Papa Intellivision collection for sale

[Atari_Bill]

1 hour ago, mr_me said:

One of the 2609 consoles does look like a very early edition.

You’re right!   Good eye!  I’d love to see a serial number on it!

[Walter Ives]

6 minutes ago, 1980gamer said:

I think you may under value what those tapes contain?

Also, the Intellivision II controllers would fetch $150-200  not $10

 

Other than that.... 

The seller doesn't value the cassettes enough to provide a list of the labels. For the ones whose labels I can make out:

 

   2 "Data Storage Tapes" (used for storing user created BASIC programs)

   2 "Diagnostic Test #1" (typed labels)

   1 "Basic Tape" (handwritten label, presumably a non-production version of a "Data Storage Tape")

   1 "French II" (handwritten label, presumably a development version of the second French tape)

   1 "Spelling" (handwritten label, presumably a development version of the Spelling cassette)

   1 "Geography" (handwritten label, presumably a development version of the Geography cassette, which is just a BASIC program)

 

Decle appears to have already rescued all of these. Only two other people in the world have a prayer of reading them; the rest of us may as well buy loose tapes at a garage sale and stick our own handwritten labels on them.

 

As to the value of the loose Intellivision II controllers: you spotted my joke: there were none listed on ebay, I hate them with a passion, and I valued them accordingly. (I did value the two original-style hand controllers at $20 each.) I also didn't spot on ebay any Alphacom Sprinter 40 printers, Netronics boards or folios with Chandler's name stamped on them so I put my own valuation on those too. As I noted in my post, a Keyboard Component was offered for sale on ebay for $5K about a month ago and the watchers reported the seller offered them a 40% discount by PM--that's where I got the 3K. Many on this board drooled, but none, not a single one of us, jumped at the chance to buy it at that price. Again, for most people it's a brick. The BASIC cartridge uses ordinary ROMs so you could easily make your own board (I think I've seen the binary floating around the net); I valued it at $200 because a collector would pay a premium for the plastic housing. The Jack LaLanne cassette would be nice to own so I valued it at $200, but again, only three people in the world have a chance at making it work and two of them already have one, so wherever it goes it's going to live in a box. This forum attracts the world's most avid Intellivision fans and I'm not convinced any of our wives would let us pay much more. I can't tell from the picture whether the printer sports the original Alphacom label or carries an Intellivision badge. Now that I look more carefully I do see a printer interface in one of the plastic tubs: I should add that to the inventory list with a value of maybe $200. It's a pretty simple circuit that will drive most parallel printers.

 

The seller throws around the phrase "copyright paperwork," whatever that means. Does that just mean pamphlets that contain a copyright notice? That would be kind of shady. But any real copyright paperwork would have been done by Mattel's legal department and would have been retained by them. Chandler himself didn't create copyrightable material. Patentable yes, copyrightable no. Even if he did, he was an employee, so Mattel didn't need him to fill out any paperwork to register its copyright in his work product. In any event, I don't see much paperwork in the photos. The BASIC manual goes with the Basic cartridge (note that the word "Basic" is not upper-cased on the cartridge label), the Keyboard Component Owner's Book with the Keyboard Component and the Sprinter 40 Instruction Manual with the printer. No one cares about the Netronics board documents. An "In Touch with Tomorrow" catalog is currently being offered on ebay for $350, but I sort of doubt it will sell at that price. I should add it to my inventory list at maybe $100.

 

I was in a hurry, so I was kind of generous in valuing the Master Components and handheld games. Nobody wants everything in the lot, so I still only see five thousand dollars of value here, six if you're bidding against cmart. That's "as is" and before tax and the $500 the seller wants for shipping.

 

Please chime in if you would personally pay more than what I've listed for any of the items being offered. Seriously, would you yourself pay $50 for the "Geography" or "Diagnostic Test #1" tapes if you spotted them at a yard sale? Or would you let them go by, like you did for that Keyboard Component that was being offered a month ago? Also let me know if I've grossly overvalued some of the other stuff. Cmart thinks the printer might go for $2K; would any of you take it off his hands at that price if he bought the lot?

 

The Master Component box shows Bowling, so that one's not a low serial number. The other 2609 looks like it's seen a lot of use; would you buy it anyway because of its possible low serial number? Remember, the seller is not responding to inquiries, so you're buying "as is." Maybe the reason Chandler brought home the second 2609 is because the first one gave up the ghost--how does that affect your willingness to pay?

 

Except for the folio and the name plate, the provenance is worth zero to me. Does anyone feel otherwise?

 

I'm interested because I actually know someone who would probably pay $5,000 for the lot, but I can't bring myself to tell him its worth much more. Cmart, you say the lot is worth $10K-$15K, but would you yourself actually pay that much "as is"? I sort of doubt you personally would go as high as $10K.

 

WJI

[decle]

On 4/1/2022 at 4:27 PM, 1980gamer said:

Somehow, get those tapes to @decle

I am thinking some good stuff could be found.

 

9 hours ago, Walter Ives said:

Decle appears to have already rescued all of these

 

Whilst I appreciate the vote of confidence, I'm only one member of the team working on K/C software that also includes @Lathe26, @Ron The Cat, @Knarfian and @intvnut.

 

I would agree with the sentiment that the Chandlers don't seem to be being well served by their reseller.  The quality of the images and descriptions don't seem to be consistent with the sum of money being sought to me.

 

Personally, I find the discrepancies between what is listed, and what is shown on papaintellivision.com are interesting.  Specifically, none of the pre-production carts, t-cards or EPROMs are listed in the auction (potentially this is consistent with the t-carts being loaned to Intellivision Productions as stated on papaintellivision).  Also, I can only find 29 "loose" tapes shown on papaintellivision, the most interesting of which are 2x Diagnostic Test, Address Lists, BI Tape 2.0, 2x Demo cassettes, General Instruments demo and Household Inventory.  Presumably, the auction includes 7 tapes not previously shown, one of which seems to be the hand labelled "BASIC Tape".

 

To bring everyone up to date with the state of our work to preserve K/C software.  Unfortunately, @Ron The Cat's K/C has had to be safely packed away since February while some work is done to my house.  I hope to get back to Jack Lalanne in a few weeks time.  Once Jack is complete, we have Geography Challenge to do, but then I think we will have captured and digitized all the released programs.  In addition, we need to put together videos showing Jack Lalanne, Family Budgeting, Crosswords and the Basic Test Tape in operation.

 

At that point, we had intended to contact the Chandlers and the other owners of undocumented K/C tapes we know about, with a view to capturing and digitizing their content, so that it could all be preserved and potentially used by the owners.  Although we have the capability within the team to make 4-track recordings, our work doesn't necessarily require tapes being sent to us.  We just need a recording of both sides of each tape made on a mid-range stereo hi-fi tape deck to work from.  Distribution of the resulting K/C software beyond the original owner would be dependent on obtaining both the tape owner's and copyright holder's permission, presumably Intellivision Entertainment at this point. 

Obviously, things probably change with any potential sale, however, if a prospective owner of the Chandler collection, or owners of other K/C tapes, would be interested in helping us document and preserve this software, please contact us here on AtariAge.

 

 

Cheers

 

decle
 

[Walter Ives]

I've updated my pricing based on various feedback to include a range between a realistic and an optimistic value. We know that Lathe wants one item. No one in this group is going to buy the lot, but we might all willing to crowd-fund as much as two thousand dollars for the cassettes to forward to decle, Ron, intvnut, Lathe and Knarfian (DRILK?) in appreciation of their heroic efforts to resurrect French, Spelling, Football and (hopefully soon) Jack LaLanne. Maybe more if we know for certain that there's a development version of Spanish, Astrology, Diet, Stocks, Tax Preparation, Math, BASIC II, Land Battle, Shiloh, Bear Run, Trek, etc. in the mix. Ron: have you published a list of the tapes you do have anywhere?

Edited April 4, 2022 by Walter Ives
Proper acknowledgment

[Walter Ives]

48 minutes ago, decle said:

one of which seems to be the hand labelled "BASIC Tape".

 

That's probably just a pre-manufacture "Data Storage Tape." It's unlikely to have anything other than trivial (e.g.: "Hello World!") BASIC programs Chandler wrote while demonstrating the system. Geography Challenge, Family Budgeting, Crosswords and the Basic Test Tape are written in Microsoft BASIC and so whatever you recover from those tapes should be able run on any Altair 8800 you happen to have lying around.

Edited April 4, 2022 by Walter Ives
Clarification

[+BBWW]

13 hours ago, cmart604 said:

I could easily see 10-15K but it's hard to get beyond that by my math. 

Diversion, deception and subterfuge while Cmart places his $18500 offer.

[Walter Ives]

7 minutes ago, BBWW said:

Diversion, deception and subterfuge while Cmart places his $18500 offer.

I'm OK with that--if he gets it I'll offer him $20 each for those two original-style hand controllers. But not on an "as-is" basis; he has to represent that they work and appear unused.

 

WJI

[+cmart604]

11 hours ago, Walter Ives said:

The seller doesn't value the cassettes enough to provide a list of the labels. For the ones whose labels I can make out:

 

   2 "Data Storage Tapes" (used for storing user created BASIC programs)

   2 "Diagnostic Test #1" (typed labels)

   1 "Basic Tape" (handwritten label, presumably a non-production version of a "Data Storage Tape")

   1 "French II" (handwritten label, presumably a development version of the second French tape)

   1 "Spelling" (handwritten label, presumably a development version of the Spelling cassette)

   1 "Geography" (handwritten label, presumably a development version of the Geography cassette, which is just a BASIC program)

 

Decle appears to have already rescued all of these. Only two other people in the world have a prayer of reading them; the rest of us may as well buy loose tapes at a garage sale and stick our own handwritten labels on them.

 

As to the value of the loose Intellivision II controllers: you spotted my joke: there were none listed on ebay, I hate them with a passion, and I valued them accordingly. (I did value the two original-style hand controllers at $20 each.) I also didn't spot on ebay any Alphacom Sprinter 40 printers, Netronics boards or folios with Chandler's name stamped on them so I put my own valuation on those too. As I noted in my post, a Keyboard Component was offered for sale on ebay for $5K about a month ago and the watchers reported the seller offered them a 40% discount by PM--that's where I got the 3K. Many on this board drooled, but none, not a single one of us, jumped at the chance to buy it at that price. Again, for most people it's a brick. The BASIC cartridge uses ordinary ROMs so you could easily make your own board (I think I've seen the binary floating around the net); I valued it at $200 because a collector would pay a premium for the plastic housing. The Jack LaLanne cassette would be nice to own so I valued it at $200, but again, only three people in the world have a chance at making it work and two of them already have one, so wherever it goes it's going to live in a box. This forum attracts the world's most avid Intellivision fans and I'm not convinced any of our wives would let us pay much more. I can't tell from the picture whether the printer sports the original Alphacom label or carries an Intellivision badge. Now that I look more carefully I do see a printer interface in one of the plastic tubs: I should add that to the inventory list with a value of maybe $200. It's a pretty simple circuit that will drive most parallel printers.

 

The seller throws around the phrase "copyright paperwork," whatever that means. Does that just mean pamphlets that contain a copyright notice? That would be kind of shady. But any real copyright paperwork would have been done by Mattel's legal department and would have been retained by them. Chandler himself didn't create copyrightable material. Patentable yes, copyrightable no. Even if he did, he was an employee, so Mattel didn't need him to fill out any paperwork to register its copyright in his work product. In any event, I don't see much paperwork in the photos. The BASIC manual goes with the Basic cartridge (note that the word "Basic" is not upper-cased on the cartridge label), the Keyboard Component Owner's Book with the Keyboard Component and the Sprinter 40 Instruction Manual with the printer. No one cares about the Netronics board documents. An "In Touch with Tomorrow" catalog is currently being offered on ebay for $350, but I sort of doubt it will sell at that price. I should add it to my inventory list at maybe $100.

 

I was in a hurry, so I was kind of generous in valuing the Master Components and handheld games. Nobody wants everything in the lot, so I still only see five thousand dollars of value here, six if you're bidding against cmart. That's "as is" and before tax and the $500 the seller wants for shipping.

 

Please chime in if you would personally pay more than what I've listed for any of the items being offered. Seriously, would you yourself pay $50 for the "Geography" or "Diagnostic Test #1" tapes if you spotted them at a yard sale? Or would you let them go by, like you did for that Keyboard Component that was being offered a month ago? Also let me know if I've grossly overvalued some of the other stuff. Cmart thinks the printer might go for $2K; would any of you take it off his hands at that price if he bought the lot?

 

The Master Component box shows Bowling, so that one's not a low serial number. The other 2609 looks like it's seen a lot of use; would you buy it anyway because of its possible low serial number? Remember, the seller is not responding to inquiries, so you're buying "as is." Maybe the reason Chandler brought home the second 2609 is because the first one gave up the ghost--how does that affect your willingness to pay?

 

Except for the folio and the name plate, the provenance is worth zero to me. Does anyone feel otherwise?

 

I'm interested because I actually know someone who would probably pay $5,000 for the lot, but I can't bring myself to tell him its worth much more. Cmart, you say the lot is worth $10K-$15K, but would you yourself actually pay that much "as is"? I sort of doubt you personally would go as high as $10K.

 

WJI

Yes just to be clear, I would not be buying the lot myself as I have most of the items in there already. If I had none of it would I pay $10K? Absolutely. $15K? Not likely unless the seller did a much better job showing us what’s actually in the auction and properly documenting all of it, as there might be another item or two in there that moves the needle for me. As Decle mentioned, I think the family is being massively let down by this seller who has done an incredibly poor job with this. I genuinely believe that if this collection was broken into multiple smaller lots that some bidding wars would occur and the total received would be much better than the non sale that’s likely to occur here. 

[mr_me]

1 hour ago, Walter Ives said:

That's probably just a pre-manufacture "Data Storage Tape." It's unlikely to have anything other than trivial (e.g.: "Hello World!") BASIC programs Chandler wrote while demonstrating the system. Geography Challenge, Family Budgeting, Crosswords and the Basic Test Tape are written in Microsoft BASIC and so whatever you recover from those tapes should be able run on any Altair 8800 you happen to have lying around.

Porting the Basic code to another system should be possible.  KC Basic is mostly standard Microsoft Basic, no peeks/pokes.  The only issue might be cursor/format character codes which might be used a lot.

 

I wouldn't mind having a text file listing of Geography Challenge, if such a thing exists.  It's for learning it's Basic so completely fair use under US copyright law.

[BSRSteve]

2 hours ago, decle said:

At that point, we had intended to contact the Chandlers and the other owners of undocumented K/C tapes we know about, with a view to capturing and digitizing their content, so that it could all be preserved and potentially used by the owners.  Although we have the capability within the team to make 4-track recordings, our work doesn't necessarily require tapes being sent to us.  We just need a recording of both sides of each tape made on a mid-range stereo hi-fi tape deck to work from.  Distribution of the resulting K/C software beyond the original owner would be dependent on obtaining both the tape owner's and copyright holder's permission, presumably Intellivision Entertainment at this point. 

I am quite sure that any K/C titles did not end up at Intellivision Entertainment. I had thought they might not even have left Mattel, but after checking, I see that they are listed in the transfer from INTV Corp which eventually resulted in them getting to Intellivision Productions, Inc (Now Blue Sky Rangers, Inc).

Edited April 4, 2022 by BSRSteve
correction to transfer status.

[Walter Ives]

33 minutes ago, BSRSteve said:

I see that they are listed in the transfer from INTV Corp which eventually resulted in them getting to Intellivision Productions, Inc (Now Blue Sky Rangers, Inc).

 

1 hour ago, mr_me said:

I wouldn't mind having a text file listing of Geography Challenge, if such a thing exists.  It's for learning it's Basic so completely fair use under US copyright law.

Yeah, right. But I see a trade here: BSRSteve controls the rights and DRILK have the data. What do you have that they want badly enough to go thru the trouble to make it happen?

Edited April 4, 2022 by Walter Ives
Cleanup

[+BBWW]

I sent a message asking if the KBC was working. No answer as of yet.

[Zendocon]

2 hours ago, BSRSteve said:

I am quite sure that any K/C titles did not end up at Intellivision Entertainment. I had thought they might not even have left Mattel, but after checking, I see that they are listed in the transfer from INTV Corp which eventually resulted in them getting to Intellivision Productions, Inc (Now Blue Sky Rangers, Inc).

Good to know.  Not to go off-topic here, but what about the Tutorvision properties?

[BSRSteve]

20 minutes ago, Zendocon said:

Good to know.  Not to go off-topic here, but what about the Tutorvision properties?

I would guess that those rights might have belonged to World Book. They did not transfer to Intellivision Productions.  

[mr_me]

1 hour ago, Zendocon said:

Good to know.  Not to go off-topic here, but what about the Tutorvision properties?

 

44 minutes ago, BSRSteve said:

I would guess that those rights might have belonged to World Book. They did not transfer to Intellivision Productions.  

I always said, if the developer wasn't paid, the rights remain with the developer.

[BSRSteve]

1 hour ago, mr_me said:

 

I always said, if the developer wasn't paid, the rights remain with the developer.

If that is the case (and I don't know if it is true on a work for hire), they either stayed with INTV Corp or with Real Time Associates.

[Walter Ives]

 

On 4/4/2022 at 7:27 AM, decle said:

At that point, we had intended to contact the Chandlers and the other owners of undocumented K/C tapes we know about, with a view to capturing and digitizing their content,

"That point" may need to become "now."

 

On 4/4/2022 at 7:27 AM, decle said:

the most interesting of which are 2x Diagnostic Test, Address Lists, BI Tape 2.0, 2x Demo cassettes, General Instruments demo and Household Inventory.

The General Instrument demo tape contains audio clips made by General Instrument to sell Mattel on the idea of using its voice chip. The "National Weather" segments contain phrases strung together to create automated weather reports for dissemination by radio or telephone (e.g.: 818-841-1384). The tape has no bearing on the Keyboard Component and so probably doesn't fall into your "most interesting" category.

 

The pair of "Diagnostic Test #1" tapes were used to check the quality of recordings made by Mattel's high-speed tape duplication vendor. Again, not a lot of interesting content there.

 

The two Demo cassettes contain the six-and-a-half minute in-store presentation Keith posted on Youtube in 2007. BSRSteve has a copy; Alex.Pace has two; I've heard of a few others. The ones here appear to be in pretty sorry condition--you'd probably want to make copies rather than put them directly into your Keyboard Component.

 

Address Lists and Household Inventory are labeled in a similar style that doesn't resemble any of the other tapes and purport to be BASIC data tapes, so I speculate that they contain programs Chandler wrote for himself. He was, after all, a big promoter of using the Keyboard Component in the home, so he must have played around with it at least a little and if he created any tapes on his own they would be in this collection. The contents of Chandler's address book may be as interesting as the BASIC code that implements it.

 

As to BI Tape 2.0, if you look through the little tape monitoring window in the photograph on the papaintellivision site you can see it only holds about 15 minutes of tape, so it's highly unlikely to be a BASIC data tape. It may not be a Keyboard Component tape at all.

 

On 4/4/2022 at 11:13 AM, BBWW said:

I sent a message asking if the KBC was working. No answer as of yet.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160107012355/http://papaintellivision.com/hwKeyboard.php "The keyboard component. This particular unit is fully functional except for the cassette tape unit. The capstan turns and the pinch roller closes on the "Clean" command. There is no tape movement when attempting to access tape contents, just buzzing."

 

This appears to be the same unit. The comment was written in 2012. The drive belts were obviously in tatters; the rollers presumably needed replacing too. By now you can expect that the electrolytic capacitors may be beginning to leak, so you should plan to replace those. None of this is as scary as it sounds. On the other hand, the collection does not appear to have been all that well cared for, so caveat emptor.

[+cmart604]

I see the auction went up with the same insane pricing. If at first you don't succeed...

[Rev]

8 hours ago, cmart604 said:

I see the auction went up with the same insane pricing. If at first you don't succeed...

For that price they cant cover shipping?   Nope!  500 extra. ?

[+cmart604]

2 hours ago, Rev said:

For that price they cant cover shipping?   Nope!  500 extra. ?

steal of a deal at twice the price! 

[+Lathe26]

8 hours ago, Rev said:

For that price they cant cover shipping?   Nope!  500 extra. ?

I'll drive down and pick up the items personally for free!

[ColecoGamer]

Wow! The auction ended at $70k! 

[Numan]

Did anybody buy it?  It’s been up twice.

[+cmart604]

1 hour ago, Numan said:

Did anybody buy it?  It’s been up twice.

Shockingly I don't think so. ?

[Numan]

Did you make them an offer.  I had thought about it but at 70k they may not be in reality yet.