MattPilz

I'm glad to have found this thread just in time (by way of the Facebook group post I noticed)! Events like this are a great way for Vectrex owners to dive deeper into the game library. Strangely enough I barely ever gave Mine Storm any focus and vastly underestimated the variety and difficulty. I played for maybe 45 minutes tonight and slowly evolved in strategy from barely ever getting past stage 2, to consistently getting to at least stage 5. It can be very addicting to practice and learn new avoidance techniques along the way. Initially I would attempt to destroy every fireball mine, but eventually found it convenient to just avoid them and let them travel out of screen when in a panic. I also found myself rarely using the hyperspace/teleport function until my later sessions, where it became very useful even multiple times in a row to get out of the chaos. Though there are definitely elements of luck in it all and sometimes you just get delt a worse playfield than others. Until tonight I hadn't even paid enough attention in this game to recognize that what I thought was just a random starfield was in fact the spawn points of enemies. I then started reading some of the tips and guides around just to better understand some of the gameplay mechanics. Might revisit this one in the next day to see if I can improve my score, but either way I'm just happy to have taken a moment to play! Seen here on my unmodified original generation Vectrex with woodgrain vinyl and generic multicolor overlay, internal ROM. Score 64595. (Edit - Apparently I have a long way to go to catch up to the best on this game!!!)

Last year or so I had posted some snapshots here of a handwritten cassette that came with an overseas bundle, called Venedig by Said A Abouelhassan. It felt to be in prototype stage on the tape. I never really knew any more history about it, but today on the Aquarius FB group a user posted this image of an Arabic aquarius that included both a 4K (?) and 16K build of Venedig on actual Aquarius-branded cassette tapes. I'd be very interested in seeing if they are more polished versions than the one I have. Hopefully we will see digiitalizations of these in time, now knowing that it was an apparently official title released overseas.

I own one and it's a great throwback to the 80s Gameboy days. Rather than promising the world they did the opposite and worked the low tech specs and limitations directly into their marketing, self-mocking itself even. It worked and sold 4x more in its first day than what Amico had received in $100 deposits in three years, despite also costing as much as Amico's original announced price. They have done incredible things to make development for it accessible, with impressive online web tools for novice developers and IDE options for advanced coders. Making it as fun to develop for as it is to play on. And every month they send out a "What's New!" email that showcases a lot of new content. Just got the update this week with 10 new promoted (and affordable) games in it. First Impressions of Amico Home Apologies in advance for the long ramblings to come, just want to share my overall thoughts while fresh in mind. Yesterday I finally had a chance to test Amico Home with a friend. We used a Note 9 and Note 10+ for the controllers and a Tab A7 for the screen. Both of us are technically savvy users. And it was not easy to get going nor particularly entertaining. I redeemed Astrosmash through the Amico Club website and Google Play. After getting the controller apps on the phones and the Home app on the tablet, and then everything tied to the same WiFI and updated, I tried connecting. First it detected two different Home instances and then only allowed one of us to connect. After reopening it on my phone I was able to finally see the tablet's Home app from the controller. I kept looking down at the controller like I would on Wii-U, expecting the mini touchscreen to compliment or mirror the tablet's screen. But the controller app screen has its own menu interface entirely unrelated to what's on the Home screen, and many of the options didn't seem to have any functionality. I didn't realize that while trying to navigate the controller menu using the on-screen controllers, it was doing different things on the Home app. The digital directional pad was confusing to navigate. I assumed rotating it continuously clockwise would iterate downward through all the menu options, and counterclockwise would iterate back up to the top similar to any other wheel/potentiometer type control I've ever used. Instead it only checked the physical position of your finger and if it was above the midway point of the wheel it'd go "up" on the screen and otherwise would go "down" but also added "left" and "right" into it depending on your finger's placement. Leading to a very chaotic menu navigation. I realized the proper way was to just tap the invisible quadrant on that spinner wheel to navigate a given direction. Pressing in on the middle of the directional pad didn't have any affect despite also being another "button" to press (this would've made sense to use as a confirm button). But if I'm able to spin the directional disc I'd expect the direction of spin to equate to direction of menu navigation, but I digress. We also both found there were flaws with the automatic orientation of the controller's "screen" that would generally get fixed to portrait or landscape based on how it was when we launched the app, even though it is meant to be dynamically changeable including in game. I did get mine to alter a few times when testing, but not consistently. Astrosmash was not showing up under "My Games" in Amico Home so I had to click on it to "Buy" again. This took me back out to Google Play, which since I had already activated it apparently I needed to then install it direct from Google Play. After that, I had to tab back into Amico Home but it had disconnected both of our controllers and we needed to reestablish a connection. It still wasn't appearing under My Games so maybe I needed to do a force restart, or just some other bug. But I was able to finally launch the game from Amico Home. What I didn't try doing is launching it directly from my dock or from the Google Play app, but since Amico Home disconnected when I switched away from it I assume no controls would be possible without launching it from within the Home app--despite needing to navigate out of the app just to install and so on. The game itself felt very bare-bones. There is no online score system, which would've been a minimal effort addition to provide a greater reason to replay the game. 12 years ago I developed a simple freebie app for a smart TV and the inclusion of a daily/weekly/monthly high score system has kept the game competitive all these years later (to the tune of millions of continual plays). Every game on Amico was originally promoted as including an online high score bracket; from a technical perspective it is not a complicated process. For the $15 valuation and a modern take, I had also expected more power-ups. You are limited to only the single fire or double-fire shot, shield and nuke. I've played many cooperative space shooters and part of the fun is discovery of new power-ups and upgrades (Gradius and even the Chicken Invaders series are great fun due to the power-up diversity). Moving around felt sluggish to us and with no tactile feel for the buttons it was easy to slip off the directional pad or forget about the hyperspace boost. I have not played the remade Shark! Shark! yet but knowing they completely removed the dash functionality so you can only drift aimlessly around using the directional pad does not sound fun to me and robs the game of its core mechanic. In the end we reached level 4 or 5, died, and drifted back to Steam to play a bundle of funny co-op titles that cost $10 for the entire pack, and then to Mario Wonder on Switch. I'll play through Astrosmash again on my own eventually but without easy support for common controllers I'm not keen on the touch controls at all. I don't think the two released titles or the few upcoming ones, including the one level concept Side Swipers, will be enough to hold anyone's interest very long after the fatigue of setting it all up.

Only problem with that dream scenario is... John confirmed Amico Home is not built to support public/guest WiFi hotspots. It relies on UDP packets through a LAN's broadcast IP. (John: "I did not implement any special way to deal with public networks.") This implementation effectively rules out any social play at bars, hotels, game festivals. It also wipes out the concept of simplicity to pick-up and play, since it won't work on cellular networks either. Anyone who wants to experience Amico Home will need to ensure every single device is configured on the same home network, that the router is configured to allow IP broadcasting, that no UDP ports are blocked (or, that necessary UDP ports are allowed/forwarded in the Router admin), and that they have one extra phone handy to act as the console, with the necessary updates and apps installed on all of them. It'd be much more versatile if it supported no-account online play like some other common party apps by launching a game on the "console" and having it display a code for others to join regardless of their device or connection. But that would require a whole network infrastructure that I doubt exists. But the games I've seen previewed on Amico Home, namely Shark! Shark!, already support their own multiplayer functions so I don't really know why Amico Home as a basestation would be a necessary at all.

BBG could benefit by improving their customer support, which feels non-existent even after three major IP remake releases this fall. They have never responded to any tweets or Steam discussion topics and have shown zero engagement effort with their consumers. I saw one interview with the BBG president. The word "Amico" never appears within it, apparently sidestepping that whole saga. It does include this blurb: All those focus testers and game testers, but Astrosmash lacks even a pause button. They never corrected the bullet offset problem reported back in 2020, and have gamepad mapping oddities too. This was also a game that the a few on YouTube had been playtesting with their Amico test units for more than a year now... 🤔

YouTube Short on Original Hardware: https://youtube.com/shorts/V2vkoQyhdi4?si=G1U5BF4eA6JXWSNJ (MP3 of output below, from emulator. As well as WAV data files to playback yourself.) The Tetris bit cuts out short in the video but you still get the idea. This spring/summer I went down another Bally rabbit hole to better understand the sound chip. I found it to be incredibly versatile with its three voices, noise, vibrato and tremolo capabilities. Certainly beyond what most other consoles through the early-80s could handle (even flagship systems like the TRS-80 Model 1 had no internal sound, relying only on mic-out manipulation for patchworked sound). A lot of these aspects have not often been tapped into, short of a few 70s-80s Bally legends like George Moses (who noted in his Bach music advert: “It took 5 months, 22,000 inputs and many new techniques to organize and de-bug this tape.” – Now that is dedication…) The second segment of the Tetris theme via Bally is quite comparable to a lot of chiptune style music you’d find on Commodore etc. (NOTE: The attached data WAV files will work on a real Bally or the MAME emulator, but do not work through Evie’s BackBit due to the way the bytes are stored… I will send her a sample to see if she can improve the BASIC loading of that adapter, but it’s admittedly a very fringe use case.) More Context and Technical Breakdown When AstroBASIC released, they introduced dedicated variables for managing the master oscillator, volume and tones of three notes. But in taking this route (with NT=0) you end up missing out on the rest of the capabilities. Even manually poking the other ports relating to noise or vibrato will have no obvious affect if you mix it with the variable approach. Knowing this, I found the original I/O interfacing to be more adaptable (with NT=-1 to skip any AstroBASIC convenience variables). Spent considerable time studying the block diagrams and schematics in Bally’s “Hacker” guide and various newsletters to gain a higher understanding of how the various ports interact with each other and produce different sound effects. With a default mapping, you can achieve 52 notes of playback from C#2 through E6. By adjusting the oscillator, you can drop or gain entire octaves to conform as needed. Intrigued by the potential, I then imagined how modern music, video game themes and so on might sound if ported over to Bally while embracing all three voices and noise or vibrato where beneficial. So off I set toward creating a makeshift in-house MIDI parser to remove the burden of manually mapping and inputting every single note. I used the approach of storing the tone byte data beyond the “size” wall of the program data, as determined in AstroBASIC via address %(20000) after all the program code has been typed. This would allow me to generate poke data for each byte with my script, without needing to embed lengthy REM statements as data placeholders. I added front-end controls for adjusting the volume, enabling noise with its own associated volume (at the moment the noise will toggle on/off every other beat to mimic a basic drumline), and whether the track should repeat at the end. For fun and convenience I also added the ability to customize the display with a title and custom background/foreground color from any of Bally’s 256 color options. The memory start and allocations are calculated and updated in real-time based on any of these changes, but I also have a buffer option so that you can adjust the title and other properties without having to re-enter all the note data afterward. The general process for my homegrown music parsing system then became: 1) Find a MIDI online or record a new one, ideally one that doesn’t have more than 3 simultaneous notes or that can be reduced to such. 2) Edit the MIDI in an editor to delete irrelevant tracks and then merge all the remaining notes into a single track. 3) Import the MIDI into the parser, which will iterate through all the notes and generate the Bally code for both the player and the tone data copy-paste ready. 4) Adjust the title, colors, volume and options. 5) Paste the output into a new Bally project using Mame (with my front-end editor, which I expect to release to public before end of year). 6) Batch run all the code into Bally. 7.) Run to check the output, adjust as needed, then save to WAV file to load on actual Bally. To implement automated and adjustable vibrato throughout a song, I thought of another clever solution. The MIDI files can be edited to include C1 notes since these are outside the ordinary range of notes. Inserting a C1 anywhere along the track will signify that a vibrato change is to occur. The duration set for that note equates to the frequency/vibrato value of port 20 from 0-255. So you can start a track out with no vibrato, then mix in different variants of it at moments in the song using this technique direct from the MIDI with no manual coding required and while keeping the player to a minimum. I use this in the Tetris song to vary it up to five times in the full tune. I’ll be taking a bit of a break from this project but still intend to release these two different toolsets to the community as-is by Christmas once I get them into a more distributable fashion. Enjoy! P.S., The Zelda track doesn’t loop perfectly as I kind of ran out of time to perfect it and then lost the source MIDI I was working from… But it’s close. Bally-Tetris-Zelda-Theme-Data.zip Bally-Tetris-Theme.mp3 Bally-Zelda-Theme.mp3

I feel for the developers because they still intended for this to release on Amico, even as of last year they were optimistic about it. They even have the Intellivision logo buried in the assets of their PC demo, yet. Being realistic I think they will struggle to even get enough sales of it to meet the $100 minimum withdrawal interval on Steam. It's just very difficult to gain prominence and sales on Steam as a very small developer with no social traction. This is also why I am sure many developers found it inviting for Intellivision to fund a chunk of the development and then offer the perks of an exclusive platform where they'd be showcased exclusively for weeks in the shop. I did play the demo and there are still only like 3-6 people listed in the global high score list; very few have tried it. I didn't mind the game and think it will be fun for local coop, though they should make improvements to the UI as the mouse is non-functional to select options even though it is visible. It also is one of the rare titles that sets fullscreen exclusive mode, to a lower resolution than my desktop, which messed with my window arrangement and icons. The Xbox-style controller image they now use looks a lot less complicated to me than many of the instruction screens we saw for Amico exclusives. Like Tank Battle that supported three different control schemes but without any that feel particularly simple or ergonomic compared to a classic controller. And all of these different gestures to do a full turn setup in Cornhole...

I gave the demo of Dynablaster a spin this evening. The BBG side of development was from a small team of three and I presume they did the vast majority of this work outside of Intellivision's involvement since they also had worked on Dynablaster long before their Intellivision connection. The full version was supposed to release at the start of July but so far only the demo exists. (The build metadata indicates this version is 1.5.0 built with Unity 2021.3.11f1, compiled last October. They list the typical play time as 5-10 minutes.) I noticed a potential in-game purchase feature for character customization, with a shopping cart basket and 'lock' symbol next to more than 35 of them with required coins ranging from 500 up to 10,000 for a single item. This hopefully will all be unlockable just from battling; if it includes a component that allows for any monetary exchanges for virtual items or coins, it would go against the grain of Intellivision/Amico's vision and promise. (P.S., The very similar and more familiar Super Bomberman R2 by Konami is also slated for release on Steam next month - "with new adventures and game modes, it has the largest content volume in the series' history!") The full credits within the game's About section include the following. Tommy's name appears five times, albeit the actual music scores and soundtrack are from a distinctly separate sound studio and crew not Tommy Tallarico Studios. Many others listed in the Intellivision section were only active for a short timespan, and no later than Mar-Apr 2022. Dynablaster 2023 BBG-Entertainment Credits Executive Producer: Stephan Berendsen, Vaclav Jakubek Programming: Jan Andrle Art: Vaclav Jakubek Intellivision Entertainment Credits Executive Producer: Tommy Tallarico, Hans Ippisch Product Manager, Europe: Therese Svensson Additional Game Design: Tommy Tallarico Art Direction: Mike Dietz Software Technical Director: John Alvarado Audio Director & Music Supervisor: Tommy Tallarico Audio Produced by Moonwalk Audio Music: Adam Gubman (Moonwalk Audio), Joris Hoogsteder (Moonwalk Audio), Nomi Abadi, Cain German Sound Design: Alex Cox (Moonwalk Audio), Tommy Tallarico Voices: Tommy Tallarico, Nick Richards, Sydney Richards, Adam Gubman (Moonwalk Audio) Quality Assurance Manager: Sam Curnow Quality Assurance: Sterling Magleby, Jason Freston, Mike Wilson

Still very confused about all of this back and forth, and what BBG actually can or can't do with Intellivision hardware/software. John's comments didn't really make it any clearer to me. To actually fulfill Intellivision's obligations, in addition to honoring the promised refunds, they would need: 100 retail Amico systems for the Fig/Republic investors. 6,000 retail Amico systems for remaining users and investors ($100 per system to go to Sudesh until $675,000 paid back). Several million dollars in repayments to creditors, which by 2022 had already accrued substantial ($1M+) interest. $100K+ to settle the leased furniture contract. Based on the above and their current situation that hasn't changed very much in at least two years, the only path forward feels to be selling of assets, liquidation of others and officially declaring the Amico console canceled. Even then, short of bankruptcy I don't know how else they can absolve future creditor disputes.

Although that one requires passing a single controller, among my old LCD games I still have a six player version from Senario, also released in 2004. It included Texas Holdem and Blackjack and cost $30 for the whole set (MSRP $60). The marketing images definitely had that Amico family-friendly vibe, too. We never got to see exactly how well the Amico card/dice game worked, only a few seconds in the E3 teaser as far as I know.

That led me to revisit their 2020 press release about the ACL license. The opening sentence is worded a bit vague, but it suggests they were developing it with consulting from some of the world's greatest ACL players and/or that you could play as or against some of those players (just like that Steam game). Rewatching the playthrough and even the opponent names shown seem made-up or otherwise unrelated to any cornhole players: Sabrina Spada, Klaus Graf, Niceto Pina, Rihab Bishara, Lauren Ayers, Dean Ray, Gael Carvallo, Lucas Gomes Velho, James Morris, Rokuro Saitou... And these names appear to be the only competitors you can play (one per country), they never changed since the original 2019-20 gameplay.

This price dispute, like a lot of drama in the Amico world, wouldn't had been a big deal at all if Tommy had just acknowledged it truthfully. It's understandable that production costs fluctuate. It's also sensible that his original ranges before the system had actually been developed would be subject to change. But when he goes on to accuse others of lying and spreading misinformation just to avoid admitting he made even one innocuous error, that's what people take offense to. PRGE 2018: $149-179 is the price point that we're going for... So it will be somewhere in between there. We're hoping for $149 but this gives me a little bit of room. Because if we come up with something so cool, or some new technology hits in six months from now. And we've gotta get it in the system. And it's going to cost us $10 more to make. I don't want to not do that and say "oh gee I told those people a year ago it was going to be $149 or whatever." So we're giving ourselves a little room but I just wanted to tell people the price range that we're looking at. Under $200, way under $200.

I just learned last week that the original Wii had trace amounts of internal memory to write Mii character data to and then take over to a friend's Wii to transfer them. Pretty cool idea that I never knew about, I guess only four games ever used the feature for game data sharing across Wiis. Very similar concept though to Amico and could had behaved the same way had Nintendo wanted, by storing checksums / keys of user purchased apps to the controller and then reading them back on another Wii.

One potential complication is that the cards all have a hardcoded URL to Intellivision's website. If they ever lose control of the domain, which has happened before and is currently only being renewed year-to-year sporadically, scanning the cards with any NFC app will direct users to some unrelated (potentially even malicious) link instead. The cards themselves are in a perpetual state of nothingness. They are dependent on the system being done, then the back-end hosting architecture being implemented, then the entire user infrastructure for activation and validation, then the games actually being fully developed and v1 released. The system can parse the IDs from the card URLs to activate and download the data, but again this is all contingent on the entire Amico infrastructure working. The Youtubers with test units have said that this works, but it has never been demonstrated by anyone on camera. They also said the system/controllers were FCC certified when they aren't. So without seeing it in action I don't have high confidence. My theory is that the dev units came preloaded with the same games that the one Jon demonstrated did, but some may be software-locked to simulate NFC activation by scanning the cards.

To the best of my knowledge that has no material relevance to FCC certification. But on that subject... "no plan in place for manufacturing" seems contrary to a lot of statements made by Intellivision since 2020. I would argue they had very specific and detailed plans in place, at least publicly and throughout their 2020-2021 trajectory. Here was Tommy's response to your own question about manufacturing, from 2020: Every pitch video and fundraising campaign painted a very clear picture that they were on the cusp of manufacturing. We know they did drop over $1M to one manufacturing company, announced in September 2020: ^ This sounds more than "no plan" to me, and any failures of these plans are, hmm... After raising $17M to $150M depending on which version we believe, it should had certainly been enough to get the system (rocket) off the ground.