Why is there little homebrew for this wonderful system?

[jaybird3rd]

These "glue chips", are they no longer made?

Mattel's original prototype boards used ordinary TTL chips, and nowadays I suppose a PLD or a microcontroller could be used. Either option would require a custom cartridge board, since you cannot simply retrofit the old boards with EPROMs the way you can with Atari cartridges, but this isn't as much of a limitation as it used to be now that Chad Schell has designed new boards for this purpose.

[Bruce Tomlin]

You misunderstand. That stuff was built into GI's (and Fairchild's) ROM chips, whereas "standard" chips don't have them.

 

I imagine one could be made with a single GAL chip and a couple of latch chips, but I've never taken the time to try.

[RangerG]

I honestly think the Intellivision controllers hurt its popularity. I have started to collect for the system several times. I love the gatefold boxes, game library, and great nostalgia with its rivalry with the 2600. But - those discs and the painful fire buttons just kill the experience for me. The 5200 and 7800 have alternatives if you don't like the controllers - but in all these years, nothing for the Intellivision.

[doppel]

I'd love to try homebrewing on the Intellivision, but I don't see any way of doing that while the hardware remains such an obstacle. I don't mean figuring out how to program it, I mean making cartridges for it, and so on.

[Rev]

I'd love to try homebrewing on the Intellivision, but I don't see any way of doing that while the hardware remains such an obstacle. I don't mean figuring out how to program it, I mean making cartridges for it, and so on.

 

the guys at beeslife could help you i know for sure. contact them!

[chrisbid]

the sad part is, at the intellivision keynote they the topic of homebrews came up and they liked what was being done, but wished there were original ideas being developed. they spoke about adding homebrews to their official intellivision compilations, but they could not do that with arcade ports.

[intvnut]

I'd love to try homebrewing on the Intellivision, but I don't see any way of doing that while the hardware remains such an obstacle. I don't mean figuring out how to program it, I mean making cartridges for it, and so on.

 

This is Joe Z. I have a cartridge design I'm putting into production. I am actively working on making it available to a wide audience so that anyone can self-publish with ease. I don't have the bandwidth to sell these personally as "Left Turn Only", so I'm researching other options. I'll still publish my own games under that banner.

 

As with so many things in this arena, it's a labor of love. I was hoping to be at this point over a year and a half ago, but the economy tanked, work went absolutely nuts, and I had to shelve things. The economy's back now, and there are a bunch of exciting, material developments the last few months. (Not just talk... I've got beaucoup $$$ out there in active production.)

 

Like David mentioned, we're not in a position to announce dates. But, I've moved forward with hardware production, so the rest is just a matter of time. If I can open up the capability to a wider audience, even better. I'm actively pursuing options there so that I'm not the bottleneck. My new design is flash based and in-circuit programmable, which makes it easier to fan out to a large audience. It also supports unimaginably large games (at least in terms of ROM size), so I doubt hardware should be much of a limitation ever again. If it is, I can make a better design. 16K bytes RAM, 240K bytes ROM though should be enough to hold people for a few years.... :-)

 

BTW, I did actually receive a couple entries to my programming contest. Not as many as I hoped, but a couple. Now that I'm moving to hardware production, I can make good on the prizes I wanted to offer. I had wanted to move to production in 2007 originally, slipped to 2008, and then had to totally can things until 2010 due to the economy (all my savings "disappeared") and an oppressive work situation. I'm back now. :-)

[+cmart604]

I'd love to try homebrewing on the Intellivision, but I don't see any way of doing that while the hardware remains such an obstacle. I don't mean figuring out how to program it, I mean making cartridges for it, and so on.

 

This is Joe Z. I have a cartridge design I'm putting into production. I am actively working on making it available to a wide audience so that anyone can self-publish with ease. I don't have the bandwidth to sell these personally as "Left Turn Only", so I'm researching other options. I'll still publish my own games under that banner.

 

As with so many things in this arena, it's a labor of love. I was hoping to be at this point over a year and a half ago, but the economy tanked, work went absolutely nuts, and I had to shelve things. The economy's back now, and there are a bunch of exciting, material developments the last few months. (Not just talk... I've got beaucoup $$$ out there in active production.)

 

Like David mentioned, we're not in a position to announce dates. But, I've moved forward with hardware production, so the rest is just a matter of time. If I can open up the capability to a wider audience, even better. I'm actively pursuing options there so that I'm not the bottleneck. My new design is flash based and in-circuit programmable, which makes it easier to fan out to a large audience. It also supports unimaginably large games (at least in terms of ROM size), so I doubt hardware should be much of a limitation ever again. If it is, I can make a better design. 16K bytes RAM, 240K bytes ROM though should be enough to hold people for a few years.... :-)

 

BTW, I did actually receive a couple entries to my programming contest. Not as many as I hoped, but a couple. Now that I'm moving to hardware production, I can make good on the prizes I wanted to offer. I had wanted to move to production in 2007 originally, slipped to 2008, and then had to totally can things until 2010 due to the economy (all my savings "disappeared") and an oppressive work situation. I'm back now. :-)

 

Exciting news Joe! Thanks for the update. I suspect you'll find there are a lot of us who are very happy to support whatever future projects you come out with...OK let's face it, we INTV fans are a bit jealous of the 2600, 7800 and CV homebrews that have been coming out. Not sure if you noticed a copy of Space Patrol just went for $202 and an LTO 4-tris went for $228 about a month ago so clearly there are folks out there who appreciate what you do. It's a bit embarrassing how many times I've said Space Patrol is a fantastic game and is simply one of the best INTV games that have been made period....and now I've said it again. Please keep us updated. Cheers.

[intvnut]

the sad part is, at the intellivision keynote they the topic of homebrews came up and they liked what was being done, but wished there were original ideas being developed. they spoke about adding homebrews to their official intellivision compilations, but they could not do that with arcade ports.

 

I was actually there when Keith made that remark after someone else asked about Space Patrol. It was kinda surreal, I must say. :-)

 

I will say this: Game design is hard. I have a lot of skills as a programmer and an engineer, but not so many as a game designer. This is why I value having David on my team so much, since it he's got a much better eye for it than I. Plus, there are some really good games I wanted to see on this system. Some of them are here now. :-)

 

I'm starting to work on some new game concepts myself. I'm hoping that making my cart design accessible to a larger audience will inspire others to bring their game concepts to Intellivision, including even ports of unique homebrews from other systems.

 

Someone else commented that Intellivision is harder to program than Atari. I forcefully disagree. The programming model for the Intellivision is closer to the Colecovision, since you need not write a "kernel" or time all your code tightly to display refresh. The STIC handles display refresh for you much as the VDP does in the CV. You also have a more powerful CPU (16 bits with 6 general purpose 16-bit registers) that, while not popular in its own right, has about as generic and approachable an instruction set as you could hope for. Here's a 100% complete "Hello World!" that doesn't rely on any EXEC functions for anything other than ISR dispatch (which is hardwired and unavoidable):

 

            ORG     $7000

START:      PROC
           MVII    #$2F0,  R6      ; Set stack pointer
           DIS
           CLRR    R4              ;
           MVII    #$360,  R1      ; \_ Clear memory, STIC, PSG
           CALL    FILLZERO        ; /

           CALL    PRINT           ; Print Hello World!
           DECLE   $7              ; white
           DECLE   $200 + 6*20 + 4
           STRING  "Hello World!", 0

           MVII    #ISR,   R0      ; \
           MVO     R0,     $100    ;  |_ Enable display
           SWAP    R0              ;  |
           MVO     R0,     $101    ; /

           EIS
           DECR    PC              ; Done!
           ENDP

ISR         PROC
           CLRR    R0
           MVO     R0,     $20     ; Enable display
           MVO     R0,     $28     ; Black background
           MVO     R0,     $2C     ; Black border
           MVI     $21,    R0      ; Color-stack mode
           JR      R5
           ENDP

FILLZERO    PROC
           CLRR    R0              ; Start out with R0 zeroed for FILLZERO
FILLMEM     MVO@    R0,     R4      ; Store R0 out at R4, and move along
           DECR    R1              ; Keep going until our count runs out
           BNEQ    FILLMEM
           JR      R5              ; Return to the caller.
           ENDP

PRINT       PROC
@@FLS:      MVI@    R5,     R1      ; Load format word from invoc. record
@@LS:       MVI@    R5,     R4      ; Load ptr to display loc from invoc record
@@S         
           B       @@1st           ; Get first char of string
@@tloop:    SUBI    #32,    R0      ; Shift ASCII range to charset
           SLL     R0,     2       ; Move it to position for BTAB word
           SLL     R0,     1
           ADDR    R1,     R0      ; Merge with color info
           MVO@    R0,     R4      ; Write to display
@@1st:      MVI@    R5,     R0      ; Get next character
           TSTR    R0              ; Is it NUL?
           BNEQ    @@tloop         ; --> No, keep copying then
          
           JR      R5
           ENDP

 

That said, if bAtari wants to bring something like bAtari BASIC to Intellivision to simplify things further, I'm all ears. :-) We do lack those sorts of toolkits, and I think having them would add to the number of homebrews.

Edited August 12, 2010 by intvnut

[doppel]

I'd love to try homebrewing on the Intellivision, but I don't see any way of doing that while the hardware remains such an obstacle. I don't mean figuring out how to program it, I mean making cartridges for it, and so on.

 

This is Joe Z. I have a cartridge design I'm putting into production. I am actively working on making it available to a wide audience so that anyone can self-publish with ease. I don't have the bandwidth to sell these personally as "Left Turn Only", so I'm researching other options. I'll still publish my own games under that banner.

 

As with so many things in this arena, it's a labor of love. I was hoping to be at this point over a year and a half ago, but the economy tanked, work went absolutely nuts, and I had to shelve things. The economy's back now, and there are a bunch of exciting, material developments the last few months. (Not just talk... I've got beaucoup $$$ out there in active production.)

 

Like David mentioned, we're not in a position to announce dates. But, I've moved forward with hardware production, so the rest is just a matter of time. If I can open up the capability to a wider audience, even better. I'm actively pursuing options there so that I'm not the bottleneck. My new design is flash based and in-circuit programmable, which makes it easier to fan out to a large audience. It also supports unimaginably large games (at least in terms of ROM size), so I doubt hardware should be much of a limitation ever again. If it is, I can make a better design. 16K bytes RAM, 240K bytes ROM though should be enough to hold people for a few years.... :-)

 

BTW, I did actually receive a couple entries to my programming contest. Not as many as I hoped, but a couple. Now that I'm moving to hardware production, I can make good on the prizes I wanted to offer. I had wanted to move to production in 2007 originally, slipped to 2008, and then had to totally can things until 2010 due to the economy (all my savings "disappeared") and an oppressive work situation. I'm back now. :-)

 

That's a shot in the arm for those of us like myself who aren't so hardware-inclined. :-)