decle

OK, let's get this road on the show. I present for your consideration Chippi. This submission may incur the wrath of Mike's Gaming Gala, you have been warned! I've been asked a couple of times whether it's possible to write an emulator in IntyBASIC. Chippi is proof that the answer to this question is YES! Chippi implements Joseph Weisbecker's CHIP-8 virtual machine from the 1970s. It's a new version of quite possibly the most ported emulator ever, which brings a load of much needed demakes of old classics to the Intellivision. Not only that, but Mr Turtle hands down beats the majority of the lo-res, monochrome and monotone conversions it makes available on your favourite 16-bit platform: Chippi is an ECS program written in 4K decles and loads CHIP-8 programs from ECS tapes into RAM. Chippi was deliberately made this small so that even if the largest possible CHIP-8 program is loaded (4KB / 3.2K decles), the total will be less than the 8K decles allowed by the IntyBASIC competition rules. Chippi also uses the ECS keyboard to emulate the hexadecimal keypad of the original. Unfortunately, as the CHIP-8 only has a beeper, I've not found a use for the ECS synthesizer, although it was tempting to cobble together the world's worst synthesizer program. As you can see in the GIF above, Chippi supports an enhanced SuperGRAFIX mode in JzIntv, and on a Tutor-Pro with additional GRAM or Tutorvision, it's the only way to play! CHIP-8 emulator features: Full compatibility with CHIP-8 programs including shift and memory "quirks" modes Emulation speed control 7-colour monochrome 64x32 resolution graphics Double resolution SuperGRAFIX mode on Tutorvision and Tutor-Pro with 2K GRAM 3-voice monotone sound (A major triad) Volume control CHIP-8 and ECS keyboard layouts Oh, one more thing! As well as comprehensive instructions, I've included eight game tapes in the zip archive below for you to get up and running right away. This one's for you @MGG, enjoy! chippi.zip

The work we did back in 2022 (wow!, time flies) was based on recordings of two different Jack LaLanne tapes. Unfortunately, we're pretty confident that neither of these tapes contained the music. However, that is only two recordings, and clearly the music might exist on other tapes. The team has a standing offer to examine and archive any K/C tapes people make available to us. There is no need to send us your tapes, and we will share the contents of any tape archived with the owner. We only need recordings in WAV format of both sides of the tape made using a standard stereo, and we're happy to help people make suitable recordings. Unfortunately, no-one has taken us up on the offer as of today. If anyone has a tape that they'd like us to look at, just PM me. So whilst Bob Randles' music isn't on all tapes, we don't know if it's an example of 8K Lock N Chase that probably never made it to the wild at all, or Competition Astrosmash, which can be found on a proportion of the carts sold in Brazil.

Hey all, I believe NES Zapper / Sega Light Phaser work in a pretty simple way. The gun has a photodiode and some electronics in it. When you pull the trigger the game detects this and paints the screen black on the next frame. The photodiode assesses the brightness at this point as a reference for ambient light. Then on the following frame the game draws one or more white squares on the screen where the duck(s) were. If the photodiode now registers more light than the reference it captured a frame ago a hit is registered. There's a bit of faffing about for which of multiple targets are hit, but that's essentially the jist of it, as explained here: The only small complication I immediately see to interfacing such a gun to the Intellivision II, SSVA or ECS is that the Inty controller ports don't supply power, and therefore, cannot run the electronics in the gun. This could be solved by having a battery in an adapter circuit sitting between the gun and the Master Component. There are plenty of adapter circuits online to interface these guns with other consoles that could provide a jumping off point for such a design. It should also be noted that the NES and Sega guns don't play nicely with modern TVs. It's not clear to me if this is just down to lag between the console and screen (which might be fixed in new games with a calibration screen and code to expect the lag), or something more fundamental. Either which way, Inty zapper games would have to be specifically written to take advantage of the gun. No just plugging in a phaser and blasting away at Space Battle.

Like many of my posts, this one starts with "whilst researching something else I stumbled across..." ...an interesting and pretty detailed review of Jerrold Cable Security on page 40 of Communications Engineering Digest (CED) from January 1981. This seems to be a second product developed by Jerrold using the Data Channel technology that underpins PlayCable: The idea is that your cable provider would supply a home security service that would respond to fire, break-ins etc., similar to the service that companies like ADT sell today. Technically Jerrold Cable Security was more complicated than PlayCable, because the link between the subscriber's home and the cable company is bi-directional. It seems the product was trialed in New York in 1981, but didn't go much further. It's briefly mentioned on page 79 in a Canadian industry analysis from 1983, but otherwise not much... ...except that Dennis Clark has an industry brochure designed to sell the Cable Security service to cable operators from 1980: jerroldCableSecurity1980.pdf This shows the subscriber's controller unit in all its peak 80s kitch: Pretty cool! Of course, the obvious question is were there any other actual (or nearly) products based on Data Channel? Well, the answer is yes! Jerrold branded their two-way cable system "Communicom", and they hoped it would underpin a broad range of consumer services. There are suggestions online that the Communicom technology was first developed in the mid-1970s. However, the trademark doesn't seem to have been registered until 1982, and Dennis has another sales flyer describing their aspirations from the same time: jerroldCommunicom1982.pdf So, if Communicom was the underpinning bi-directional technology, was it ever deployed? I haven't found evidence of the more overt consumer facing products like home banking making it to market, however, it does seem to have made its way into Jerrold's cable decoders as a way of controlling channel access. You may recall that Joe Jacobs was recruited by Jerrold to work on this kind of subscriber channel access technology, before he and Dennis wrote Bump N Jump. Dennis suggests that Data Channel tech was used in the StarCom Intranet cable receiver, which I believe may also have been branded as the StarCom 550: jerroldStarcomIntranet1983.pdf Further evidence is provided by this site, which documents the protocol used by Jerrold's UK analog cable TV infrastructure through the General Instrument CFT-2000 and CFT-2100 set top boxes. The protocol used looks to be very similar to that implemented in PlayCable. Jerrold also worked on using the telephone network, rather than their cable infrastructure, to implement the link from the subscriber back to the cable company, as detailed in this 1986 paper by Dennis: jerroldStarphonePaper1986.pdf So it seems that although PlayCable the company died at the start of 1984, its core technology lived on, perhaps as long as the late 1990s. Many thanks to Dennis for sharing his documents and shedding more light on his work at Jerrold.

Unfortunately I don't own a PlayCable (I'm always open to reasonable offers ). I rough it with replicas instead: However, I believe know the location of 4 other units that haven't been mentioned so far. These include the only PlayCable butchered modded by Jerrold development engineers to act as a PlayTape receiver now known to exist: One of Joe Jacobs and Dennis Clark's PlayCable-based Intellivision development systems: And @Ron The Cat's unit which is the only PlayCable still capable of playing games as far as we know: When it comes to how many PlayCables were made, it's commonly stated that 13 cable companies with ~650,000 customers provided the service. However, the quoted PlayCable subscription rate was less than 3% of cable subscribers, but presumably more than 2%, which would suggest that between 13,000 and 15,000 PlayCable adapters were produced. The overall size of the subscriber base number is backed up by the PlayCable marketing document below, which details the various campaigns, number of cable companies and consumers targeted. The largest of these was the Mickey Mantle campaign in November 1982 covering 12 cable companies and 600,000 subscribers: playCableAdvertisingTimeline-198303.pdf However, page 16 of the March 1984 issue of CED detailing the closure of the service at the end of February paints a rather different picture, suggesting that PlayCable only had approximately 5000 subscribers, and a penetration rate of about 1%. If I was to hazard a guess, I suspect that somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 PlayCable adapters were manufactured, making it of similar rarity to the Keyboard Component. As to where who the 13 cable companies were and where they served. Clearly there is some ambiguity about what exactly constitutes a "service", however, this is the information I've managed to dig up: Company Location Source ? Alberta, Fort Saskatchewan Classic Gaming Collectors of Canada posting Vision Cable Florida, Tampa Tampa Bay Times Apr 14 1983 United Cable Idaho, Boise CableVision Apr 21 1980 Cox Cable Illinois, Moline CableVision Apr 21 1980 Teleprompter Minnesota, Rochester CableVision Apr 21 1980 ATC Mississippi, Jackson CableVision Apr 21 1980 Vision Cable New Jersey, Bergen County Play-A-Thon - Searle image collection Suburban Cablevision New Jersey, Bloomfield Video Games Magazine Feb 1983 page 75 Vision Cable New Jersey, Hackensack The Record Apr 12 1982 Colony Communications New York, Beacon / Poughkeepsie CED Mar 1984 Corning New Channels New York, Corning PlayCable advertising material ? New York, Fayetteville CED web article Rogers Cable Ontario CableVision Apr 21 1980 / Panorama TV March 1980 page 95 Brampton Cable Ontario, Brampton Calgari Herald June 17 1982 ? Ontario, Hamilton AtariAge posting Storer Cable Communications South Carolina, Charleston Greenville News Jul 1 1982 Here are the documents referenced above: cablevisionIntellivisionFromPlaycable1980.pdf photosFromSearleCollection.pdf<-- This is well worth a look there are some cracking pictures Finally, PlayCable memorabilia: I believe you are also after the two variants of the PlayCable t-shirt: At least three issues of Scoreboard (the PlayCable newsletter) and various other flyers and industry convention handouts: And the holy grail, the PlayCable team tote:

Happy New Year everyone, I'm afraid I'm a little behind on my usual New Year's Day post. However, I have managed to update the version of K-Vader at the top of thread to fix a couple of small bugs. I'd also like to congratulate @sramirez2008 on his K-Vader high score. 180 is well beyond anything that I've achieved in the 30 second game (although I find the reflection in the screen to be a little disturbing!): By my reckoning, they hit 14 aliens and only missed 5 shots! I'm now considering what the perfect game would look like. I guess it would score about 245 in the short game, and 465 for the long one. Anyway, I think @sramirez2008 is victorious in the 2023 K-Vader high score challenge, and if they PM me, I'll arrange to send one of these as their prize (box courtesy of @Steve Jones): Wishing everyone a great 2024, cheers decle

Hey all, I'm putting together a bespoke Inty ROM multi-cart for a computer museum I help out at, and I'd appreciate your thoughts on the best games to include. The rules are: Games must be from the original 125 or be public domain homebrews. No additional peripherals, extra RAM, weird-ass memory maps or other on-cart extensions (I'm looking at you B17, Jetsons, Chess, Dig Dug and JLP). Titles must be pick up and play games, meaning... Single player only or single player optional. Absolutely no instructions or overlays are needed, even for Zoomer Inty noobs. If possible, I'd like to cover a good range of genres, eras and manufacturers. If you only had 16 slots to fill, which games would be a must?

Unfortunately the geo-restriction is down to SBT not me, I guess the show might be syndicated in the US, and they don't want YouTube cannibalizing views? Anyway, for those that want to see it, a clip can be downloaded by requesting file tvpowww.mp4 from my homepage (http://decle.org.uk/). But you didn't get it from me! A couple of things I've spotted. Firstly, I'm pretty sure now that they're using my recreation. A bug in my code is visible in the video, bonus marks for anyone who can spot it! Secondly, the bargraph overlay at the upper left of the game screen looks to be the volume of the volume of the game's sound, rather than the player's mic as you might hope. Finally, I'm pretty sure they aren't using sound activation this time. It's a shame, but you can't have everything I guess.

It was a surprise and went down really well . Originally, he had idly suggested the possibility of a PlayCable on a cart about 3-4 years ago when I was first doing PlayCable stuff. In the intervening period I think he may have forgotten about it, so it was cool when I finally got round to implementing it. Oh cool! Half-a-sec, I've got my collection list here somewhere... I'll ping it over to you, perhaps dungeon spillover could fill in one or two gaps at Christmas? Hang on, this doesn't mean I have to start eating large amounts of maple syrup or anything, does it?

I've been fortunate in that several versions of "Killer Bees" and its derivatives have come my way and this post is a look at that small collection. The original Killer Bees was written by David Rolfe as a demonstration for Mattel to show how little code was required by the EXEC to get some semblance of a game up and running. Subsequently, Killer Bees was used by both APh and Mattel as a tool to introduce new recruits to developing for the Intellivision. Inductees were provided with the Killer Bees source code and asked to enhance it as a means of understanding how to develop games using the framework provided by the EXEC. As a consequence, there were many derivatives of Killer Bees, most of which have been lost. However, it turns out there are still quite a few knocking about. This thread is going to describe each of the variants. Where possible, as well as a short video and description of the variant, I will include a binary that can be played on an emulator and the original source code. It should be noted that it's not possible to use the development tools in JzIntv to rebuild the binaries from the source as the assembly language used by APh is different to (some of the original developers would say better than) that used by modern tools. With that said, let's dive in. KILLER BEES - David Rolfe - 01BeesRolfe.zip This is believed to be the original version of Killer Bees, written by Talkin Horse Inc (aka David Rolfe) in 1978. The "game" comprises a Running Man from Baseball who is stung if he carelessly walks into a static swarm of bees (referred to as a Mine in the source code). When stung, the man changes from blue to tan. After 6 seconds the man becomes unstung and reverts to blue. From the source it seems David intended this to happen after 2 seconds, however, because the EXEC ticks every 20th of a second rather than every 60th, this actually takes three times longer than expected. The only sound in Killer Bees are the key clicks sounds generated by the EXEC as it processes controller inputs. David published the source code to this version on his personal website in 1999. KILLER BEES - Mattel - 02BeesMattel.zip This version of Killer Bees has been retrieved from the Technology Associates PDP-11 disk archive. The other contents of the disk suggest that this version was received from Mattel rather than APh. It's clearly quite an early variant with a file date of April 1979. This version converts the Mine into an animated bees swarm of bees that chase the player. "Ouch!" is written to the screen when the player is stung, and the player's avatar moves faster than David Rolfe's original. KILLER TOMATOES! - 03Tomatoes.zip Based on comments in the code, it appears that David Rolfe's original Killer Bees was tidied up by John Sohl on his return to Mattel having been seconded to work on Astrosmash at APh's offices in the fall of 1980. John reworked Trivia / Killer Bees renaming it "Killer (Trivia II)" in the process. Perhaps this is when it acquired the name Killer Tomatoes!? Killer Tomatoes! is attributed to TRIVIA PRODUCTIONS and appears to be similar to David's original. The Mine has been changed to flash red and yellow, but otherwise the gameplay is the same. However, the comments in the source code have been extended quite a bit with references to Your Friend the EXEC. MAN DIVES! - 04ManDives.zip Attributed to "ONE MUSKETEER", Man Dives! was posted to Atari Age by Steve Roney and seems to be closely related to Killer Tomatoes! The source code is very similar and, other than the black background, the only significant change in game play is to replace the Baseball Running Man with a Football derived Running Man. Whilst the title suggests he is supposed to be diving as he moves, it looks more like he is repeatedly falling and picking himself up to me. SOUNDT / SOUND TESTER #2 - 05SoundTester2.zip Sound Tester or SOUNDT was originally written by Bill Goodrich in 1982. It is a Killer Tomatoes! derivative designed to test sound effects and a pre-cursor to Mr Sound! written by Daniel Bass. This version dates from the end of February and was recovered from the Technology Associates PDP-11 archive. It would seem that SOUNDT allows the definition and testing of two sound effects, which are stored in RAM. The sounds are activated using the bottom action buttons, and it is believed that the sounds can be defined using the controller keypads. Unfortunately this version of the code is incomplete and the missing functions mean that sounds cannot be altered. The binary included here has been built with calls to these functions commented out. No sounds are built into SOUNDT, so a macro in the configuration file will load two simple sound effects into RAM, allowing the program's playback behaviour to be demonstrated. Looking at the actual Killer Bees game within SOUNDT, the mine/bees are not enabled, and so your Baseball Running Man has the freedom of the screen. WAY TO GO, JOE - 06WayToGoJoe.zip Way To Go, Joe (WTGJ) is a derivative of the "Mattel" version of Killer Bees, complete with animated swarm that chases your Running Man. WTGJ was written by Joe Jacobs in August 1981 and this version was found within the Technology Associates PDP-11 archive under the name JOE.ASM. The major enhancement made by WTGJ is the addition of sound effects taken from Math Fun and SNAFU. These play periodically as the bees move, and also pretty insistently whenever the Running Man is stung. In addition, Joe has increased the running speed of your protagonist and cut some of his run animation, giving him a rather stuttery gait. When you run off the screen edge, your avatar now reappears at the centre. Finally, the bees have been changed to be red, rather than the yellow of Killer Bees. DEBUG KILLER TOMATOES! - 07DebugTomatoes.zip Debug Killer Tomatoes! has version 2.0 of Rick Koenig's Intellivision debugger embedded within it. The source code is contained in three files dated between May and June 1983. These files were supplied by Mattel to Technology Associates in June 1983 along with a Magus test harness to help Joe and Dennis to debug Bump N Jump. In addition to the code itself, we also have instructions for the use of the debugger in the file BUG.TXT. This version of the debugger is a precursor to the one found in World Championship Baseball as it does not provide the disassembly of the current instruction and has slightly different controls. In terms of Killer Tomatoes!, in order to play the game it is necessary to "Fast Run" the debugger using the 0 key on the right hand keypad. At this point it becomes clear that in addition to the Mine, which rapidly flashes red and white, there are two black, inverted A characters printed on the screen. The Running Man, who positively sprints round the screen, can also be stung by these. To return to the debugger press the lower right hand action button on the left controller. CRAZY CLONES '81 - 08CrazyClones81.zip This is the original and unfinished version of Crazy Clones released on Intellivision Lives! For obvious reasons this version of the binary is not included. No source code has currently been found for this version, however, using the source for Crazy Clones '83 it has been possible to rebuild a plausible set of files. These illustrate how the '83 version builds on this variant. Interestingly, the final four functions in the code (listed in UNKNOWN.ASM) aren't found in the '83 version of Crazy Clones. They have been reverse engineered from the binary. None of these functions actually seem to be used by the game. This can be demonstrated by crazyClonesMinimal.bin which is built without them. Most of the redundant code seems to have been taken from Melody Blaster, one of the Tron titles and Astrosmash. Presumably this redundant code was removed during the construction Crazy Clones '83 (below), hence why it is missing. In this version of Killer Bees the your Running Man must catch clones. Doing so kills them and scores 10 points. The "Mine" chases you around the screen in a similar manner to the bee swarm and will kill you, ending the game if it touches you. CRAZY CLONES '83 - 09CrazyClones83.zip This is a second and much more complete version of Crazy Clones, which according to the title screen dates from 1983. The source code for it was provided by Steve Roney. It is believed that this version was the work of Keith Robinson, or someone who was working with him. This is evidenced by the Tron Solar Sailer font used on the title screen and a comments in the source code. The source code supplied was incomplete, but the missing functions have been reverse engineered allowing the full game to be rebuilt. Whilst the game is a variant of Killer Bees, a sophisticated title screen and group play mechanic have been added using code from Solar Sailer and Party Line. It is speculated that this variant was being worked on as a potential Party Line title. It is not known why Keith released the simplified 1981 version of Crazy Clones on Intellivision Lives!, rather than this more interesting version. If you've gotten here, thanks. If you want more, I've added a summary of the various versions of Killer Bees to the latest version of the Intellivision Development Description along with some other new information on Roklan development.

Hey all, I thought I'd share my latest project results. This year, for my brother's birthday present I put together a PlayCart for him: It's a PlayCable, on a cart! Under the covers PlayCart is a 15 title multi-ROMcart with the PlayCable menu replica I created previously to select games. The titles included are all Mattel games we played as children, including old favourites like Space Battle, BurgerTime, AD&D and Utopia. While designing the PlayCart box art I wondered if the PlayCable styling might work for some of the PlayCable variants that Joe Jacobs, Dennis Clark and the other Jerrold developers created. Let's see... First we have PlayComp, the personal version of PlayCable that Joe and Dennis built. PlayComp was a piece of PDP-11 software, and it was never actually a Technology Associates product. But if it was, it seems appropriate that it would have been distributed on an 8" floppy disk: Of course to use PlayComp you would need a copy of Dennis and Joe's CYBER development system. Originally this was a heavily modified PlayCable Adapter. These are way too rare and expensive to start hacking about, so instead I've tidied up the replica board I built previously and created a box for it: The CYBER cart mimics a modified PlayCable adapter with Dennis and Joe's debugger in firmware, 8K of RAM and a serial interface to talk to a modern PC over USB. Finally, there's PlayTape, the PlayCable variant based on audio tapes that the Jerrold engineers used to share Intellivision games. Again this required a hacked PlayCable adapter, with the library of games recorded on audio cassette: Overall I think it makes a nice little fantasy product collection. If you're interested in PlayCable, you might like to know that I've also posted an update to the technical description that adds information about the equipment used by the cable companies to broadcast the service. You can get the down-low here:

Recently I've been talking to @Dutchman2000 about Roklan, and he kindly pointed me to a video of his talk from VCF Mid-West last year that summarises his research. It's well worth a watch: In the video @Dutchman2000 identifies two of Roklan's Intellivision developers for the first time. It seems Paul Crowley wrote Frogger. In some places Frogger is attributed to Peter Kaminski and Tom Soulanille. However, I suspect this probably just confusion with Frog Bog. It is well documented that Peter worked for APh, where he wrote Frog Bog with Tom, and several other unreleased titles. Peter then moved to Activision where he worked on River Raid, rather than Roklan, Coleco or Parker Bros. Next is Frank Johnson, who wrote Donkey Kong, Carnival, Mouse Trap, Zaxxon, Star Wars, Tutankham, Donkey Kong Jnr, Q*bert, Popeye and Super Cobra. I suspect this makes Frank one of the most prolific Inty developers, and means we are only missing the author(s) of Ladybug, Turbo and Venture. This information means some of the similarities and differences we can see in the comparison of the Roklan ROMs now make more sense. Specifically, that the Parker Bros games are similar to the early Coleco titles. It also looks as though Paul Crowley and Frank might have shared some code when writing their games. Finally, it seems that Ladybug, Turbo and Venture could be outliers because they were written by other developers. According to @Dutchman2000, Frank has unfortunately passed away, so we won't get the opportunity to find out what it was like to create so many games in such a short period of time, or how he feels about the infamy that his port of Donkey Kong now has. While we're talking about it, let's just put a bit of context around Frank's work. Firstly, Jennell Jaquays, who was the Director of Game Design at Coleco, is clear that they did not deliberately make poor Atari and Intellivision ports of Coleco titles in her talk at VCF (23:47-26:00): She also explains that Coleco's work on programmable video games didn't start until February 1982 (16:57-17:27). This is corroborated by Ron Borta of Roklan, who seems to have made the initial verbal deal to produce the Intellivision ports at the Juanuary 1982 CES in Las Vegas (24:00-25:30): Let's consider what this might have meant for Frank. His ten Intellivision games were released over 12 months between October 1982 and October 1983. At the very most he would have had 22 months to write 10 games, that's churning out a game every 9 weeks. However, this ignores the time needed between agreeing the deal and game development starting in earnest. In this time Roklan needed to reverse engineer the Intellivision and put together a development kit. It also omits the time required to test, package and distribute the games once they were written. Unless Frank had access to a significant shortcut, I suspect that this meant his games were written in approximately 18 months, reducing the time spent on each game to about 7.5 weeks. Surely the fact that Donkey Kong was the first third party game for the Intellivision, and the subsequent rate of production, had to be a significant factor in its relatively poor quality. As you will see from his video @Dutchman2000 has also found out some interesting information about the development kit used by Roklan. Roklan was unusual in that its developers worked from home, and we've been lucky enough to talk to Fred Allen, the roving tech who was the link between the developers and the office, and who maintained the development gear deployed in the programmers' homes. I've added information about Roklan development and some other bits and pieces to the latest update of the Intelivision development document which can be found here: Thanks once again to @Dutchman2000 for sharing this information, and regardless of your view of Donkey Kong, I hope you will raise a glass of your favourite tipple in memory of Frank Johnson, an influential and unsung hero of the Intellivision community.

South America is where everything Intellivision goes to die... ...and rise again! A couple of weeks ago it seems TV POWWW! made an appearance on Brazilian late night TV show "The Noite com Danilo Gentili". If Google translate is keeping me on the straight and narrow I believe it was part of a special on video games shown on SBT, the channel that used to broadcast TV POWWW! in the 80s: I'm not certain, but I suspect the version of TV POWWW! being played is my recreation for the 2020 IntyBASIC competition: If correct, it's pretty surreal.

Whilst researching some other bits and pieces I came across a couple of General Instrument ads for the Gimini product line. The first, from a copy of Electronics dated November 1975, suggests that before it became a range of video game chipsets the Gimini name was used to brand a CP1600 computer: The second ad from a March 1977 copy of Electronics aims to build on the success of the AY-3-8500 Pong-on-a-chip that was launched in 1976: The "screenshots" in this advert are interesting, most are mockups of the AY-3-85xx and AY-3-86xx range of dedicated chips taken from pages 4B-4 through 4B-36 of the 1977 GI catalog, for example the top left image is Tennis from the AY-3-8500 and below it is the same game from the AY-3-8550: Here are the same images from the catalog: There is also a line of mock-ups of 2 and 1 player versions of Blackjack, Draw Poker, Acey Duecey and War from what would become the Unisonic Champion. These were taken from pages 4B-40 through 4B-43 of the 1977 catalog: Although technically plausible, there are small differences between these mockups and the games released on the Champion. At the bottom of the page there are a set of games also attributed to the Gimini Programmable Game Set in the 1977 catalog on pages 4B-44 through 4B-54: These games are Combat Squares, Racing Squares, Shooting Squares (I don't know if anyone else is getting Degenatron vibe), Juggle I, Juggle II, Volleyball, Protection, Hazard, Road Race, Baracade and Submarine. None of these games could be generated by the Unisonic Champion's GIC graphics chip, for a start 6 colours are shown. However, it should be remembered that at this point the Gimini line had not been split into the Mid-Range and Deluxe chipsets (at least not outside GI), so both the Unisonic card games and these more action oriented titles were supposed to be generated by a single chipset based on a rudementary version of the STIC that supported MOBs, but had no GRAM. That leaves us with these four games from the centre of the page: These are not found in the 1977 catalog, or any other we currently have access to (if anyone has the 1976 or 1979 catalogs, get it touch). However, it seems as though these are the only mock-ups we now have of two unreleased chips, the AY-3-8888 and AY-3-8889. These are mentioned on page 39 of the winter 1977 Electronics Tomorrow: ...and pages 217 and 219 of the 1977 Gametronics Proceedings: In both documents the AY-3-8888 and 8889 are identified as next generation dedicated chips similar to the AY-3-8500 series Pong-on-a-Chip, perhaps explaining their position within the advert. The AY-3-8888 was intended to play the Las Vegas style games of Black Jack and Slot Machine, with the A-3-8889 playing Tic-Tac-Toe and LEM, a lunar lander game. These sources of information on unreleased chips do need to be treated with a little care, as Gametronics also identifies the AY-3-8800 / GIC at the heart of the Unisonic Champion and the four games from the mock-ups above as being a dedicated chip, which according to the 1977 catalog it wasn't: Then again, given the numbering, maybe the AY-3-8800, AY-3-8888 and AY-3-8889 were originally going to be dedicated chips, and the AY-3-8800 was later migrated to a microprocessor design. As an aside, the Gamestronics document is an interesting read, it seems David "Papa Intellivision" Chandler was at the conference promoting his game, "Tank Squadron" (p20), and the Mostek / Fairchild F8 processor it was based on (p57-60). Any which way, it definitely seems that 1977 was a fast moving time of opportunity and change.

Hey all, Following on from Hangman, Battleship is my second recreation of an unreleased Unisonic Champion game: In this case, all we have to go on is a description from the 1978 GI TV Game Circuits catalog: Although this doesn't sound terribly inspiring, the rules that define where ships may be placed makes the game slightly more strategic than some variants. Certainly, it's possible to do better than randomly selecting locations to shoot at. Play testing suggests that the game is quite well balanced, with it being possible to win a little over 50% of the time when played carefully. You'll find the game for both the Unisonic Champion and Intellivision, complete with box art, instructions and overlays in this zip archive: battleship.zip While we're talking about the Unisonic Champion... Be careful what you wish for @nanochess...

Here's the latest update of the Intellivision development tools description: intellivisionDevelopmentBackInTheDay-20230801.pdf The main additions are: A new section 5.5 on the development tools and processes used by Roklan / Coleco / Parker Bros (p43) Additional information on SOUNDT, Bill Goodrich's sound development tool (page 21) A summary of the differences between v2.0 of Rick Koenig's debugger (page 23) and the version embedded in World Championship Baseball A brief piece in Section 4.8.2 on the various versions of Killer Bees and their uses (page 39) Get it while it's hot!

The latest update of the PlayCable research document can be downloaded here: playCableTechnicalSummary-20230907.pdf The main addition is a significant expansion of the description of the PlayCable headend system, based on a Jerrold datasheet: This provides us with quite a bit of detail regarding the hardware used, confirming what your $11900 of cold hard cable company cash bought you, and that the PlayCable games were distributed on tape. Enjoy!

Hi @thewaxcylinder, thanks for sharing this. It seems as though the Maxflash Studio used to dump the game has generated an image of the Intellivision's full 64K memory map for some reason, rather than just the contents of the game ROM. The addresses between $0000-$4FFF and $6000-$FFFF in the binary file are all padding. Unfortunately, once this padding is removed and the 4K game that is left is compared with the production version, they look to be identical. Sorry to disappoint you. Cheers decle Oh, I should add that the reason the Maxflash image crashes in emulators like JzIntv, which obviously the production version doesn't do, is entirely because of this padding! It is declared as ROM with a fixed value of $FFFF (well that or $7FFF where the Maxflash has had a bit of a hiccup) and interferes with the other devices in the memory map. Remove it and everything works perfectly. I'd also advise against trying to run the Maxflash image on a Flash cart. If the Flash cart is not constructed defensively, this image could cause it to try to compete with other IC's in the Intellivision to return data from shared addresses (e.g. the GRAM, GROM, STIC, etc). This is a bad idea, and might (if you're really unlucky) cause damage to either the Inty or Flash cart.

Hey all, This is the first in what I hope will become an occasional series. I have a bit of a soft spot for the Intellivision's little brother, the Unisonic Champion 2711. In 2018 I created Li'l Bro II which lets you to play all four Unisonic cartridges on the Intellivision, and I also ported Activision Dragster to the Champion. However, there are also several games that General Instrument detailed in its datasheets that never made it to market (quelle surprise!), and I thought it might be fun to take a crack at implementing some of these. I've started with Hangman for two reasons. Firstly there's a good description of the game, including a screenshot, in the GI datasheet: Secondly, the game is pretty simple, but it gives me the opportunity to put together some infrastructure that could be useful in creating other titles. So, here we are, Hangman for the Unisonic Champion and Intellivision: ROMs to play on both the Intellivision and MAME as well as instructions, box art and an overlay design can be found in the following zip file: hangman.zip If you have a preference for which game I tackle next, I'm open to requests (but please, not Football, I don't know how they thought they would create a workable game). As always, any problems or feedback, just shout. Enjoy! decle

That's a really interesting observation, great spot Unfortunately, I don't think the copy of DK is likely to be a prototype. At 7:45 it becomes clear that this is raw footage of a regular Sears store for an ABC news segment that is probably being filmed somewhere in early or mid December (notice the reference to "these final two weeks before Christmas"). We know that DK was released in either September or early October '82 (see my recent post on release dates), so we should expect to see the production version of the game in store at Christmas. I also don't believe we know of any production changes or fixes for DK at this time. Although there was a rumoured version that fixed the Inty II lockout, I don't believe this has been proven to exist. Even the cartridges with a white shell contain the incompatible ROM, at least mine does! I think that leaves at least three possible causes for DK being AWOL: Filming aberration - the YouTube video is a low quality rendition of an old broadcast tape. The footage is filmed from a CRT and the lighting isn't great. I believe that DK is the only object on screen that is the Inty "olive brown" colour (BONUS, which is only just visible, is dark green). So perhaps it's just not being rendered and/or picked up well by the camera? As has been suggested, CRT output was decidedly variable. I've had a fiddle at this section of the video with FFMPEG and GIMP to see if I can apply any Bladerunner like zoom and enhance, but I've not managed to achieve anything conclusive. The nearest I have to something is an image take from the frame with 15:41:59;08 in the top right corner, see below. By removing the red and blue channels and then applying a narrow filter to the green channel you get the image on the right. There might be something to the left of the barrels, if you tilt your head to one side and squint. Personally I'm unconvinced, I would have expected to find something better in the video, so this is perhaps hopeful that DK really has vanished. Console glitch / fault - I've checked a copy of DK on a SSVA and it plays fine, so it's not a M/C model bug. I guess it could be a console issue. I think DK is an animated background tile that uses BackTab sequencing, rather than a sprite. Jump Man uses two sprites, there seem to be up to five barrels and the final sprite is reserved for the hammer. So if BackTab is at fault the 6 locations where DK is located would all have to be faulty, but the rest of the screen looks fine, so most of the rest of BackTab is working OK? Looking in GRAM the three parts of DK's animation are stored in two different areas. His animation and GRAM are below, notice how DK's idle stance is stored in images 2-5, his picking stance is in images 27-30 and his rolling stance is in images 31-36. These locations don't change as the game plays. So for this to be a GRAM graphical glitch all 112 of these GRAM locations (14 * 8) and only these would have to be borked. Similarly, the DK graphics are not stored consecutively on the ROM, but have the ladders and girders between them like GRAM. Therefore, it seems improbable that a missing DK would be caused by a console fault. DK glitch / bug - What is definitely true is that DK is littered with bugs. In addition to the ability to jump and stand in the air next to the girders (see below), some presses of the disc will be interpreted as keypad entries on the game selection screen for example up and right is seen as "2"). Also if you hit an upper action button before the intro tune plays at the start of the first level Jump Man will never appear and the game will freeze. Press a lower action button at the same point and the game will crash with the first note of the tune playing. If you spam 1 to start the game and then tap right once Jump Man appears, the walking sound will not stop when you release the disc. I'm sure there are others. Could one of these cause DK to disappear? Well, the code that draws DK (starting at $53df for those playing along at home) is also used to draw the levels, so it can't be something intrinsically bad with that. This function is called by three separate pieces of code in different areas of the ROM, one for each of DK's three stances ($5475, $58a3, $5885), so it seems unlikely that all, but only these three pieces of code are bad. So we'd be looking for a glitch that would either allow the girders to be drawn on both screens but not draw DK (in both cases the code just follows on immediately after, $53fe flows into $5475 and $5489 is followed by a call at $54ec), or that doesn't draw DK as barrels are initialised (although this code does jump around a bit, the barrel in DK's hands is initialised at $5877, immediately after DK's idle stance is drawn at $586e). Could it be a bug or glitch? Possibly, but I've not found it yet. So nothing concrete I'm afraid, just lots of "doesn't seem likelies" at the moment. If I was to hazard a guess, I would go with a filming aberration, but that's only really based on Occam's Razor.

I've been interested in the release dates of the original 125 for a while, mainly through trying to understand which games were broadcast on PlayCable and when: Currently, the primary source of release date information is blueskyrangers.com. The dates published there vary significantly in precision, with Mattel games prior to the end of 1982 typically having day specific release dates, whilst third party titles and games released in 1983 or later only stating a release year. However, there is other information that has been consolidated on Wikipedia for some titles, including some of the excellent work by the Atari Archive. This information seems to be largely be derived from adverts and issues of Video Game Update (VGU). Personally, I'm not inclined to trust the timing of adverts too much, however, VGU looks to be a great source, with reviews, release schedules and game sales charts. To the best of my ability I've consolidated the information VGU contains with existing data on blueskyrangers.com and Wikipedia to come up with a spready of "best guess" release dates accurate to the month: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1A5JxISTJAFX0koFpd_f8oVXpboyuGaGM0v8R5rcoKnE/edit?usp=sharing In general, my best guess is within a month of the dates on Atari Archive. However, sorting this stuff out is open to some interpretation and a bit fiddly, so there may be errors on both sides, which I will seek to review and correct over time. So what can we learn from this? Well, the first thing to note is that according to the September 1982 issue of VGU any release dates originating from Mattel should be taken with a pinch of salt: The need for caution is apparent when comparing the Mattel and VGU dates for games released in the latter half of 1982. Where the BSRs report precise dates, VGU typically only acknowledges games as being with distributors a couple of months later (where no precise dates are given on blueskyrangers.com I push the release date to the end of the period, so a "1982" release date is assumed to be before December 31st 1982). Looking at the release schedule in aggregate we can see some interesting trends: Then as now, game releases tend to be clustered in the run up to Christmas to hit the holiday season. Mattel may have missed an opportunity to build their market in the Christmas 1981 season. Having released 19 games in the fall of 1980 in support of the nationwide launch of the console, they only released six games in October and November for Christmas '81 (Astrosmash!, SNAFU, Space Armada, Triple Action, Bowling and Boxing), bringing the full catalogue to 25 games. It's really noticeable how game production ramps up in the second half of 1982 as Mattel opens the taps and third parties enter the fray. Only 31 games arrived in the 27 months prior to September 82, roughly one a month. A further 70 hit the market over the next 15 months, more than four a month on average. 20 of these second wave titles were released in the final 3 months of 1983. This is more games than were released in the whole of 1981 and nearly seven titles a month! Looking in more detail at specific releases: The first third party game was probably Donkey Kong released in September or October 1982. This seems to have been followed by Atlantis and Demon Attack in October. I won't bother listing all the third party release dates, they're in the spready if you're interested. We can put some more accurate dates on Mattel's 1983 releases. We appear to have: January - Shark! Shark! and Sharp Shot (perhaps they just missed a Christmas launch?) February - Tron Solar Sailer April - Chess May - Vectron June - Burgertime July - Buzz Bombers and Mission-X September - Pinball October - Motocross and Treasure of Tarmin November - Bump 'N' Jump, Kool-Aid Man and Masters Of The Universe December - Loco-Motion I've deliberately missed the ECS titles off this list. Although it seems the peripheral hit the stores in late November or December 1983, it's unclear which games were released when. At the moment I've just assumed they were all released in December, although Atari Archive has Mind Strike and WSMLB as being released in June 1984. So what does this mean for my interest in PlayCable? If we assume PlayCable launched at the beginning of 1981 it would have had an initial selection of 19 titles to select the 15 game schedule from. The PlayCable advertising on the internet seems to come from the end of 1981 as it shows all 25 titles available at the end of the year. In some instances new games made it to PlayCable pretty quickly, for example in the schedule above Lock N Chase should be broadcast in November 1982, two months after its release in September. September / October 1982 seems to have been an important time for PlayCable... The release of the Intellivoice meant it was not compatible with the full catalogue of Mattel games for the first time. Donkey Kong hit the market highlighting that the service was a walled garden, closed to third party titles. Licensing constraints surfaced for the first time as Tron Deadly Discs could not be broadcast. The monthly roster of games that were broadcast was increased from 15 to 20 for the first time in October. It might be tempting to see the increase in the number of games broadcast as being a response to one or more of these events, however, talking to Jim Wiesenberg this was not the case. As the Intellivision catalogue grew the roster was increased to provide customers with more value in an attempt to increase sales. However, as Jim notes "We had not reached 3% subscriber level on any system so revenue/profit contribution was negligible so going to 20 games did not make difference needed." After the Intellivoice games, the next game to be incompatible was Chess owing to its additional RAM. This didn't hit the shelves until April 1983. The first game to be released that specifically breached the 8K game size limit was Vectron released in May 1983. The next was Pinball, which wasn't with retailers until September, this was followed by Bump N Jump and Masters of the Universe in November. However, Paul Hilt says that the writing was on the wall for PlayCable by the fall of 1983, and he was tasked with negotiating the termination contracts with cable companies. His primary objective when doing this was to maintain a good relationship with the cable companies as they would continue to be significant customers for Jerrold's broadcast equipment business. As a final aside, Video Game Update is well worth a read with lots of excellent bits and pieces scattered through its pages. Sure, some of its review scores are rather intriguing, for example is Donkey Kong really a better game than Tron Deadly Discs, as reported in November 1982? That said, it's scathing review of Turbo in February 1984 is totally justified in my view, and the commentary on the industry is great. At an industry level the way that Video Game Update added the secondary "Computer Entertainer" in June 1983, then switched the newsletter name in March 1984, dropped all video game console content in January 1985 only for it to come back in February 1986 is cool to see. You can also follow the demise of Mattel Electronics in July, September and December 1983, and February and March 1984. Intellivision's resurrection can be found in October 1985, and there's an interview with Terry Valeski about INTV's plans in February 1986. Overall, Intellivision is well represented in its pages with 85 of the 100 titles released after mid-1982 being reviewed. In April 1988 VGU asked readers to write in with requests for help collecting rare titles. Sure enough, in May three people had written in with requests to buy and trade games for various second generation systems. Could this mark the formal recognition of retro game collecting as a hobby?

Scudding around eBay, it seems we have the first proven Intelligame ROM variant... https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/185916993091?hash=item2b49842e43 Looks like someone has stuck a bit of the manual to the label for some reason... ...and those red disc stickers are definitely there to hide the fact that someone has dug through the label to get to the screws and open up the shell... ...internally, although it has the same 3x 16pin ICs and 3x 14pin ICs as my copy of Utopia, the EPROMs are larger 28pin ICs (probably 8x8K 2764s rather than 8x4K 2732s) and the board layout is different. And now the money shot... ...got to love the 1985 date on the EPROMs and title screen. That's a rarity in the world of Intellivision, I could be wrong, but the only other ones I'm aware of are Championship Tennis and World Cup Soccer. I wonder if what seems to be an electric screwdriver is included in the 299Euro asking price?! For completeness the game looks to be standard from the one available screen shot... I've updated the entry in the Brazilian Pirate game database: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Gg49VKGUp8k7y5MeHOFcnsFeO77G8FPPwPOUYrA8yhE/edit?usp=sharing

Sorry to disappoint everyone, but my reference to Killer Tomatoes rather than Bees was just a typo. Hanlon's razor and all that! @DZ-Jay is correct, I have been collecting variations of Killer Bees, my last posting on the subject, which has a video where I build and run @David Rolfe's original program and mentions the relationship between Killer Bees, Killer Tomatoes and Crazy Clones, was here: I think that since then I've turned up another version created by Joe Jacobs, and a quick look at the version posted by @BSRSteve above suggests it might be different again. Perhaps a small comparison project and posting is in order, if that would be of interest?

That's a really good point! Well we can't have that! I think this is the 6-frame animation of the Children's Discovery System (CDS). It's a bit tricky to be certain because the screen has so much ghosting: The CDS running man is unique. It's the only one that uses square pixels! As a consequence, it doesn't have half pixels, and therefore is 8x8 rather than 8x16 pixels in size. Nonetheless I think it does a good job of evoking the original. On a different point, it seems that the intellivision Productions / Intellivision Entertainment logo (right), is not quite the same as frame 4 of the Football Running Man (left): In addition to the square pixels, notice how his arm and waist are one pixel shorter and the ankle is thicker, as highlighted in the middle image. I could be wrong, but don't think it's actually extracted one-for-one from any of the animations. Finally, I've put together a small ROM that allows you to try out all the Running Man animations in one place. Tap the disc left and right to select a different animation. Use keypad 1-8 to freeze on a particular frame of animation, or 0 to start the animation again. All animations are set to cycle in about 40 frames, so the smoother animation of 8-frame cycles is really apparent. The ROM should work in JzIntv or on a Flash cart and it can be downloaded from here: runningMan.rom And here is a video of the ROM running (please excuse the CDS animation not having square pixels, but the Intellivision can't show them )

Something that bothers me a little bit is the way the Intellivision Running Man (tm) is often drawn using square pixels. I'm looking at you Intellivision Productions and Intellivision Entertainment... It makes him feel squashed to me, with thin limbs. To be honest, looking at the Intellivision Productions logo, I think Keith viewed pixels as more of a loose guideline, rather than a hard constraint. In reality, the Intellivision's pixels are slightly taller than they are wide, with 5x4 being an often quoted ratio. This seems to be based on the pixel aspect needed to get a 160x96 resolution (5:3 aspect ratio) to fit onto a 4:3 TV screen. Whilst this doesn't explicitly take into account screen borders or the vagaries of CRT overscan (mal)adjustment, it seems a reasonable scaling. If so, the Running Man should be drawn like the version on the right below, rather than the square pixels on the left... I've also been rather intrigued as to why the canonical Running Man seems to be taken from Football, rather than the first game written Baseball. I don't know the answer to this, but it seems to go back to the Mattel Electronics days... It looks as though the Intellivision Productions and Intellivision Entertainment logos are taken from the fourth frame of this image, although I notice that Mattel realised the Intellivision has rectangular pixels Anyway, that got me to wondering what the other Running Man animation cycles really look like. So here they are, all 14 of them! Let's start with this familiar eight frame sequence from Football. Our hero, complete with helmet and belt. This animation was also reused by INTV in Super Pro Football... This run cycle seems to be one of only two, the other being WSMLB, where the avatar faces to the left in the ROM. It also doesn't start on the same frame as the Mattel logo, so let's standardise by having all cycles facing right, and starting on the thinnest animation frame to make comparisons easier like this... Next up we have Baseball. The helmet is replaced with a cap, and our guy is less bulky. This animation was reused by David Rolfe in his tutorial game Killer Tomatoes, however, as we will see, it does not appear in either WCB or WSMLB... Soccer drops the cap from Baseball, but otherwise is quite similar, with the exception of the bulky first frame... Then we have Basketball. Here the belt is always present, and figure is slightly squashed with a torso that is a pixel shorter than normal... ...this is because this animation is intended to be shown stretched vertically like this... Making the players' slightly out of proportion with longer legs relative to their body, and then stretching the MOB, really makes the Running Man seem tall in this variation. The stretched basketball animation was reused by INTV in both Slam Dunk and Spiker. Next we have Tennis. This is the first game that uses a smaller run cycle with only six frames. Like Basketball, the squat figures are expected to be stretched, and although similar, none of the frames are actually shared by the two games (even frame 2 has the figure one pixel to the right in Tennis)... To round out the Mattel sports titles we have World Series Major League Baseball. This is rather tricky as there are a ton of animations in the game. Not surprising, given the sophistication of the game. I think the nearest to a classic Running Man is this 4-frame cycle used for fielders. Four frames might seem a little frugal, but I guess resources were limited, even in a 24K game... OK, on to Action Network games and we have the minimal four frame cycle of AD&D that reuses frames 1, 3, 5 and 7 from Baseball. This makes Baseball guy and his low frame rate AD&D derivative the most common Running Man, having been used in nearly 1.8 million cartridges according to the sales figures in Intellivision Lives... I think that comparing this AD&D animation to the one in WSMLB really shows how the WSMLB is also based on the original Baseball, even though superficially it looks quite different. Night Stalker reuses all but frame 1 of Soccer, replacing the the bulky figure with something more svelte. Is this the purest form of the Running Man?... The figures in Tron Deadly Discs are obviously based on Football, sharing the helmet and leg animation, but the belt has been removed and the torso leaned out a bit... And finally for the Mattel roster we have Maze-A-Tron, with it's very weird leaning, kicking 5-frame gait. I'm not even sure if this qualifies as a Running Man really... And so we move on to the INTV titles. As already mentioned, SP Football, Slam Dunk and Spiker reuse the run cycles from Football and Basketball. However, WC Baseball replaces the regular side profile animation for an isometric view when running sideways... And World Cup Soccer ditches the elegant original for this 6-frame freak show... Finally we have the two INTV action games Thunder Castle and Tower of Doom, both based on Knights with their face guard open. Tower of Doom has a 7-frame animation with a couple of slightly awkward lunging poses in frames 3 and 4... Thunder Castle cuts this cycle down to six frames. Frame 1 is shared with Tower of Doom, with frames 2, 3 and 6 being minor variations. The less said about frame 4 the better... Now I've probably been a bit unfair here, because in both Tower of Doom and Thunder Castle your avatar carries a shield, which partially obscures the character. This probably makes it necessary to exaggerate the limbs so they can be seen. I think the variations we see in the Running Man animations shows why it was a good idea for Mattel not to bake the run cycle into GROM. Personally, I like the small variations that each game brings, allowing each to have its own personality whilst still belonging to a common brand. It's a bit like the way each model in a well designed car line up has its own identity, but evokes common themes of the manufacturer. So, did I miss any running men, and which is your favourite? I wonder which was the first one drawn by David James for the CES demo back in January 1978?