Sylvania and Tandyvision Owners Help?

[First Spear]

Can anyone with a GTE and/or Tandyvision console comment on how much they like it, played it, or other memories?

 

Thanks.

 

 

[BassGuitari]

My first Intellivision (and just the second-ever system I acquired when I started collecting, actually...120+ systems ago!) was a Sylvania. It was cool because it was one of my first first-hand experiences with "Golden Age"/Pre-NES consoles. Compared to the 16/32/64-bit systems and PC games I was familiar with, it was so foreign and interesting to me, with the disc/keypad controllers, the weird little cartridges that plugged into the side, and the games themselves. So the Intellivision, along with my Odyssey 2, was one of the gateways to classic console gaming for me.

 

I've since collected every major variant of the Intellivision except for the Super Video Arcade--including the Tandyvision. My memories of them are sort of interchangeable, I guess, since they're all the same console (except for the Intellivision II, which is still close enough). I always admire all the woodgrain on the Tandyvision, and the fire buttons on mine are really nice as Intellivision buttons go. One Tandyvision-specific memory I have isn't an actual memory of the console itself, but early on in my collecting career--probably not too long after I got my original Sylvania--when I was researching and reading about classic systems, I idly wondered to myself how/why somebody would have purchased a Tandy instead of an Intellivision (or Atari or Odyssey or whatever), and what it would have been like having that as your main game system.

[rietveld]

Here we go, but remember you aked.

 

I am a Tandyvision owner because my first computer was a Radio Shack Color Computer 2 in 1984 when I was 12 years old.

 

My dad was a regular customer of the RS stores and when it was time to buy me my first computer he naturally picked a Tandy (coco2 16k) product over the Commodores (64) that all of my friends were getting.  I used this computer every day to learn BASIC and upgraded several time to where, by 1991, I was the proud owner of 512k Tandy color Computer 3 with dual drives, RGB monitor,and pretty much every add on that Radio Shack sold.

 

By 1991 I was in college and moved on to a PC, or more specifically a Packard Bell 386 SX running MSDOS

 

Fastforward to 2015 

 

I found a RadioShack coco2 computer at a Value Village thrift store and the spark for Tandy was back

 

Over the next few years i picked up a coco1,coco2,coco3,model1,2,3,4, model 100,102,200, and several Tandy 1000's

 

Then I saw an ebay listing for a Tandyvision.  What was a Tandyvision?  I looked thru some of my old RS catalogs and saw that it was an Intellivision clone sold at RS stores.  With the connection to my collection of Radio Shack computers I knew I needed to buy it,  

 

We never had an INTV as a kid. We had an Atari 2600 instead.  I tried out the Tandyvision 1 and was hooked.  Soon I bought a Intellivision 1,2, and 3 because they were related to the Tandyvision which inturn was part of my Radio Shack collection.  Then I found the system changer, for the INTV 2 as well as the ECS and musical KB. Then I found that there was a brown ECS and musical KB also so I got that for my INTV1 and Tandyvision. 

 

Anyway thats how ended up being part of the INTV brotherhood

 

Here is my YouTube channel if you want to see some of the stuff in the story

 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqvCMNU3T0-PXIhDaZPZNpw

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[+cmart604]

I have no back in the day story for Sylvania or Tandy but I will say that the sweet, sweet woodgrain on the Tandy makes it my favourite of all the Inty models and I use one as my daily driver.

 

From a collecting standpoint the Sylvania CIB remains one of the hardest to find boxed and the Tandy remains one of the hardest to find in a nice box. The catalogs for the two of them are both hard to find and very cool. 

[mr_me]

We had a Mattel Intellivision, then in 1983 my friend said he got an Intellivision.  So I went over to his house, looked at his Tandyvision and said "that's not an Intellivision".  He said "yes it is" and then we played some games.  It sure was a weird thing for me to see at the time, hadn't heard of it before that.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

I really don't have anything to share because when I was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s, none of my friends had the Intellivision. I remember the commercials for it, but ignored them because we all had the Atari VCS/2600 and just didn't care to pay attention to anything that wasn't 'Atari' at the time. It was same thing for the Colecovision as well, while the commercials did show a graphically better version of Donkey Kong of course to the 2600, it wasn't one of my favorite games in the arcade and the games I did like existed on the 2600 and not on the Colecovision anyway.

 

Let's fast forward to early 2000s when I really start to get into retro gaming again and collecting. My first Intellivision was actually my SVA I found at the local thrift for an expensive price of... $1.97. I grabbed it and brought it to the office to check it out as there was a few games available with it (That might have cost more than the console now that I think about it...). And it didn't work. As luck would have it, a few days later a co-worker gave me his intellivision model 1 and a few more games and I quickly swapped out the mainboards from that Intellivision into the Sears unit since I liked the styling and separate controllers on the Sears model. That model 1 in an SVA shell is still my daily driver to this day with some services having been performed on it along the way. 

 

But, about 5 or 6 years ago? I happened to find a Tandyvision at a local garage sale I believe and it was only like $20 or something so I snagged it and I have to admit that of all the Intellivision consoles with that original case design, the Tandyvision easily wins. But that console has nasty RF but I just can't bring myself to modify it in any shape or form so it doesn't get used very much and just gets stored along with my Slyvania/GTE model. That one I only got about 2 or 3 years ago from Shopgoodwill for a pretty decent price. It is a very cool console because you can tell it is older than most on the inside. It actually uses old first gen tantalum caps in it vs standard electrolytic caps and is super clean on the inside. It works decently as well although I think the controllers could stand a rebuild. But like the Tandyvision it is more of a display console vs use console at this point. But I do really like that silver like appearance of the trim work on the Sylvania/GTE model as it appears slightly more modern than the others (Save for the Super Pro and INTV III variants).

 

 

 

[+BBWW]

I was a young father at the time. I had two young boys. My mom worked for GTE/Lenkurt in San Carlos California. She got a GTE/Sylvania for Christmas in, it think 1980. They were offering a generous discount to employees. She kept it at her house for the grandkids...so she was assured frequent visits. I could not afford one at that time but about 9 months later we got one for our house. Ours was a standard Mattel unit. It is one of my oldest son's best childhood memories. Sometime around 2008 he started collecting games...now we do it together. We have a pretty damn good collection at this point. So that GTE/Sylvania morhped into something special for us.

 

 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/13839114@N00/albums

[Morpheus]

On 6/12/2021 at 1:54 AM, BBWW said:

I was a young father at the time. I had two young boys. My mom worked for GTE/Lenkurt in San Carlos California. She got a GTE/Sylvania for Christmas in, it think 1980. They were offering a generous discount to employees. She kept it at her house for the grandkids...so she was assured frequent visits. I could not afford one at that time but about 9 months later we got one for our house. Ours was a standard Mattel unit. It is one of my oldest son's best childhood memories. Sometime around 2008 he started collecting games...now we do it together. We have a pretty damn good collection at this point. So that GTE/Sylvania morhped into something special for us.

 

 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/13839114@N00/albums

Hi!

I just realized that I bought some games from you on Ebay! Most of them sealed…

Always everything perfect !??

Thanks!

[+BBWW]

13 minutes ago, Morpheus said:

Hi!

I just realized that I bought some games from you on Ebay! Most of them sealed…

Always everything perfect !??

Thanks!

Cool, our collection is pretty much all sealed. We have LTO's and Cuttle Carts to play most games and we have most of the games open as well. I am happy to share our "Waiver Wire" list of things we would sell or preferably trade.

[20ohm20]

My dad worked at GTE (and for a couple years, Verizon, which bought them) for 34 years.  I vaguely remember seeing the GTE/Sylvania Intellivision offered in the Lakewood, CA employee store, but we never bought one.  We did buy our TI-99/4A there along with at least two Sylvania branded TV's and a few phones.