Shock Vision games are ROM variants

[m-crew]

I realize now that I need to win the lotto to ever catch up collecting Intellivision!

Win it big, so you can share with the rest of us here...

Edited June 20, 2016 by m-crew

[+BBWW]

Win it big, so you can share with the rest of us here...

 

 

 

When I win big!! Spiker for Everyone!

[+intellivotion]

is there anybody who can lend me a Shock Vision Adapter?

 

Shock Vision carts do not work without adapter, right?

[decle]

Were the Shock Vision cartridges ever catalogued and the ROMs made available? I notice further up this thread that some of them were dumped last year.

 

Does anyone have a feel for how insanely hard the carts and adapter are to obtain? I notice that there are no Intellivision Shock Vision titles on mercadolivre.com.br at the moment.

 

 

Cheers

 

decle

Edited August 17, 2017 by decle

[+cmart604]

is there anybody who can lend me a Shock Vision Adapter?

 

Shock Vision carts do not work without adapter, right?

Remind me before PRGE about this and I'll bring you one

[+cmart604]

Were the Shock Vision cartridges ever catalogued and the ROMs made available? I notice further up this thread that some of them were dumped last year.

 

Yes, yes, I know it is a copyright infringement, but infringing a pirate when I have multiple legitimate copies of the 35 year old original is surely a special case. And it would be nice to have them for completeness.

 

Does anyone have a feel for how insanely hard the carts and adapter are to obtain? I notice that there are no Intellivision Shock Vision titles on mercadolivre.com.br at the moment.

 

 

Cheers

 

decle

They're pretty darned hard to find. I believe I've identified over 40 of them (my list isn't near by).

[+intvsteve]

Maybe we should try to dump some of these at PRGE?

[+cmart604]

Maybe we should try to dump some of these at PRGE?

I'm happy to bring them

[+intellivotion]

Remind me before PRGE about this and I'll bring you one

THANK YOU!

[+cmart604]

THANK YOU!

You bet! ??

[+intellivotion]

I need a Shock Vision Adapter to test these:

 

[+cmart604]

I need a Shock Vision Adapter to test these:

 

4 Shock Vision-1.JPG

Sweet! Is that four games or eight?

[+intellivotion]

Sweet! Is that four games or eight?

it's four games, all with instruction sheet, which is the coolest thing, imo

 

EDIT:

[+Lathe26]

I love the red/blue/silver sticker on the lower right cartridge. I wasn't aware of that one. Did all AD&D Cloud Mountain carts come that way or is it a variant?

[+intellivotion]

Lathe26, here's a clue that the red/blue/silver label is a variant:

 

 

if the one in the picture is actually A.D.& D. Cloudy Mountain, it has a standard black label

 

EDIT: the games in this picture are not mine

[mr_me]

Looks like swords and serpents.

[+intellivotion]

I've been searching with my good eye closed... you're right, mr_you

[+cmart604]

it's four games, all with instruction sheet, which is the coolest thing, imo

 

EDIT:

4 Shock Vision-5.JPG

Yah those instructions are even harder to find, especially in good condition. A few of mine are fairly beaten up

[decle]

Looking through the various lists and images of the 40 or so known Shock Vision carts there seems to be an odd game out, Pinball.

All the other games pictured are 4K or 8K titles with a standard memory map of $5000-$6FFF. Pinball is a 12K title with an additional 4K at $D000. Which brings us to this picture, posted by ricardowilmers:

 

If Google Translate is correct "só Pinball" written on the adapter means "just Pinball"; i.e. this suggests there might be at least two different Shock Vision adapters. One for 4K and 8K titles and a different one required for larger titles. The "só Pinball" verison of the adapter would probably play the smaller games too, perhaps Ricardo could confirm that? It is also interesting that, judging by the holes in the label, the "só Pinball" adapter has been opened up.

The need for two adapters makes sense as the address decoding of a single block of memory done for the earlier 4K and 8K games would have been simpler.

We can also see in this image that the Shock Vision cartridges make use of a 36 pin connector and the adapter probably has at least 4 standard looking ICs:



It is not clear which version of the adapter this is, but the "só Pinball" version of the adapter seems to have the same connector, as shown here:

 

Again this makes sense as the standard ROMs inside the carts would require 10 (or possibly 16) data lines, at least 13 address pins and a few more lines for power and chip selects. Shock Vision probably did not use the 44pin connectors of the Intellivision because they did not want people accidentally plugging Inty carts into the adapter and damaging things.

This information means that we can predict which types of games we are unlikely to see a Shock Vision version of. These are carts with:

• Non-standard address layout - e.g. early Imagic Games like Atlantis and Demon Attack, some Atari games like Centipede and most later INTV games
• Bankswitching ROMs - WSMLB
• Large code bases - It is unclear whether the "só Pinball" Shock Vision Adapter could handle 16K titles with a standard layout like Bump N Jump or He-Man, but it is unlikely the later INTV games would not work through a combination of large and non-standard address layouts.
• RAM on board - Chess

Pretty much anything else goes and would have been trivial for Shock Vision to dump and put on a cart.

Here is the list of 40 Shock Vision games I've eyeballed from the thread to date:

 

 

 

4K Games
Armor Battle
Basketball
Bowling
Boxing
Dragonfire
Frogger
Horse Racing
Pitfall
Sea Battle
Skiing
SNAFU
Space Battle
Stampede
Star Strike
Star Wars

6K/8K Games (6K game probably put on an 8K ROM, some Mattel copies are similar)
AD&D I (Cloudy Mountain)

8K Games
AD&D II (Treasure of Tarmin)
Beamrider
Dracula
Ice Treck (sic)
Lady Bug
Loco-Motion
Mission X
Nova Blast
Popeye
Q-Bert
River Raid
Safecracker
Sewer Sam
Shark Shark
Space Spartans
Sub Hunt
Swords and Serpents?
Tron Maze-A-Tron
Tropical Trouble
Truckin
Venture
White Water
Zaxxon

12K Games - The Odd Man Out
Pinball

 

 

 

It is interesting the games that have not turned up in Shock Vision form, for example big hits like Astrosmash!, Lock N Chase, Night Stalker and Tron Deadly Discs are missing. And where is Soccer? This is Brazil after all! Meanwhile, more obscure titles like Stampede and Sewer Sam have been found.

 

As always, nice pictures of hardare internals from Shock Vision owners would be appeciated

 

 

Cheers

 

decle

Edited March 21, 2018 by decle

[+Lathe26]

Great detective work! I had never noticed that "so Pinball" was a commonplace sticker. I noticed mine had it when I got it, but didn't pay too much attention to that fact.

 

If it weren't for multi-carts like the CuttleCart 3 and LTO FLASH or the single-game carts currently used with the homebrews, we'd be stuck with burning ROM chips for new games and forced to use T-cards and Shock Adapters (the latter being easier to purchase but that's not saying much).

[+intvsteve]

Thanks for the list! I've updated the basic entries in the database for the website, but have no images yet, either.

[+cmart604]

Thanks for the list! I've updated the basic entries in the database for the website, but have no images yet, either.

I think I know of a solution ?

[+Lathe26]

Ok... first off, I don't think I have a similar adapter "Só Pinball". I think that is the same adapter (photo taken before it got to my hands).

 

Since the screws are exposed, I decided to open it up. Based on the limited amount of visibility, the below is my analysis so far. Feel free to point out mistakes or erroneous assumptions.

 

---------------------------

 

The plastic case is the same as the games, except that the case is 2 pieces (top and bottom) instead of 3 since it is missing the end-cap piece of plastic.

 

It is difficult to backwards engineer the board since the circuit board is encased in some glob of material that adheres and obscures the board itself (similar in function to the goo for Glob-Top Chips). The material is light brown, gritty in texture, heavy, and is hard with a slight brittleness. There is also a possibility that the chips themselves had their part labels removed since removing the material with a razor blade only revealed a black surface (alternatively, I might have ruined the label doing this).

 

There might be 2 versions of the adapter: the ordinary board and the "Só Pinball" board. I own the latter. A red patch wire is visible near the Intellivision male edge connector. This is not seen in an online photo of a different adapter that likely is an ordinary board.

 

The board has 6 chips on it. All are DIP packages that are 16-pin and maybe 14-pin (some chips are too obscured to be sure). They could be 7400-series parts.

 

The board has a 36-pin male edge connector for the Shock Vision cartridges. It is assumed that it is decoding the Intellivision / CP1600 bus into a standard ROM chip bus (i.e. the game cartridge might just a board with only ROM chips). If so, at a minimum, it contains the following signals:

• 1x +5V (or more)

• 1x GND (or more)

• 10x data lines (maybe 16)

• 12x address lines for 4K of address space (could be a little more or a little less, but not likely 16 due to the "Só Pinball" patch wire)

• 3x chip select lines (or more). These would be the 0x5xxx, 0x6xxx, and 0xDxxx ranges (the latter only present in the "Só Pinball" variant).

• 9x unaccounted for pins

The Intellivision edge connector has the following signals:

• BDIR & BC1 output (note that BC2 is missing!)

• D0 thru D15

• Loopback BDIR, BC1, & BC2 input and output (not connected to any chips)

• MCLK, ~RESET, & Ext Video (original Inty pin) are tied together with a fat trace that is typical of +5V or GND. Since ~RESET an active low signal, MCLK has a 5.6K inline resistor, and Ext Video has a pull up resistor, it is assumed that these are all tied to +5V.

Given that only BDIR and BC1 are decoded, then the board (without using a state machine) decodes the following bus phases:

• NACT (No Action, 000) and IAB (Interrupt Address to Bus, 010). I assume the adapter treats IABs as if they are NACTs (ignores them), especially since the EXEC ROM handles the IAB phase for new program counter assertion.

• DTB (Data To Bus, 011) and ADAR (Address Data to Address Register, 010). I assume that the adapter does not handle ADAR properly since DTB must be supported for basic ROM reading to work. This means direct-mode instructions might be unsupported. Trivial circuit implementations would cause bus contention on a Direct-Mode-Read since this bus sequence has both ADAR and DTB (slightly more complex circuits could work around this...).

• BAR (Bus to Address Register, 100) and DWS (Data Write Strobe, 110). I assume that that the adapter does not handle DWS reads since BAR must be supported for basic ROM reading to work. An artifact of this would be during a DWS that board would latch the data being writting into its own address latch, but this likely would be harmless.

• DW (Data Write, 101) and INTAK (Interrupt Acknowledge, 111). I assume that either the adapter is ROM-only or that data for RAM must latch the data during the DW phase. The Intellivision internally remaps INTAK to BAR so the adapter never sees it, thus DW vs INTAK bus phases don't get confused.

 

 

[+cmart604]

Ok, two things....what in the actual f*ck is that goop all over the board?!?! Please tell me that isn't 30+ year old man j*zz! Secondly, as you were describing the colour and texture I swear in my brain the next line was going to be

"And it tastes like..."

???

[+nanochess]

It must be a paste serving as anti-copy protection