry, enthusiastic Computer Science grads with PDP programming experience who would jump in and start churning out more software once Intellivision was firmly established in households across America...
The quality of the graphics seems inconsistent across games. I look at games like "Space Armada", "Shark Shark!", and "Astrosmash" and they're not that impressive to me. On the other hand, a lot of the games have graphics that seem more reminiscent of what we'd be seeing on Commodore 64 computers and NES a few years later - Inty games such as "Auto Racing", "B-17 Bomber" and "Motocross".
The graphics in "Motocross" in particular, look every bit as good as those found in Nintendo's "Excitebike" - maybe even a little better. But I can't seem to get the controller to be responsive enough to have as enjoyable a game-play experience on the Intellivision compared to playing NES on PC emulation using the keyboard arrow-keys. Is the flaw here in the Flashback implementation? Or was the experience equally frustrating on the real hardware? I never could get used to using my thumbs to control everything on an NES the way I used an Atari joystick or a computer keyboard. For a lot of games in emulation (MAME Asteroids, for example) keyboard button-pushes feel the most natural and similar to how I remember the arcade game controls working.
Ultimately, the Intellivision feels to me, like an astonishing level of unrealized potential. If the full keyboard component had become available as originally envisioned, and the system had continued to grow and expand, it does not seem beyond the realm of possibility that it could have eventually been a full Unix system with hard-drive, connected to a real 80-column monitor, and running serious software.
But even without the collapse of the home video game market in '83/'84, it would have been a hard-sell for serious computer users to accept an offering from a toy company to go in that direction. I think Exidy faced similar challenges for their "Sorcerer" computer, which from what I can see, seems to have been a solid piece of gear.
At the end of the day, I still seem to find it to be more "fun" to play a short list of my favorite Atari 2600 games over-and-over. It may be years of bias, or a mind-set that just "wants" Atari to be the more appealing game system, or it may be the excitement and enthusiasm surrounding the Atari home-brew scene of the past ten years. Sorry for the long post, but these thoughts have been simmering over the past several months...
Agree with some points and disagree with others. Now we know that CP1600 was very,very good and could have be more that a game console, 16 bits in 70's ! it could be went very far... but that's another story. The keyboard existed but there is the keyboard history and we all know that things didn't went well to this side. Regarding the controllers I will tell you something, that's one of the most unfair items in general judge. I grew up with Intellivision and, boy I was 9 years old, and nothing felt more powerful that those controller in my hands. I don't mean the ergonomics which are a little bit bad, the FB very cleverly used a rubber button that it's all that I asked those times, but the response and directions that it can go I didn't find in any console. I don't have a FB unit so I can tell you about its response, I use the real thing and in games with "the running man", like Tron series or Soccer, the motion is astonishing ! I mean 16 , real 16 directions ! and it's for real. Ask Dz-Jay, revolutionika or any other programmer here and they will confirm you this. And I don't have how to prove it yet but in games that doesn't need 16 directions , like some X-Y axis only, beamrider for example, the flow of the object is totally smooth, the impression is that the 16 directions are somehow compressed to form only the four needed but the flow from the disc to the object is amazing ! My cousins had atari-2600, everyone else in my neighboorhood had atari, I was the only one with that weird videogame in the entire district and I always found my games far more difficult and interesting than Atari even at the same titles, e.g Pitfall. And like I said to an "old guy" from a CG forum : If a 9 yrs old boy can easily control this thing or he is a genius (which I wasn't) or the problem it's somewhere else (yourself for example). So I think is really more bias. I don't like to play Intv in computer because of that, the flow is completely different and in fact I never adapted to play console games in computer because of ...Intellivision. It gave me such a strong mark that I miss the real controllers of any console if I play the PC keybrd. I have a Sega genesis and a Ouya and besides the great ergonomics of their controllers the response are still not good to me, it's incredibel how I still prefer that little phone over them. Don't take me wrong but It's just my opinion too and kind explain the way I fell about my console. Rgds..
-
1
-
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord
Platform Studies, Intellivision
in Intellivision / Aquarius
Posted
Absolutely fantastic Doc. Wells, It's a dream come true , to me at least . I tried to pursue Keith Robinson to get in touch with Ian Bogost years ago but I was not very fortunate with that . Now the wait is over.
"
Good Morning Professors , Today i discovered the platform studies series thanks to a wired.com article that mentioned the "racing the beam" book. Well as the site was opened to suggestion and as you have written a book about atari 2600 vcs, now it's time to give credit to its most terrific rival : Intellivision (....).
Rgds
Fabio "
I loved "racing the beam" except for the two references to the intellivision (
) now it's time to charge back. I think you gonna find a lot of good information here. Historic developers , new developers, a team of great hackers and enthusiast all together in a single place . Hope to see a great work coming.
Cheers..