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Intellivision Ebay Roundup


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You had me at Blue Whale!

 

I have finished uploading all the photos to my gallery album. Included and not previously mentioned is the Keyboard Basic, but as you can see from the photos, the box is pretty beat up. Also, I only have the manual and the cassette - the Basic cart is missing.

 

And one more thing, I also will be listing the Blue Whale that goes with all this stuff.

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I know I should not be surprised to see that there are over 50 watchers on the KC auction. After all, many people pay good money to go whale-watching.

Nice.

 

Was this Keyboard Component used for regular Intellivision game development at Mattel?

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Nice.

 

Was this Keyboard Component used for regular Intellivision game development at Mattel?

Yes, from Intellivisionlives.com - FUN FACT: All the money spent on the Keyboard Component didn't go totally to waste; as the ranks of the programmers swelled during 1982, development systems could not be assembled fast enough. The bottleneck was the hand-built Magus board -- the interface between the development computer and the Intellivision. Then some bright person realized that a Blue Whale would make a dandy development system! A slightly modified Keyboard Component (dubbed a Black Whale) would accept the compiled object code for a game serially to its internal RAM; that RAM, mapped to the same addresses as an Intellivision cartridge, would be read by the attached Master Component as if it were a cartridge.

 

While slower to download a game than a Magus board (which read data from the computer over parallel lines), the Black Whale proved to be a quick, cheap solution. By the middle of 1983, half of the development systems in Hawthorne and all of the development systems at Mattel Electronics France used Black Whales.

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I've been watching that one. Great for a collector who doesn't need the older rare box. Still pretty cool version at a decent price. I'd buy it if I didn't already have a stack of them :D

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I see them all the time buying a ton so they're obviously a big player. Just not sure if it's a collector or re-seller.

Without disclosing any identifying information, I can say that none of the auction winners currently have any items listed for sale on eBay - not that they could not be reselling on some other venue.

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I'll disclose that I am one of the winners (though not m***e) since a number of folks already know my eBay alias. I'm stoked. :-D

 

Congrats! Some nice items there. Since I'll never have a keyboard, I made the decision to never branch my collection out to the software some time back. That's why I traded away my CIB BASIC much like the one here only with the BASIC cart.

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I made a bid or two late in the game for the Keyboard Component. I would have gone higher but though I'd get in a bidding war so I stopped before I regretted it. Nice pickups all around.

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For future reference and searches, here is a listing of the recent keyboard component and the software sales:

 

Intellivision Keyboard Component - Powers on, shows on screen, non-functioning tape deck - Sold for $2,330

Conversational French - CIB - $331

Jack LaLanne's Physical Conditioning - Sealed - $347

Basic Data Storage - Sealed - $368

Crosswords 3 - Sealed - $204

Crosswords 1 - CIB - $255

Family Budgeting - CIB - $440

Basic Cassette and Cartridge - Box, manual and data cassette only (basic cartridge missing) box poor to fair condition - $135

 

So in 5 years when the next person selling asks what they are worth, there is at least some reference point :).

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