Intellivision Keyboard Component Emulation

[+nurmix]

 

 

A 4-track cassette recorder? They were very popular among musicians and DJs.

 

-dZ.

Yep. I had a couple in the late '80s / early '90s. Both from Tascam. In the later days of using them, I'd put SMPTE timecode on one track, and an external sync box would lock whatever was on tape to my MIDI sequencer. Kind of a pain, but this was before multi-track digital recording on computers was a readily available (affordable) thing. I still have a drawer full of 4-track master tapes, but don't have the recorders any more.

 

 

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Edited December 16, 2016 by nurmix

[Games For Your Intellivision]

I wasn't saying that NOBODY has them, but they aren't common items in everybody's house. I've never owned one, nor did I know of anyone who has except for Frank, except now I guess you two guys.

 

I'll try and put Frank in touch with Alex.

[+DZ-Jay]

I wasn't saying that NOBODY has them, but they aren't common items in everybody's house. I've never owned one, nor did I know of anyone who has except for Frank, except now I guess you two guys.

 

I'll try and put Frank in touch with Alex.

 

 

That's fine. I just was letting you know that they can be acquired. I've seen plenty of them on E-bay, and they are still being sold in second-hand stores. On a pinch, you can get one easily.

 

-dZ.

[Rev]

I'd rather have a TR-808 drum machine. :-)

[+DZ-Jay]

I'd rather have a TR-808 drum machine. :-)

 

Had one of those too. Got it now emulated on a Mac and on the iPad, along with the 909 too.

 

-dZ.

[Rev]

How about an intv version of TR-808. Make it so.

[+nurmix]

An original good condition TR-808 fetches more money today than a CIB Keyboard Component.

 

There, I brought it back on topic!

 

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Games For Your Intellivision]

From my understanding, "Super Football" originally came from Dan Blitz....therefore, it is possible (likely) that Frank already has a dump of the tape. I'll double check with him on that.

[Games For Your Intellivision]

Frank reports that he believes that he has a dump of Super Football already!

[Tempest]

Does anyone have a good page about the keyboard component detailing all the known programs and maybe some screenshots? It has always interested me.

[mr_me]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5UfAiXP3E-s

 

I think this is a video of the actual keyboard component demonstration tape. Notice the high res text overlayed black jack and space battle with instructions to hit the space bar. Its an interactive demo. The stock charting software in the demo was never released. I think the voice narration is playing through the keyboard component. There is another early Mattel video that uses a mockup of the keyboard component.

 

Does anyone have a fully working keyboard component? Thats why this emulation project is so great.

 

There's a screen shot of Super Football in the 1980 brochure you can see at the link below. I think its a mockup.

http://www.intellivisionbrasil.com/Menu_Catalogos.htm

Edited December 17, 2016 by mr_me

[Games For Your Intellivision]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5UfAiXP3E-s

 

I think this is a video of the actual keyboard component demonstration tape. Notice the high res text overlayed black jack and space battle with instructions to hit the space bar. Its an interactive demo. The stock charting software in the demo was never released. I think the voice narration is playing through the keyboard component. There is another early Mattel video that uses a mockup of the keyboard component.

 

Does anyone have a fully working keyboard component? Thats why this emulation project is so great.

 

I saw a working Keyboard Component running the demo tape at CGE at the Intellivision Productions booth a number of years ago.

[+intvsteve]

Does anyone have a good page about the keyboard component detailing all the known programs and maybe some screenshots? It has always interested me.

 

In my dreams!

[Knarfian]

Happy New Year everyone! This is Frank Palazzolo and I just wanted to chime in on this thread. The tape images I am working with came from Dan Blitz's collection, which eventually was sold to Alex Pace. I used two different systems to do the dumps - initially I used a "Gen 1" simple stereo cassette player with two passes. The "Gen 2" system I did consisted of a TASCAM 4-track player/recorder which I modded, working with a data acquisition system. Unfortunately, I didn't get to dump everything with the "Gen 2" system, however. So, I do have recordings of "Super Football", as well as other tapes mentioned on the internet.

 

You would think I have all the data I need - but some of the cassettes had some damage, and the system I cobbled together back then wasn't perfect. I am going through the images now, recovering and verifying the data with some python scripts and by hand as needed. I'll post a link soon with the list of images, and their status as far as recovery goes. I may need help with image recovery at some point - and it may be worth trying to re-acquire some of the images eventually. But I don't even know which ones at this point.

 

So far I have recovered 3 images in their entirety - Family Budgeting, Geography Challenge, and Crosswords1. I haven't run the last 2 in an emulator yet. Can't wait to try it though

 

I am upgrading the emulation in MAME as well, so that it can run the various programs. I believe the emulation of the BASIC programs is complete - I just need to get it back into a recent build of MAME. Emulation of the assembly programs, Physical Conditioning, Conversational French, etc. will probably need some more work in MAME to run properly.

 

Thanks for all the interest - I'm glad to be working on something again that people want to see

 

-Frank

[mthompson]

Frank: Thanks for posting your update here and giving us some info about your work. I'm excited that we may finally get to see what some of this software was designed to bring to the Intellivision experience.

[mr_me]

The KC BASIC rom file can be found here (thanks Frank). https://github.com/mist64/msbasic/tree/master/orig

 

You can find the mame intellivision/kc system roms at one of those rom sharing sites. To load the basic rom in mame, first press "scroll lock" to change keyboard emulation, and then "tab" to bring up the menu that lets you load a rom file (use cartridge 2 or 3).

 

edit:

no support for tape images yet; so you have to type in your own programs

Edited January 4, 2017 by mr_me

[Knarfian]

I wanted to give a quick update to this forum.

 

I have been actively working on restoring the tape images I made so long ago, as well as trying to get the emulation going.

 

In addition to the 3 BASIC programs I mentioned in the last update:

• Family Budgeting
• Crosswords 1
• Crosswords 3

I finished restoring the data for:

• Data Cassette (formatted tape for saving your own BASIC programs)
• Physical Conditioning

And I have partially finished:

• Conversational French

So far, the error-correction coding layer on the tapes appears to have been good enough to support full restoration(!)

 

To get things to run in the emulator, I basically need to:

1) Remaster the error-free (hopefully) data into new 4-track .wav files. (Python script)

2) Add support to MAME for the tape drive. In the last week, I added skeleton support for loading tape images. I hope to have partial emulator support for the tape drive soon.

 

I will continue to post updates here.

 

-Frank

 

 

[intvdave]

I wanted to give a quick update to this forum. ...

 

 

This is exciting news Frank!!!! Thank you for the update!

[+nurmix]

That's fantastic, Frank! Your hard work on this is appreciated!

 

 

Sent from my Keyboard Component using Jack's Conversational Intelli-talk cassette

[mr_me]

I wanted to give a quick update to this forum.

 

I have been actively working on restoring the tape images I made so long ago, as well as trying to get the emulation going.

 

In addition to the 3 BASIC programs I mentioned in the last update:

• Family Budgeting
• Crosswords 1
• Crosswords 3

I finished restoring the data for:

• Data Cassette (formatted tape for saving your own BASIC programs)
• Physical Conditioning

And I have partially finished:

• Conversational French

So far, the error-correction coding layer on the tapes appears to have been good enough to support full restoration(!)

 

To get things to run in the emulator, I basically need to:

1) Remaster the error-free (hopefully) data into new 4-track .wav files. (Python script)

2) Add support to MAME for the tape drive. In the last week, I added skeleton support for loading tape images. I hope to have partial emulator support for the tape drive soon.

 

I will continue to post updates here.

 

-Frank

 

Is it possible to take your .wav file (or even an original KC cassette) and reproduce a KC cassette with standard audio cassette equipment and audio cassettes. I'm thinking there's more than a few people that have KCs but no cassettes.

 

Edit: My understanding is that one difference between a KC cassette and an audio cassette is a KC cassette doesn't have the plastic leader. Is there any reason a regular audio cassette couldn't be used?

Edited April 17, 2018 by mr_me

[Knarfian]

Physically, the tapes are not much different from ordinary cassettes. The leaders would need to be transparent so that the "end of tape" detection (photodetector) would work. They do seem to come in widely varying lengths.

 

The issues with creating new tapes:

 

A) We need fully remastered images. (I am working on it.)

B) You would need to use a 4-track recorder capable of recording all 4 channels at once.

C) There is an issue with the way ordinary recorders work. There is a generally a DC-blocking filter (usually a capacitor in series) in an audio channel, which causes some distortion of the waveforms. It's not clear right now if modifying the recorder would be necessary to make it work or not. I will probably do a post in the near future to illustrate this.

 

Another way forward would be to make a solid-state replacement for the drive (and probably the tape drive interface board) itself. The interface is a simple 20-pin header connector, which I have fully documented. (I am currently playing around with an Arduino connected to mine.) It would be possible in the near future to use something like an Teensy3.5 board to with a small touchscreen to replace the whole thing.

 

Of course, if you could put the whole KC on a cartridge...but one thing at a time...

 

-Frank

[+Steve Jones]

On 4/17/2018 at 5:25 PM, Knarfian said:

Physically, the tapes are not much different from ordinary cassettes. The leaders would need to be transparent so that the "end of tape" detection (photodetector) would work. They do seem to come in widely varying lengths.

 

The issues with creating new tapes:

 

A) We need fully remastered images. (I am working on it.)

B) You would need to use a 4-track recorder capable of recording all 4 channels at once.

C) There is an issue with the way ordinary recorders work. There is a generally a DC-blocking filter (usually a capacitor in series) in an audio channel, which causes some distortion of the waveforms. It's not clear right now if modifying the recorder would be necessary to make it work or not. I will probably do a post in the near future to illustrate this.

 

Another way forward would be to make a solid-state replacement for the drive (and probably the tape drive interface board) itself. The interface is a simple 20-pin header connector, which I have fully documented. (I am currently playing around with an Arduino connected to mine.) It would be possible in the near future to use something like an Teensy3.5 board to with a small touchscreen to replace the whole thing.

 

Of course, if you could put the whole KC on a cartridge...but one thing at a time...

 

-Frank

Hi Frank, did you ever make any more progress on this? Almost 3 years since last update so I was just wondering.

[Walter Ives]

On 12/14/2016 at 9:27 AM, mr_me said:

Wasn't there an unreleased "Super Football" for the keyboard component.

Super Football was still under development when the keyboard component was cancelled. Since it wasn't finished, referring to it as "unreleased" is a stretch. Among other things it had a play editor for 16 different teams/coaches, instant replay, player auctions with a fixed budget and more.

One must even be circumspect in the use of the term "unfinished." For example, the Takeover game that's floating around was the result of an investigation. You can't legitimately call it "unreleased" because it was never finished. You can't even legitimately call it "unfinished" because there was never a commitment to taking it beyond the investigation stage. Furthermore, it was on the list of possible game ideas to develop further for the Intellivision III because the higher resolution graphics might have made the game viable.

On 12/14/2016 at 9:27 AM, mr_me said:

Wasn't there an unreleased "Super Football" for the keyboard component. It's code may have been repurposed to Super NFL for ecs or not.

Not.

 

On 12/14/2016 at 7:25 PM, mr_me said:

The KC basic has no peek/poke and no way to program Intellivision graphics other than the preset KC character graphics.

BASIC runs on the 6502 side, so Microsoft's PEEK and POKE functions couldn't have addressed the STIC or GRAM. Special versions of PEEK and POKE that addressed the CP1600 side were considered. Had they been implemented they would have had to block until the next vertical retrace and so would have run very slowly. But Microsoft BASIC was a stopgap measure. See next comment.

 

On 12/14/2016 at 7:25 PM, mr_me said:

There's a copy of the Keyboard Component BASIC Introduction guide here. http://www.beeslife.com/intvlibrary

 

The KC basic has no peek/poke and no way to program Intellivision graphics other than the preset KC character graphics. The character set has some graphic characters that break a character into six blocks. So it effectively turns the 39x24 hi res monochrome character display into a 78x72 block display. There's a BASIC comparison here. http://www.pagetable.com/?p=46

 

My understanding is that they were planning a second version of BASIC that would allow people to program Intellivision graphics. But there is no improvement to Intellivision graphic resolution in the Keyboard Component or the Tutorvision other than the hi res monochrome text the Keyboard Component adds.

Your understanding is correct. BASIC II was actually completed and even adapted for the Intellivision III. It included an EXEC that handled controller input and animation. Users could read and write GRAM and BACKTAB, initiate an object move to a given position with sequencing and write and designate service routines to be called on events like arrival, controller input, timeouts or collisions. It included object oriented concepts, implementing syntax like OBJ[3].COLOR=BLUE to set the color bit field and OBJ[2]=OBJ[3] to copy a whole object. Sample programs that put up fairly complex backgrounds and allowed each of the controllers to control a running man were included.

On 12/16/2016 at 3:12 AM, mr_me said:

Alex also has a couple of tapes marked demonstration, a couple of unmarked tapes, and one that says 'dont record 1'. They could be blank, or they could have the disco dancing tutorial software. : )

When a tape cassette being rewound at high speed reaches the beginning, the motors are brought to an immediate stop by the tension on the tape. Wham! No, more like WHAM! When the first unit of the Keyboard Component was assembled one of the engineers saw this and said, "Yikes. That's not a very nice thing to do to that tape. I wonder if that could stretch the first foot of tape or something and cause problems in the field." He called in his buddies to see. After giving it a few moments thought, they decided, "Nah, the tolerances are such that it should work just fine." But being the outstanding, responsible, diligent and good-looking engineers they were they shared their observations with their manager. That manager conferred with Chandler and, in the world's first recorded instance of a Reverse Feynman Gap, the two decided to temporarily institute a policy of not recording data on the first foot of production cassettes pending testing to determine whether there really was a problem. Testing wasn't started immediately because, well, there was only the one unit. That policy filtered down to Baum's group as "don't record on record 1" of the first run of BASIC cassettes. But as long as the duplicating house left a foot or so of blank tape before laying down the data track there was no concern. APh, ever practical, solved the problem by inserting a few seconds of filler material at the front of the next batch of tapes.

On 4/17/2018 at 11:41 AM, mr_me said:

My understanding is that one difference between a KC cassette and an audio cassette is a KC cassette doesn't have the plastic leader. Is there any reason a regular audio cassette couldn't be used?

You can't use a regular audio cassette because either (a) it doesn't contain a pre-recorded Intellivision data track or (b) if it does it's pirated, and you wouldn't stoop so low.

[whbinder]

On 3/22/2021 at 5:31 AM, Steve Jones said:

Hi Frank, did you ever make any more progress on this? Almost 3 years since last update so I was just wondering.

I'd also love an update on this.

[+DZ-Jay]

On 12/16/2016 at 5:45 PM, Rev said:

How about an intv version of TR-808. Make it so.

Sorry for the necro-bump, but I just saw this old post …

 

As requested, the venerable TR-808, deliciously interpreted by the Intellivision PSG. 😁

 

 

   dZ.