intvsteve

Vectron dedicated some of its ROM space to defining the graphics for the characters it wanted to draw. Tron Solar Sailer did that, too, and probably a couple other games. Many of the new homebrews do, too.

The first concern is accessing the cart from your PC. Not sure how familiar you are with Windows 10. If need be, PM me. The short version is: Does a COM port appear in Device Manager when you plug the cartridge in? Double-check the cable supports data transfer - over the past few years, it's become alarmingly frequent that cables only support power, not data It also appears that more recent Windows 10 seems to require installing the FTDI serial port drivers - a link to their website is in the menu, or here - you probably would use the 64-bit Windows driver On the menu layout side... If your cart has ROMs on it, they got there somehow. You can rearrange your menu layout in the UI software. It's been a long-time regret (just look up this thread), but the Windows version does not support rearranging multiple items in the menu layout (right hand side) - you have to rearrange one at a time. The general approach is to create the folders in the UI, as @carlsson mentions, then drag the ROMs into the appropriate folder. When that's all done, connect the cart, click 'Send to LTO Flash!'. You won't need to reformat the entire cart. Since you set up the cart somehow, then it is easiest to do the menu rearrangement on the machine that you used to put the ROMs onto the cart, as that's a "known good". Feel free to contact me via PM and we can go over things in more detail as needed.

Well I finally got around to opening mine! Do I get a prize? lol Question about this release: Are we supposed to get two copies of each of three different overlays, or one of each? Unless they are really stuck together, it appears the one I received has three overlays - I think each is different but will have to double-check.

For quite a while you could get various games by special order from Radio Shack. IIRC many stores had a binder that listed inventory and you could try your luck. Not sure what places like Toys R Us and Kay Bee did. wow. Every single one of those places is gone now. Definitely feeling old.

I have a couple of the blue ones. The brown one sure is classy!

The simple answer: Never There are all kinds of unpleasant issues involved if the hardware itself were to be distributed pre-populated with anything. The simplest case would be if such ROMs from Left Turn Only, and under their full control. Given that many of those ROMs are already freely available to download, modifying the manufacturing process would still impose a significant time investment, and at this point, one would imagine the market for the cartridge is approaching saturation. That said, the world is a crazy place that never ceases to surprise. lol From the UI software side, we actually did consider having a 'Starter Pack' of ROMs to include, and there are even some hooks in the UI code laying groundwork for such a feature. It never materialized for the same reasons you can guess. Q: Why not ship the cart with most of the ROMs already on it? A: We can't. Intellivision Entertainment and Blue Sky Rangers, Inc. own the original games, and the authors and publishers and IP owners of all the newer games own their works. I.e. it would be illegal, and making it legal costs a lot of people a lot of time and a lot of money. Q: Why not offer a way to buy the ROMs? A: We're hobbyists, not iTunes for Intellivision. It's simply not feasible. See above. Same answers apply.

Is this is a Super Pro system? I know the system we had as kids we almost always had to press RESET to get a game booted up. I was always a little jealous of my friend who never had to do that. Kids are weird. lol

Are you using an Intellivoice?

All .bin- and .rom- format ROMs go through a utility that prepares them for use on the LTO Flash! The utility will assume a standard memory map if none is provided for a .bin-format ROM. If the memory map isn't correct, the game won't run correctly. When the UI is handed a ROM that it determines is of .bin format, it performs a CRC and attempts to identify the ROM from it. There are several reasons for UI bells and whistles, like fetching ROM metadata from a database (publisher, etc.). But the most important reason, by far, is to cope with missing .cfg files for .bin-format ROMs. If a .bin-format ROM's .cfg file is missing, the UI uses its internal database to try to find a match based on a CRC-32 of the ROM. If a good mapping is found, then the corresponding "canonical" .cfg is placed next to the .bin with the intent of making it unambiguous about the mapping being used. If no match is found, then a copy of the default memory mapping .cfg is created. It does no active harm, and if someone is savvy, they can then edit that .cfg to get the game working. For .rom-format ROMs, the memory map is embedded in the file itself, so no such measures are necessary.

Eeek! Figures I was off the grid all weekend. Hope I sneak in!

No.

You busted me! There's a partial manual here. You can get to it from here (the gold box), too: I say "busted" because it's incomplete, and it's quite likely that the sorting feature you were looking for was added after I made those pages lol. I think I have a couple hundred screen shots for Windows and Mac that I never got to writing content around, and who knows how many of them are out of date by now lol. ... In fact, I just determined that the sort feature is indeed not documented by following link in the above reference page to this sub-page. Based on the released notes at the download page (which is horribly overpopulated), the sort was added in a version released 2016-09-06 meaning that the manual is even older than the earliest releases! Who knows how many little things are "off"... Back to Multi-Select Tree From what I remember, I was working on key navigation in the multi-select tree. I think the mouse operations work - but it's not Windows Explorer 'lasso' type, it's using the Shift and Control keys. I might just cut bait and leave some of the edge cases in the pure keyboard navigation remain unsolved. I dug around in Microsoft's reference source code to look at how they do key navigation in the tree control for things like page up and page down and it's insanely complex. They've done multi-select tree controls in their own products, and the behavior in Visual Studio is what I was aiming for.

FWIW, I try to track feature work here: https://github.com/intvsteve/VINTage/projects/3

I opted for a pretty obvious option for the auto-populate-the-menu, on the premise that if you had taken the time to organize all those ROMs on disk, it's a very likely you'd like to keep it that way simply out of habit lol. But you know what they say about assuming.... Of course more mundane pressures also applied as we worked on it - like "Holy crap this thing's already so late! Stop polishing the turd, Steve!" ... And every layer of that polish needs testing, et. al. "It worked on my machine" is one of the worst things in software developemnt lol. Having a "flat list" option - which is how the ROM list is presented, would be simple enough to implement I suppose - but there's a BIG caveat. The file system on the cart is limited to 255 files in one folder. These days with the highly productive IntyBASIC scene it's pretty easy to hit that limit. Not saying this isn't a valuable option, just that sadly it's fraught with extra complications that need more testing and a plan to guide the user on what to do next, etc. Since there's already a "nag" dialog in the UI on import (unless you tell it to go away and never come back), there is an attachment point in the UI to expand the options... <runs off looking for another box of flux capacitors />

During beta testing, we found just about everyone had this kind of folder layout already as well. Later, we hit a case where someone had almost the opposite problem - they had downloaded every single ROM as a .zip, and unzipped everything. The default behavior in that case was that every single ROM was in its own folder. In this case, we ran out of directories on the cart! There's just no way to "win" lol.

Regarding organization in general, we found during testing that almost everyone already had arranged their ROMs in some fashion in folders on the file system. When adding files from a folder, the folder hierarchy is reproduced in the menu layout pretty much as-is, subject to limits in the file system on the cartridge (max number of files / folders limits). Aside from the multi-select drag/drop in the tree, are there other approaches you could suggest? One idea that just occurred to me that would only really work for the original 125 (mostly) is to offer an option to do an "organized import". Here's a sketch of the idea: We can pretty reliably identify ROMs via a checksum We have a database of the original games' checksums as well as other metadata (like publisher, official game name, network, etc.) The option to organize by "Publisher, Network" could work for this kind of import Multi-select in the menu tree for Windows is a big feature, and I do intend to release it. At some point. It's been almost a year since I last was working actively on it, so I can't say how near release quality it is. There are several other items in the hopper too so juggling everything is a bit tricky.

Trying different menu layouts: You could explore the features here: This makes a copy of the ROMs list and menu layout in directory based on date and time. (A fancier option is on my wish-list.) So, you could make a backup, tinker with it, make another backup, restore, etc. It's been a couple years since I've looked at the code for it, but I think it literally just swaps out the files for you.

It may be that it's hidden in a right click menu in the menu layout (right-hand side).

Regarding .cfg files: When you run a game in the classic .bin format (.int is identical, not sure of the origins of that file extension for these), a .cfg file is required. jzintv has implemented an internal database that will use an in-memory lookup for the original 125 if the file is missing. The UI does this as well. IIRC some of the file format conversion tools necessary for populating the cart may require the .cfg. My memory is a bit fuzzy on that specific detail. In any case, IIRC the .cfg files must be located in the same directory as the ROM itself, so dropping them in a different directory would not be very helpful, and could turn into a nightmare of doubling the file management. It's quite possible that the auto-creation of the .cfg files was done early on, and later I changed to have this all operate on a backup copy.

@wongojack - I'll get to the details in your post eventually (I hope!) Regarding the #1 gripe - which I have as well - Multi-select in the menu tree in Windows... Yeah. Long time sore spot for me, too. The Mac version has this - their "stock" tree control has all kinds of utility baked in. Sadly, that's not the case in Windows, so I've explored a few options there: Good controls that have such features cost $$$$ No success so far in finding any that support the features I want in the open source community The baked-in Windows tree control supports neither drag and drop nor multi-select, so I've had to write these from scratch due to the items above I've actually been working on my own implementation off and on over the past couple years but have been overwhelmed with a lot of other things that take time away from the hobbies. There are many corner test cases likely not yet tried out, and I recall specifically the keyboard support features being a real pain to get working as well. EDIT: And based on highly scientific polling, this is the third-most-requested feature! (I initially misread the 'Live menu edits' option as "Select multiple..."

Occam's razor does indeed apply here! This appears to be an error in the database. It will be remedied shortly. Sorry about the snipe hunt!

Gonna have to go dig in the stacks to see if I still have it... though my notes say the bottom flap has a sticker. @BSRSteve's image doesn't appear to be a sticker... … even harder to find? :gulp:

Ah, the old KayBee. Bought a lot of stuff there. I remember they had stacks of Intellivision II, ECSs, and Synthesizers there and I always meant to get... But they disappeared before I got around to it.... The $1.99 and $2.99 bins of games burned up the pocket money I had in those days... I remember there was a deal - send in the bottom flaps from 5 games and you'd get 5 in the mail. IIRC, my Mind Strike from Kay Bee was an I.I. copy, and some of the games were international ones w/ other language manuals on the back.... Some were the French Canadian dual-language ones, since we were in the upper Midwest. Yeah, I 'member!

I intend to get to this tonight. My schedule's been a bit hectic lately.

To do this, you'll likely need to connect to the flashback over the network and copy the files - but whether that's possible or not depends on your flashback setup. Not sure if you can power it all off, take out the SD card and locate the ROMs on it from another computer.