rockman_x_2002

I have one of Jim Brain's uIEC/SD devices, and recommend it very highly. As others have mentioned, for smaller, simpler games (i.e., games that typically load on a single disk without any sort of fancy loading techniques), it's perfect. For more complex games, you'll find that this device won't load them directly. However, for those, I have a 1541 disk drive and a set of 5.25" disks and a copying program that I can use with the uIEC/SD to offload those multi-disk games onto the actual floppies, and then load them from there. Essentially, it turns the uIEC/SD into a handy way to interface from PC to C64 (transferring .d64 images onto actual disks). That being said, if you intend to use the uIEC/SD in that fashion (as an interface for getting .d64 images onto actual floppies), I would highly recommend investing in JiffyDOS. You will need it for both your 1541 as well as your C64. A good alternative, if you don't want to permanently install it into the C64, would be to purchase an EasyFlash III cartridge and flash JiffyDOS onto one of its kernal slots (besides, the EasyFlash III is another great tool to have on hand). All these can be purchased on Jim's site. Incidentally, the program that I use to do my images-to-disk transfer is a C64 app called CBM-Command (latest version is 2.3, and is final), although I'm sure there are other applications out there that will work just as well (or perhaps better).

I love Checkered Flag for the Lynx! Vastly better than the Jaguar version. I picked up a copy of this game earlier in the year (back in the winter), and whenever I have my Lynx out, this is one of my "go to" games (my others include Chip's Challenge, RoadBlasters, and S.T.U.N. Runner)

Thought I would follow up. I got home tonight and decided to take a look under the hood and see if I could find anything. The first thing I found out is that indeed the ribbon cable is fragile. At first glance, it looks to me as though some of the plastic has come away from the cable, likely due to age. Thankfully, it looks like all of the connections themselves are okay, so I proceeded with due caution. The other thing I found is that, indeed, the shielding plate is soldered on very, very well. But I was able to get that taken care of and underneath the shielding at the ICs themselves on the mainboard. I found the RA-3-9600 using the diagram, removed the IC and reseated it. Tried the system, and still the same behavior. System works fine for a few minutes, and then begins to glitch out in those same four card locations. I also checked the seating of the other ICs, but that also yielded no different results. So I'm still leaning toward that it's a faulty RA-3-9600, and the only option I'm going to have at this point is to either replace that chip, or to come across another Intellivision console that is working, and keep this one for parts since everything else appears to be working fine on it. It's unfortunate the console doesn't work because that was part of my going for the deal (even though I did get 8 games, 7 of which are boxed and complete). But that's how it goes sometimes. So I guess at this point I'm looking for advice on next steps. Would it be worth the trouble to get another RA-3-9600 and go that route, or would I be better served to keep this console for parts, and see if I can hunt down another Intellivision somewhere?

Hmm. I think my dad might have one of those types of soldering guns. It's a bit overkill for electronic work, of course, but for removing this shielding, it sounds like just what the doctor ordered. Might see if he'll let me borrow that thing for a bit. That would save me having to bother my friend with his electronic hardware toolset to help me, especially since that's a socketed IC (I have what I need to remove and replace those, except for the IC itself of course). I figure my first check will be the obvious things that have been mentioned before, such as the ribbon cable and all that, and then of course that IC if there's still problems (and I imagine there would be, because I strongly suspect it's a mis-seated or flaky RA-3-9600 at this point). So I'll make an attempt to reseat that. If that doesn't help, then I'll know the whole IC is bad, and I'll just have to try to come up with a replacement somewhere.

Quite alright. At least we're getting on the right track on what need to be fixed on this machine. I've been reading up on how to disassemble the thing so I'll have some preparation and know about the "gotchas" before I dive off into it. Now I understand that some of the components on the board are socketed, and some are soldered (this is an original model Intellivision, btw), and that the SRAM appears to be one of the socketed ICs. Of course I've read that the shielding plate attached to the mainboard is soldered on, and can be a bit of a pain to remove. I was wondering if there would be any advice in regards to getting that thing off there with standard household tools, or would my best bet be to place a phone call when I get home to my friend with the electronic soldering equipment?

Awesome that it's got 7800 support! But I played around with OpenEmu just this week, and I'm having problems getting some of the controls to work. Specifically, reset, select, etc., which you need to have working in order to really use the 7800. I figure that's due to it being an experimental build, but I thought I would check to see if I might be overlooking something. Is there a way to manually edit configurations to change the things that don't necessarily show up in the application's built-in controller config tool?

HunterZero and intvnut, In light of your most recent posts, it's very possible that it could be an issue with the SRAM in the system. The sprites (MOBs) appear to be fine at all times, and even seem to "float" over the affected screen area in most games. For example, when shooting in Space Armada, when my shots reach these cards, they explode like they're hitting a shield, but the explosion sprite appears over the cards correctly. Also, Space Armada only crashes when the aliens finally reach the affected area, but all the sprites (which I assume in this case are the MOBs) do seem to "float" over this area and are rendered fine. For another example of strange behavior, in B-17 Bomber, when I switch to the map screen, it is totally black except for those four card areas on the screen, and it appears they are scrolling their glitchy pattern downward, so I'm assuming that the entire map screen is a set of static background cards that appears to be scrolling. And in another example, in Bomb Squad, I can move the tools over the affected screen area, and the sprites are drawn correctly. On the other hand, none of the games seem to exhibit any issues with the controls, and the games only appear to crash or glitch out when something significant happens concerning those four cards on the screen (i.e., things are being scrolled out of those cards and onto another, things are moving in that area, etc.) Also, as in my middle picture of Space Armada, sometimes the bottom third of the screen undergoes a color change (for example, sometimes on the title screen, those cards at the bottom might turn the background black), but it's only ever those four cards as shown in my pictures above that have glitched graphics on them. Also, for the games that use the Intellivoice, there appears to be no issues at all with the speech in the games, even if the games have garbled graphics on the screen. Of course the difficulty that I face is I don't have the equipment I need to work on this issue at home (I'm a software guy, and I've done very little hardware work). I have a friend that might possibly have the equipment that's needed, and he might be able to help if I can get these diagrams to him and explain the situation and what we need to look at.

Alright. I can check those things out once I get home this weekend. I'll see if I can look around for a guide on what voltages I ought to be seeing on those things. Of course, if anyone has diagrams, instructions, etc., that would be helpful also. As far as the Intellivision hardware is concerned, I'm a complete and total idiot on that (even though I've played the games on other people's systems many times).

That's what I was afraid might be the case but I thought I would ask for more expert opinion, seeing as I'm more a software guy than hardware. So if it is an issue with the GRAM, and I strongly suspect with the rest of you that that is the case, what am I looking at in fixing the problem. Is it possible some solder joint needs to be reflowed, given that it appears to work fine initially for a few seconds before warm-up, or is it more likely that a replacement would be in order?

So I'm on vacation, and I picked up an Intellivision from a thrift shop, along with a handful of boxed games for it and a few Colecovision and 2600 games for a good price. When I got back to the condo here, I hooked it up to the TV to test it out, and there appears to be a problem. So basically when you first power the system on, the game and title screen look fine. But after a couple of seconds, that changes as garbled characters begin to appear on the screen, as in this example: No matter which game I play, those same four character locations appear garbled on the screen after just a few seconds from being powered on. Here are more screenshots of Space Armada, which is completely unplayable and, as the game continues to run, the glitches continue to get worse until it eventually crashes to its "Game Over" screen. My guess is it's some sort of a memory issue, since I've given the console and all the games a good, thorough cleaning, but I wanted to post on here to see what my problem might be and what I would need to do to fix it to get this Intellivision back into working order.

If you mean just the classic systems from that era, my guess is the Lynx probably could handle the game decently, given its built-in scaling and rotation and all. But I would imagine the Game Boy and Game Gear would struggle at playing the game. Then again, the 5200 port is quite decent.

My R1 button also was sticking when I first got the controller. However, I went through the procedure these videos show and for the past month, I have had no further issues. If you recall from using a brand new controller with analog sticks, often you'll find that, initially, there is residue built up along the analog stick, just under the thumbstick nub, usually encircling the area where the stick meets the outer housing of the controller. Basically, you have the same issue going on here. So the trick to it is, use the controller for a while (a week of thorough use to get it well worn in). Then, remove the R1 and/or L1 button. Be sure to clean the post where the button attaches on the controller, as well as the hole on the plastic button cap itself. After thoroughly cleaning, simply pop the button back into place. As I said, I did this same thing about a month ago, and since then, I haven't had a single issue, and I've been playing the PS4 just about every day.

Thanks for posting that link! I didn't know this was out there at all. I've owned a TI-99/4A for a couple of years now (bought it at a flea market), and it came with its original manuals, but very often you can glean more meaningful information from other third-party books and publications (the "missing" manuals).

I've always had issues with classic consoles and modern HDTV sets. The Atari 2600 and 7800 do seem to fare better than most on my set, though, with only the Commodore 64 beating it out in terms of video quality (using S-Video with the C64, though). The worst looking system for me is the NES, of course, and everything else seems to fall somewhere in between it and the 7800 in terms of video and color quality. A good old-fashioned CRT is just hard to beat for these old machines, seems like. For added fun: If you have an N64 laying about the house and have never tried it on an HDTV, go ahead and give it a shot. It'll make your eyeballs cry blood.

How neat is this! It's strange because I finally got around to buying a copy of this game about a month ago (NIB copy), and after a month full of hair-pulling, now we have this awesome document. This is what I would've hoped the manual in the box to be (minus the walkthrough of course, but very nice it's included here in this). Being from the software world, I would dub this the game's "Missing Manual". Basically the thing that should have come packed in the box and didn't. Excellent job!

Back to work again this month, and this time it's a little more upbeat tune, again from the Mega Man franchise. This is "We're the Robots" from Mega Man 9, the second Wily stage. Here's a youtube video to the original "NES" tune: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bA4PAkrAVpQ Included in the zip you'll find an RMT file as well as an MP3 for hassle-free listening. If you load the RMT, you'll need to make sure you're playing it using NTSC timing or it'll be a wee bit too slow. megaman9_weretherobots.zip

What I'm wondering is, if you had a port of Major Havoc on the 7800, would it necessarily have to use vector graphics to get the game done? After all, we have Asteroids on the 7800, which is a fine port of the game, and it uses raster graphics. Back when the 7800 was being sold and games made for it by Atari, had it been decided to make a home port, my guess is that the decision would have likely been made to do Major Havoc using traditional raster graphics. You would've had to sacrifice the scaling and pseudo-3D effects, naturally, but you could still have some rather nice visuals, and the game would have still largely played like the arcade version.

Mine does the same thing from time to time (NTSC US model), and if I were to wager a guess, I would say it's due to some defect in the cartridge slot that, over the years, causes the pins inside to bend out of whack and not work properly, very similar to the same problem the original NES experiences, only less annoying and difficult to resolve.

I'll second Godzilla's patience and positive support here as well. We've waited for a long, long time to get some solid information about this, so what's a little longer wait if it means we get a whole, complete picture of the history? I've gone through the whole thread, and this game has fascinated me so far as its history is concerned (as has a number of other titles for this and other systems). Looking forward to see what you've been able to find, Wonder.

As far as reliability of third-party cards go, I bought a Performance Memory Card 2x that still works quite nicely. The only annoying thing about it is it always boots into the first page whenever you turn on the console, so you have to hit the button every time to swap to the second memory page. But that's more a design flaw than a performance bug.

Some of these consoles I did not purchase myself, nor do I remember when we first got them (they were likely bought by my older brother or were Christmas gifts). The list below contains only system that I purchased, received new personally, or otherwise came into our household as new. For consoles that have multiple generations running the same software (i.e., the Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo DS), I've listed only the first system in the line that I purchased (exception, significantly different PC systems). I am including the pack-in (if available) and a first purchase game (if purchased at the time of the console), and indicating notes as appropriate: Atari 2600: (1980, my brother's, as I was not born until 1984) Pack-in: Combat First purchase: Space Invaders Commodore 64: (1984, my brother's) First Purchase: Donkey Kong, Radar Rat Race NES: (1986, for both me and my brother) Pack-In: Super Mario Bros. First Purchase: Kung-Fu Game Boy: (1989) Pack-In: Tetris First Purchase: Super Mario Land, TMNT: Fall of the Foot Clan Atari 7800: (1990) Pack-In: Pole Position II First Purchase: Food Fight SNES: (1991) Pack-In: Super Mario World First Purchase: F-Zero PC: (1993, Windows 3.1/MS-DOS 6.2 468 25MHz, 4MB RAM) First Purchase: Wing Commander Deluxe Edition Sega Genesis: (1994) Pack-In: Sonic Spinball First Purchase: Sonic the Hedgehog 3 Game Gear: (1995) Pack-In: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 First Purchase: Sonic Triple Trouble, Captain America and the Avengers Virtual Boy: (1997) Pack-In: Mario's Tennis First Purchase: Wario Land VB, Galactic Pinball Nintendo 64: (1998) First Purchase: Super Mario 64 PC: (1999, Windows 98, Pentium Celeron 466MHz, 32MB RAM) Pack-In: Starseige First Purchase: Final Fantasy VII Game Boy Color: (1999) First Purchase: Super Mario Bros. Deluxe Playstation: (2000) First Purchase: Castlevania: SOTN, Final Fantasy IX, Alundra II Game Boy Advance: (2001) First Purchase: Super Mario Advance (Super Mario Bros. 2) GameCube: (2001) First Purchase: Luigi's Mansion Playstation 2: (2002) First Purchase: Final Fantasy X Xbox: (2004) Pack-In: Forza Motorsport First Purchase: Jade Empire, Halo Nintendo DS: (2004) Pack-In: Metroid Prime Hunters: First Hunt First Purchase: Super Mario 64 DS Sony PSP: (2005) First Purchase: Untold Legends Nintendo Wii: (2006) Pack-In: Wii Sports First Purchase: Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Xbox 360: (2007) Pack-In: Forza Motorsport 2 / Marvel Ultimate Alliance First Purchase: Kameo, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion PS3: (2009) Pack-In: Little Big Planet, Uncharted Nintendo 3DS: (2011) First Purchase: Pilotwings Resort, Ridge Racer 3D PC: (2012, Intel Core i7-3820 3.60GHz, 16GB RAM, nVidia GeForce GTX 570) First Purchase: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Nintendo Wii U: (2012) Pack-In: NintendoLand First Purchase: New Super Mario Bros. U

Now there's an idea. I wonder how cheap it might be to simply re-create these devices using modern technology, but play the same old games using the same old code and ROMs stored on the originals. Surely doesn't seem that it would be all that expensive, and you could sell the units with a handful of games as a sort of starter kit. Even the Star Trek game could be done with a name change (or, if they were willing to go after the license, perhaps intact).

I don't collect them actively, but I do have a small collection of them in a drawer somewhere. I used to buy these frequently when I was a kid growing up because the K-Mart that we used to have local in the nearby mall always had these things on sale, so I picked up a ton of them for usually not very much. Probably the most playable of any of these Tiger handhelds was their Tennis, Bowling, and Pinball games. Those horrible LCDs were quite difficult to see, and it was hard to tell what was truly going on most of the time. Very seldom did you have a game that was nicely done, but those three weren't too bad, mostly because you just didn't have a whole lot going on at any one time. Tennis had only the two players, the ball, and the net. Bowling was you, the ball, and the pins. And Pinball actually served a decent enough game of pinball. Granted it was no Mattel Wildfire, but it was a decent LCD approximation of pinball. The worst of the bunch, for me at least, seemed to be games that were based on actual video game console licensed. Those never turned out well because console games just don't translate down to these little LCD games that well. That was at least true for the ones Tiger did. You were almost always better off just getting a Game Boy or a Game Gear and playing the handheld versions of those games that way. Always struck me funny, though, that Tiger never bothered to put out an actual handheld version of Tetris. I always thought that of all the console video game licenses, that one would've translated to a handheld LCD game quite well (probably not too different from what the Game Boy version looked like).

These days I do well to find any gaming related items in the thrifts. Most often I see a lot of Genesis EA Sport titles. Occasionally I will see the odd PS1 game (usually a sports title), and I have seen a PS1 console or two, but they almost always look like they've seen far better days. No power supply, no AV cable, and a single controller that looks like it's been through a war (if the controller is a DualShock, invariable one or both thumbsticks do not work and will almost always have the rubber torn off them). Flea markets around here are almost always a better deal these days. There's still not a lot to pick from, but occasionally you will find a table with a handful of NES games for sale, and at a fairly decent price. I picked up both Top Gun titles and a Metal Gear for right around $3 each. all working. That was about two months ago.