Planetfall prototype for Intellivision?

[decle]

Anyone heard of someone porting or writing a game called Planetfall for the Inty?

 

Hard4Games seems to have a couple of very homebrew handwired proto carts:

 

 

They look like they might be Inty t-cart type circuits using standard EPROMs butchered onto a stock cartridge PCB.  The EPROMs have 24 pins so they are probably 4K 2732s, this suggests the boards might be contemporary as more modern boards are likely to use larger 2764, 27128 or 27256s.  As there seem to be 4 EPROMs I think the boards will support games of up to 8K in size.  I've only skimmed the stream, but they don't seem to get very far or give a good description of the boards.

 

Before someone asks, at one point the host does mention the ROMs have been dumped.  Hopefully we will learn more in subsequent videos, and perhaps they hook up with Joe and we might be able to find out a bit more about the circuit.

 

I was a bit worried this might be a C64 cart (As we know C64 carts are physically similar to Inty ones and Planetfall is the name of a text adventure that was released on the C64).  However, this close up of the cartridge PCB does seem to show an Inty board, and at one point it is possible to read LSB / MSB on the EPROM stickers suggesting they are being paired to give a 16-bit data word required by the Inty:

 

 

Edited October 11, 2020 by decle

[Rev]

How can they concentrate with all the yapping in the background. 

[wolfy62]

I have never heard mention of this for the Intellivision. 

Just because I dont know in no way means it's not a real thing!

[+Steve Jones]

I spun quickly through the video, did they ever show any gameplay footage?

[+Lathe26]

No footage, but then again, all they got was a title screen so no much to show.

[Rev]

Very poorly presented with zero background info on where protos came from. 
 

Just people sitting around passing the PCB to each other and a continuity tester, drinking and eating snacks, and people blabbing small talk. 
 

Give us some kind of story about the history where they come from, a theory on their existence, anything. 
 

Probably fake or a hoax.

[mr_me]

Can't get passed the titlescreen.  Did they try it with the ecs computer module?

 

I wonder what the other prototype is; maybe it's the same developer.

[First Spear]

Being pessimistic, "Planetfall" is just some confusion about what is actually there since the speaker isn't familiar with the stuff. There is a contemporary strategy game with a name like that, maybe he's confusing that with Utopia. The actual Planetfall game is an Infocom text adventure (one of my favorites from back in the day), no way that could be ported to the Intellivision in the 1980s.

 

But I like to be optimistic!

 

[mr_me]

You don't think z-machine can be converted to intellivision?

[Games For Your Intellivision]

4 hours ago, mr_me said:

You don't think z-machine can be converted to intellivision?

A friend of mine is considering porting Z Machine to the Intellivision with ECS. 

[decle]

Hey Guys,

 

Tony at Hard4Games has posted an update on the prototype boards:

 

 

@intvnut, @Lathe26 and I have been working with Tony to try to understand quite what he has.  It's a bit intriguing.

 

First the bad news - the carts don't hold some long lost version of Infocom's text adventure.

 

The first cart is essentially a copy of the 1979 copyright version of Poker & Blackjack, with the title changed to "GEMINI GAMES+TOYS".  This is the only difference in the ROM and it plays exactly the same as the retail game:

 

 

The second cart is just weird.  It contains four 2K x 8-bit EPROMs.  @Lathe26 discovered that three of these ROMs come from the Intellivision retail version of Donkey Kong.  They contain the upper 2 bits in the address range $5000 - $57ff and all 10 bits from $5800 - $5fff.  The fourth EPROM contains the lower 8-bits the retail release of Pitfall! in the range $5000 - $57ff.  Like the Poker cart the only change is to title screen, which looks like this:

 

 

This means that the changes are limited to the single Pitfall! derived ROM.  The mismatch of ROMs is very strange.  Whilst it is not obvious (at least not to me) that this kind of mix and match should work, even as far as getting a title screen to work, it does explain why the game does not get any further.

 

The current tentative hypothesis is that these carts were part of an initial investigation into developing Intellivision titles.  They originate from an engineer (now sadly deceased) who worked for both Sanders Associates and Milton Bradley.

 

The boards themselves are a Frankenstein hybrid of retail PCBs and hand wired prototypes.  They remind me of lab boards I've hacked together when doing initial product development.  The fact that they use wire-wrap, rather than strip board or veroboard might suggest the developer was working in a commercial environment, rather than a hobbyist, as wire-wrap is quite a bit more expensive.  @Lathe26 is currently working to draw up the circuit diagrams.

 

If we consider the three games used on the ROMs we see something potentially interesting. Whilst the title screens on all three games could be changed with just a hex editor, and without the need to disassemble and reassemble the games there are some differences:

• Poker and Blackjack - as a Mattel title with a standard title screen, only the title and copyright can be easily be changed.  And it is not super obvious how to change the copyright date.
• Donkey Kong - it's obvious that DK doesn't use a Mattel title screen, and all the text on the screen can easily be changed.  However, the blank lines between the text can't.
• Pitfall! - is not as obvious that it has a non-Mattel screen.  However, when you examine the ROM, it is clear that essentially everything after the first three lines (everything from Activision onwards) is just text in the cartridge, including all the whitespace, and as such it can be changed with just an editor.

So does this represent development progression?  Starting with Poker, tinkering a bit, working out what can be done easily is quite limited, switching to Donkey Kong, finding more flexibility and finally looking at Pitfall!?  It will be interesting to see whether @Lathe26's work on the circuits shows a similar progression.

 

The other things to notice are firstly that although the lower part of Pitfall's title screen is effectively free-form text, the changes made largely adhere to the original layout:

 

 

As @Lathe26 observed, the longer Planetfall title is pushed to the left in order to maintain alignment with the (tm) rather than moving the trademark right by a character to centre everything.  However, the developers did understand the free-form nature of the screen as they made Planetfall longer than Pitfall! (this is not something that could be done with either Poker or Donkey Kong).

 

Secondly, the copyright date has been changed from Pitfall's 1982 to 1983, and this might be indicative of when this work was done.

 

If this was a third party's first baby steps into Intellivision development, to have put together these boards the developer must have had access to ROM images.  This suggests that they also developed, or had access to, a tool to dump the non-standard GI ROMs that the Intellivision uses.

 

So, on one hand the lack of a game on these boards is a tad disappointing.  However, they seem to provide an fascinating glimpse into the initial development work on Intellivision titles by a third party, and I think this is really cool.  I'm hoping we can find out more of the story behind their construction (for example, who they were done for and who Gemini Toys+Games was - the internet does not seem to be very forthcoming).  I suspect it might be very interesting.

 

[First Spear]

Hey all. Was any further experimentation fruitful?

 

[decle]

I believe that @Lathe26 drew up a partial circuit of one of the boards, based on the work done by Tony and his friends at Hard4Games and some images.  However, I think this is incomplete, but I'll leave it to @Lathe26 to say more on this.

 

The boards were originally owned by the late Herbert Schmitz. I did some digging into their possible origins at the start of May.  We're waiting on the thoughts of Herbert's family as to the veracity of the findings, so although I believe the facts below are accurate, the conclusions should be viewed as speculation.

 

We know that Herbert worked for Sanders Associates and followed Royden Sanders when he left to form Sanders Technology.  Herbert's family indicates that in the summer of 1976 Herbert was introduced to the toy manufacturer Milton Bradley (MB) through some work at Sanders.  Sometime between then and 1979 Herbert moved to work at MB.

 

In late 1979 the TI-99/4 was released.  Its 4 release titles were written by Milton Bradley.  This might seem strange, but MB were working on a console version of the Ti-99 called the GameVision.  In fact, in late 1978 Mattel had discussions with TI and MB about the Intellivision also being based on the same design, this is described on page 5 of the Intellivision History and Philosophy document at papaintellivision.com.  However, Mattel did their own thing with GI, and the GameVision console was dropped by MB.  Anyway, one of the GameVision branded TI-99/4 launch titles was ZeroZap, which is credited to Herb.  It looks like it was the standout launch title, although the bar was not the highest.  The other three were Yahtzee, Hang Man and Connect-4.  Interestingly Herbert's son, Karl is also credited as writing a couple of TI-99 games, Blackjack & Poker (no shifty eyed dealer) and Hustle.

 

The trail then seems to go quiet for a bit.  However, by 1982 MB fancy a slice of the console market again.  They are reported to be working internally on a game console called Gemini this seems to have been intended to be games / educational console that could be expanded into a computer.  The Gemini was unrelated to the GameVision, being based on the Motorola 6809 CPU rather than the TI TMS9900. Its unique selling point was that it had voice recognition, and not in a minimalist, TV POWWW! volume switch way.  The Gemini had to be trained by the user and recognised different words.  Anyway, it seems that MB's management got cold feet when they saw the Colecovision some time in the first half 1982 and pulled the plug.  The Gemini got quite close to being released before management cancelled the project, here are some images of the prototype...

 

 

So in mid/late 1982 MB's engineers were casting around looking to see how they could repurpose the Gemini technology.  They hit on turning it into a peripheral for the TI-99/4a of all things, presumably because of their existing links with TI.  The result looks suspiciously over complex, like the Intellivision Keyboard Component. It retains the 6809 processor, along with 4K RAM, voice recognition, a speech synthesizer and two joystick ports.  It's nearly a console in its own right, but without the video chip, instead it communicates with the host 99/4a using the TI's bi-directional joystick port!?

 

MB demonstrated their TI-99 wonder peripheral at the winter CES in January 1983. Among a load of other companies, Atari see what will become the Milton Bradley MBX and are impressed, so much so that they do a deal with MB to produce a version for both the Atari 2600 and 5200 to be called the Voice Commander.  However, like so many things at the great Fuji, the project is cancelled and doesn't make it to market.  MB were not happy with this turn of events and ended up suing Atari.

 

MB finally scratched the game console itch in early 1983 when they bought GCE, manufacturers of the Vectrex, after it achieved strong initial sales following its launch in November 1982.  It seems likely that MB's relationship with Jay Smith had something to do with this (his company had developed the earlier Microvision which was also sold by MB).  Interestingly, although probably coincidentally, the Vectrex is also based around the 6809 CPU used by the MBX.  Milton Bradley released the MBX for the TI-99/4a in late 1983, along with 10 games (the Gemini's edutainment roots are apparent in the four "Bright Beginnings" titles released alongside the six "Arcade Plus" games).  You can see it working, complete with voice recognition, in this video:

 

 

At this point the facts end and we head off into speculation...

 

My hypothesis is that whilst developing the MBX from the ashes of the Gemini, and possibly whilst working on the 2600 Voice Commander, MB looked to see what it would take to do a similar peripheral for the Intellivision.  I suspect these prototype boards represent their early work on that project.  The software for the TI-99 MBX was distributed on cartridges that plugged into the host computer and ran on its CPU, so to do the same would require MB to write Intellivision games.  You may ask what the point was of the 6809 in the MBX if the games ran on the TI/99?  Well, the 6809 ran baked-in firmware to manage the various peripherals within the MBX.  The TI-99 host sent the MBX high level commands to train for a voice command, listen for a voice command, say a phoneme, read a joystick, etc., and then the 6809 program would scurry around doing all the low level bit banging to actually action the request.

 

Undoubtedly creating an MBX for the Intellivision would have been harder than for either the TI-99/4A or the Atari consoles.  In addition to the crazy GI ROMs and the proprietary EXEC, the Intellivision's controllers were hardwired and are not bi-directional which would have made interfacing the MBX a bit more challenging.  And then there is the fact that the Mattel already had the Intellivoice in the marketplace, its more characterful voices would undoubtedly have eroded some of the advantage of the MBX.

 

Anyway, parking these concerns, MB would need to have written some Intellivision software to get an Inty MBX to market and these prototypes might have been part of that work, with the Gemini name on the title screen being a reference to the shelved console that was the origin of the technology.

 

 

Now, as Roger Murtaugh might say "that's pretty f'in thin", and I wouldn't disagree with him.  It's held together by baling wire of

 

Herbert Schmitz -> Milton Bradley -> Gemini Console -> Gemini Title Copyright

 

and let's be honest, Gemini isn't exactly an unusual name for a failed project.  I was hoping that MB might have been known as MB Games & Toys in some context or other, but I can't find any evidence of that (they seem to have universally been known as The Milton Bradley Company).

 

So there we are, it is what it is, a plausible, if "thin" hypothesis.  Hopefully we will get some more input from someone who knew Herbert or worked at MB and we can confirm or refute it.

 

If you want to know more about the Milton Bradley MBX, I recommend this AA thread...

 

 

[+Lathe26]

12 hours ago, decle said:

I believe that @Lathe26 drew up a partial circuit of one of the boards, based on the work done by Tony and his friends at Hard4Games and some images.  However, I think this is incomplete, but I'll leave it to @Lathe26 to say more on this.

 

 

The only item I will add is that a partial schematic was made but there wasn't enough to make a full schematic.