Walter Ives

There is no such thing as an absolute set of colors for NTSC Intellivisions. US/Canadian televisions of the day had knobs on the front that let users adjust the luminance, tint and saturation, and the Master Component instruction manual explicitly instructed users to adjust those knobs to get a pleasing image. Dave James, the Mattel graphic designer charged with coming up with the palette, intended the color that was later chosen for the title screen color to be brown. To reproduce the colors the programmers intended for most games, adjust the knobs until that color is a nice, rich, pleasing brown. Not that insipid olive that's often used. Unfortunately, that adjustment doesn't yield the best sky blue. When playing biplanes, adjust the knob so that the sky is a nice pleasing sky-blue. That's right: the best color palette to use when emulating games is game-dependent. So pick shades that look good for the game you're playing. For a full discussion, plus a spreadsheet simulator that demonstrates the effect of the luminance/tint/saturation controls, see https://forums.atariage.com/topic/316961-intellivision-color-palette-v-atari-2600-color-palette/page/2/ https://forums.atariage.com/topic/278003-colors-off-on-my-intellivision-system-1/

When marketing lets them upgrade to an 8K cartridge and connect to CHATGPT. WJI

Sorry to disappoint, but the information block in the upper right hand corner isn't in a Mattel format. Furthermore, this is the side view of the pictured product: Clearly not an Intellivision. WJI

Good thinking! All those international customers were going to need Keyboard Components so they could use the featured J.K. Lasser 1980 Federal Income Tax cassette to compute their annual tribute to the US Government. And the stock analysis cassette that let you watch the Dow Jones ticker and invest in the "big board" of the New York Stock Exchange. They'd also be anxious to buy a weight loss program endorsed by ABC TV personality Dr. Art Ulene, an exercise program endorsed by that TV fitness guru with the French name Jack LaLanne and a fortune-telling program by Jeanne Dixon, known throughout the world thanks to her column in Stars & Stripes. International distributors were going to be especially heartened by the brochure's promise to run "60 second network television commercials" and advertise "in major publications like Time, People, Newsweek, In-Flight Magazines." WJI

Most definitely staged. The photo bears ZERO resemblance to the actual assembly line or rework stations. Furthermore, the real assembly workers who soldered components onto circuit boards didn't use unassembled housings as workstation mats. The model in the foreground here doesn't even know the solder goes on the bottom side of the board. Wait a minute—neither of the models is even holding any solder, nor is there any to be seen anywhere around. They're just torturing the boards with branding irons! Arghh! WJI

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Brochures were printed in December in time for distribution at CES the first or second week of January and at Toy Fair in February. A few brochures were given to select publications in December against a promise to honor an embargo in order to accommodate their publishing lead times, and that constituted the year of first publication for copyright purposes. WJI

Wouldn't have slowed you down when you were twelve. WJI

The number actually reported back as sold to customers was over 1200; the total probably didn't exceed 1400. Not all purchasers were identified and the number of returned units was lower than expected. Mattel's lawyers designed the repurchase offer to be attractive and well-publicized enough to shield the company from liability, but management wasn't exactly heart-broken over units that weren't returned. However, more than 1400 had entered the distribution chain, and returning the unsold inventory of an abandoned product to Mattel wasn't exactly anyone's priority. All the retailers cared about was getting credit, which Mattel was quick to provide, and Mattel management's mindset was to move on from the mess as expeditiously as possible. So not all unsold inventory made it back to Mattel. WJI

Recollections are that the first copies of Popey didn't make it onto store shelves until just before Thanksgiving and that Tutankham and Super Cobra didn't make it in time for a 1983 release at all. Those were apparently first released in Italy, Tutankham in the latter half of 1984 and Super Cobra sometime after Tutankham. Do you know any different? WJI

Right, except that what you call the "Mattel" version was almost written at APh, probably by Rolfe. WTGJ is pretty feature-light compared to TRIVIA/KILLER programs written as introductory exercises at APh and Mattel. Jacobs was not working under Minkoff or Daglow's direct supervision and were probably anxious to get started on the real game as soon as possible. WJI

It's unfair to suggest a Trivia/Killer game is less than perfect. The Trivia/Killer games were throw-aways—they weren't supposed to be polished. They were "Hello world!" programs before "Hello World!" existed. You were given two weeks to play around, then moved on to a real game. I'd cringe if all of the drafts of papers I wrote in my youth were thrown open for public inspection. That being said, this particular program probably wasn't a training exercise. The author was probably just using KILLER.ASM as a test bed for testing out an animation sequence. WJI

The file was created by APh, as there were at that time no software development systems at Mattel. That particular file may well have been routed through Mattel (for example, it may have been handed to Dougherty, who at the time was one of Chandler's grips who was often at APh), but in general APh was giving Jerrold direct support. Without other evidence, you should not presume that all of the files on any particular disk were sent to Jerrold at the same time. WJI

The CP1600 was the original device designed by GI in partnership with Honeywell which Honeywell wanted to use as less-expensive PDP-11 replacement as part of its distributed control system concept. It was fabricated using GI's n-channel nitride process and required three power supply voltages, VDD (+12V), VCC (+5V) and VBB (-3V). The device was designed to be clocked at 5 MHz, but required special attention to be given to cooling to run at that speed and so was usually run slower. The part was packaged in ceramic. The first chip sets delivered to Mattel included CP1600's in ceramic packages. The CP1610 was the exact same die (the die is the little piece of silicon inside the package, the part consists of the die enclosed in a package), packaged in plastic. Plastic packages are cheaper. It could in principle be clocked at the same speed as the CP1600, again as long as you arranged to get rid of the heat. The CP1610A was silicon-gate ground-up reimplementation of the CP1600/CP1610. It required 5V only; otherwise the die was supposed to be a pad-for-pad replacement for the original. By pad I mean the tiny contact point on a die, not the package pins. When you package a die, you glue it to the center of a frame that contains pins and wire-bond the die pads to the parts of the frame that connect to the pins. You don't necessarily have to "bond out" unused signals. A particular die design can potentially have several bonding options. Every rectangular "chip" of silicon is called a die. Dice are manufactured on silicon wafers, which were about three or four inches in diameter at the time. The CP1610A used smaller transistors then the CP1610 and hence had a smaller die size, which means that you could fit more of them on a wafer. If you can fit more die on a wafer, the per-die cost drops. Secondly, every wafer has lattice defects, and dice that span a lattice defect won't work. The smaller the die, the less likely it is to straddle a lattice defect. So decreasing die size also increases yields. As you increase yields, the per-die cost of working dice drops. Since it costs a certain amount to process a wafer, increasing yields decreases the average device cost. Thirdly, smaller transistors use less power. Since here the function of the device remained the same the number of transistors didn't change, so the CP1610A uses a lot less power than the CP1600/CP1610. That means the CPU didn't need a heat sink, which further decreased the installed cost. The original Intellivision didn't use all 40 signals available on the CP1610. The single power supply design eliminated the need for two more: VDD (+12V) and VBB (-3V). Standard 0.5"-wide DIP (Dual in-line package) sizes were 48, 40, 28 and 24 pins; this brought the number of signals needed down to where the part could be packaged one standard package-size down. The cheaper 28-pin package CP1610A was the only bonding variant actually released; it brought out only those signals actually used by the Intellivision. The CP1600 was introduced in 1975. By 1982 technology had advanced considerably, and to remain competitive Mattel commissioned GI to produce the CP1610A as part of a cost-reduction effort. STIC 1A, designed by APh and produced by Toshiba, was the other part of the cost-reduced chip set. GI had working CP1610A samples in 1983, but by that time Mattel had so much unsold chip inventory on hand there was no reason to go into production. When Valeski finally started to run out of his chip inventory he went to Microchip, a company that had arisen Phoenix-like from the remains of General Instrument Microelectronics, which blew the ashes off the old masks and made him a few parts. Valeski ran out of CPUs before he ran out of graphics chipsets and produced a few Master Components that paired the new CP1610A with the old graphics chipsets, hence the INTV 1987 board. How's that for compatibility! Engineers are always pleased when things like that work out. When Valeski ran out of the old graphics chip sets he had to go to Toshiba to see if they too could locate their old design and fabricate some STIC 1A parts. They could and did. The parts didn't quite work right—they really needed one more design iteration. But APh suggested workarounds that required a few extra parts. Valeski was spending his own money and didn’t want to pay for another iteration of chip design, and so elected to include the parts for the workaround on the boards. This resulted in the INTV 1988 board that uses both the CP1610A and the STIC 1A, which many on this board like to call TutorVision boards, even though that's retro-naming (at least for those boards that didn't also use the WB Exec, but let's not get into those weeds here.) So I guess the real answer to your question, "What were the differences" should be, "Other than the price, you're not supposed to be able to tell." But it turns out that there is one very important difference that you can tell: the CP1610A could be clocked at twice the speed used in the original Intellivision and still maintain a reasonable temperature. It was slated to be paired with STIC 1B to create an enhanced Master Component that, among other things, could run at twice the speed of the original. The system was Code-named Aphix, the project to create a product based on APhix was code-named Coffee and the whole caboodle was on track to create what was teased as Intellivision III at the January 1983 Winter CES in Las Vegas. The CP1610A was not supposed to be the end of the line. A specification for a next generation part, dubbed the CP16000, had been prepared and a layout team recruited. The CP16000 used a wider instruction word, as was anticipated in the original CP1600 specification. If you look at early documents you will see that the high bits of the CP1600 instruction word were specified to be zero, with other values "reserved for future expansion." That was a warning not to put garbage there. The CP16000 was made backward compatible so future systems would be able to run the original Intellivision cartridges. There was also a specification for an enhanced graphics processor, the GP16000, which was backward compatible with STIC, STIC 1A and STIC 1B. WJI

Even more curiously, what's that thing the "engineer" is wearing around his neck, sticking out from his starched collar? WJI