mr_me

Whoever designed that box mixed up screenshots from World Championship Baseball. Mattel did develop both games, but didn't release the latter.

"Super Video Arcade Baseball" "Le Baseball de la Ligue Majeure" --------------------- Sears "Baseball" would be the Atari game. They were likely sold that way everywhere outside of North America Could it have been due to limited licensing?

"more diverse and complex graphics and animations, and arcade realistic sounds (even including voices and other highly advanced effects)" Sounds like it adds a sound processor capable of playing digitally recorded audio/speech through the cartridge port audio input. Havent heard anyone advertise improved graphics since Mattel's "supergraphics" and others went to 60 Hz. I'm guessing you still need an Intellivoice to play B17 Bomber properly.

I was waiting for someone more knowledgeable than myself to comment. It sounds like what you're talking about is another way of adding more colours to an intellivision card/sprite which is really designed to only have one or two colours. Kind of like colourising an old black and white movie. Well the intellivision game program would have to write the colour data from the cp1610 out to memory on the cartridge and then a seperate program running on the cartridge would have to create the colour composite signal on the cartridge port video in. Did I understand this correctly?

Maybe they are okay putting Konami games (new conversions) on it?

The CoolCV emulator emulates the SGM. The same question can be asked about Intellivision hardware accelerators. RAM might be addressed in the CFG file. Does Jzintv support LTO cart acceleration? What about Groovybee cart acceleration and now Opcode's?

Thanks, and thats something that could have been fixed with better programming. I read in the instructions that instead of mapping 16 disc directions to 8, they only mapped 8 disc directions, if that's true it would be a problem too. The intellivision hardware addons were a bit awkward. We had to get a bigger table for the intellivoice. I wish there was a better way.

Putting up banners for division titles is lame. Its not the first time they replaced their banners. They probably need bigger ones so people can read them in the bigger arena. The old edmonton arena was one of my favourite places to watch an NHL game.

By Intellivision III you must mean INTV System III. I think the Intellivision II had the extra GRAM as well. According to Intvnut, to make use of it you'd have to make some hardware modifications inside the Intellivision and it might break backward compatibility with some games. It would give you 128 cards instead of 64 but 240 cards needed for a frame buffer. Its still at 96 line resoltion. The unfinished Intellivision III and its updated STIC was suppose to address full 192 line resolution and more. The System Changer, although it had its own controller ports, was also suppose to use the controllers through the master component. Did this work well? Just wondering if a system changer type enhancement add-on would work well with master component controllers.

I thought I read video input on cartridge pin 8 was disabled on the Inrellivision II. If that were the case than any use of cartridge based video input would be incompatible with some Intellivisions. I think adding audio through the catridge port shouldn't be a problem. Did the keyboard component and system changer use the same method input for audio?

League of Light is a strange game. Like Illusions it was unreleased but maybe completed. I do find it relaxing, and somewhat enjoyable. If you played Master of Lamps you'd have some idea about it.

The Dreadnaught Factor When I first heard of the Donkey Kong fiasco, I pretty well stayed away from third party games. And I always thought that the Activision games were just Atari 2600 conversions. Dreadnaught did interest me just because of its name and I bought it on ebay maybe 10 or 15 years ago. If only I new its the same programmer as AD&D. I like that Dreadnaught makes use of scrolling and that the game has a winnable ending. It's a quality game. Thunder Castle is the other one that impressed me. It was in my Mattel catalog but never made it out before everything disappeared.

Yeah, the keyboard component had a monochrome 40x24 text only graphic display that could overlay (not underlay?) the regular Intellivision graphics. There are no graphics characters in the font unfortunately. Here's some info. http://wiki.intellivision.us/index.php?title=TMS9927_CRT_Controller That page also mentions that the intellivision colour chip has a video input but is never used.

I didn't play this game when it came out (didn't even know about it in the 1980s), but I've tried it now. I can only play in emulation and I just can't get it to run very fast, barely qualifying for amateur 100m if I am lucky. The Instructions say you can spin the disc, and you would think that at 16 clicks per revolution it would be better but its not. I also tried the computer keyboard buttons, but got slightly better results with the disc. Spinning the disc would be most comfortable but waving your finger across the disc isn't bad. Sometimes I wonder if emulation has any input limitations (ie. inputs per second). But I tried "Track and Field" in emulation and it seems to be as I remembered it. Some head to head racing for the 100m/400m would have been nice, or even computer runners. Overall I find the running frustrating but not uncomfortable. With high jump and pole vault, the instructions suggest pumping the side button for jumping power. I think that's a bad choice for controls; these events could have been done better. With javelin, there's no control of the throwing angle like I remember in other games. With long jump you can cheat by holding the button from the beginning rather than waiting for the green line. I'm thinking the 400m event could have had a more strategic type control (energy management) like Intellivision horse racing. Obviously I don't want to do the work. I think I'm too old for this kind of game

They all have four switches controlled by one thumb. But if your talking about a single pivoting top piece that would be the Intellivision disc, mentioned earlier, except it has 16 switches.

The Nintendo d-pad is a little older than that patent. Here's another one from 1978; and there's probably d-pads older than this.

http://www.intellivisionlives.com/bluesky/games/credits/activision.shtml FUN FACT: David Rolfe (Beamrider) shares this anecdote: "At Cheshire Engineering we made a deal in late 1982 to produce games for Activision. We attended C.E.S. in January of 1983 (Las Vegas) as guests of Activision. Their most current release was Dave Crane's 'Decathlon,' and this was heavily promoted - in fact, I still have a flashy promotional jacket. "You may recall that the Decathlon game involved guiding the screen figure through a series of athletic events. You advanced him by wiggling the Atari 2600 joystick back and forth as rapidly as possible. This was an unusual thing to do with a joystick, and users found the most effective way to achieve maximum motion was to sit on a chair and hold the base of the joystick firmly between their thighs, and then to hold the joystick itself with their hands for the purpose of wiggling it. "I remember walking into the Activision hospitality suite and seeing a roomful of people trying the game. At first glance, the view was rather disturbing: A cluster of guys, seated, staring intently at a TV monitor, hands firmly grasping a protrusion at the crotch area, wiggling furiously. I recall saying to the Cheshire person I walked in with, in mock shock, 'What the hell's going on in here, anyway?' He shot back, 'Nothing much...just a bunch of geeks playing, ah, Dick-athlon.'" -------------------------------- Decathalon is one of the last games that came out during the Intellivision's life. I would think few people played it at that time. I remember a similar game on the C64 that I played and "Track and Field" in the arcade, they were fun.

I don't know what caused the crash, just want to point out that Pac-man and ET for the Atari VCS were both Atari creations, and are commonly referred to as examples of poor quality games.

Your presumption that something is legal because people get away with it is not correct either. Maybe it's come up in court, I don't know. I do know that circumventing lockout/licensing has, and found to be legal (Sega vs Accolade). Cases like this was very expensive for the smaller developers and unlikely to happen. Laws may have changed since the 1990s but jailbreaking your Iphone was legal. Nothing wrong with negotiating an exclusive deal. Regardless of the law, whether software lockout was good or bad is another matter.

Interesting; I just found that Nintendo didn't have the copyright on Donkey Kong code and got sued twice by the contractor that programmed it for them. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134790/the_secret_history_of_donkey_kong.php?print=1 Nintendo obviously have the trademarks on Donkey Kong but I wonder if they have copyright now. Regarding the D2K arcade hack, the creator did contact Nintendo for permission but apparantly nothing came out of it. If you're doing it as a hobby the worst thing might be a cease and desist letter.

Is that based on previous sales or comments/feedback. With cartridges you get collectors, speculators, and players, and some buy multiples. Rom only and you might just get players. Also internet forums are not always representative of the community; lots of people read but never post a comment. Right now on Atariage there are 116 members online and 455 guests (some guests are likely members).

Pitfall cartridge variant. Could be an Intellivision PCB in a C64 shell. http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Rare-Version-of-AcTiVision-for-Intellivision-Pitfall-Game-Cartridge-/371625327164?hash=item5686987a3c:g:k28AAOSwU9xUNFDS

You're probably right about Space Patrol, it's got similar music, scenery, vehicles; compared to the original. Space Armada however, the characters look different and the playfield is black. The gameplay is not suppose to be protected by copyright so Space Invader clones, as long the aliens look different, might be okay. The KC Munchkin decision (1982) was questionable. With the D2K Jumpman Returns arcade kit, my understanding is that its a plugin to the actual DK arcade hardware, and directly uses original code in the original chips. So all the protected stuff isn't on the new chip. Perhaps that infringes something but it's different. With Intellivision D2K, if it had different characters, different music and sound, only the new screens and none of the original screens it might have a better chance with a judge. (edit: there's a lot worse violations out there than Intellivision D2K)

I can't see winning with D2K, that one's not questionable. But to your point, you're absolutely right. And nice work, you've got a nice library of games.

I thought about it, maybe its good that copyright does not protect gameplay and game mechanics. The last thing you want is people suing over a small amount of similarity like they do in the music industry. And lawmakers can easily screw things up; sometimes better to let the judges find the balance. In the Tetris/Xio case however, the judge determined that a 10x20 grid and falling/rotating geometric shapes constitutes a creative visual work that needs protection. There were other things too, but that was part of it.