decle

Hi @thewaxcylinder, thanks for sharing this. It seems as though the Maxflash Studio used to dump the game has generated an image of the Intellivision's full 64K memory map for some reason, rather than just the contents of the game ROM. The addresses between $0000-$4FFF and $6000-$FFFF in the binary file are all padding. Unfortunately, once this padding is removed and the 4K game that is left is compared with the production version, they look to be identical. Sorry to disappoint you. Cheers decle Oh, I should add that the reason the Maxflash image crashes in emulators like JzIntv, which obviously the production version doesn't do, is entirely because of this padding! It is declared as ROM with a fixed value of $FFFF (well that or $7FFF where the Maxflash has had a bit of a hiccup) and interferes with the other devices in the memory map. Remove it and everything works perfectly. I'd also advise against trying to run the Maxflash image on a Flash cart. If the Flash cart is not constructed defensively, this image could cause it to try to compete with other IC's in the Intellivision to return data from shared addresses (e.g. the GRAM, GROM, STIC, etc). This is a bad idea, and might (if you're really unlucky) cause damage to either the Inty or Flash cart.

Hey all, This is the first in what I hope will become an occasional series. I have a bit of a soft spot for the Intellivision's little brother, the Unisonic Champion 2711. In 2018 I created Li'l Bro II which lets you to play all four Unisonic cartridges on the Intellivision, and I also ported Activision Dragster to the Champion. However, there are also several games that General Instrument detailed in its datasheets that never made it to market (quelle surprise!), and I thought it might be fun to take a crack at implementing some of these. I've started with Hangman for two reasons. Firstly there's a good description of the game, including a screenshot, in the GI datasheet: Secondly, the game is pretty simple, but it gives me the opportunity to put together some infrastructure that could be useful in creating other titles. So, here we are, Hangman for the Unisonic Champion and Intellivision: ROMs to play on both the Intellivision and MAME as well as instructions, box art and an overlay design can be found in the following zip file: hangman.zip If you have a preference for which game I tackle next, I'm open to requests (but please, not Football, I don't know how they thought they would create a workable game). As always, any problems or feedback, just shout. Enjoy! decle

That's a really interesting observation, great spot Unfortunately, I don't think the copy of DK is likely to be a prototype. At 7:45 it becomes clear that this is raw footage of a regular Sears store for an ABC news segment that is probably being filmed somewhere in early or mid December (notice the reference to "these final two weeks before Christmas"). We know that DK was released in either September or early October '82 (see my recent post on release dates), so we should expect to see the production version of the game in store at Christmas. I also don't believe we know of any production changes or fixes for DK at this time. Although there was a rumoured version that fixed the Inty II lockout, I don't believe this has been proven to exist. Even the cartridges with a white shell contain the incompatible ROM, at least mine does! I think that leaves at least three possible causes for DK being AWOL: Filming aberration - the YouTube video is a low quality rendition of an old broadcast tape. The footage is filmed from a CRT and the lighting isn't great. I believe that DK is the only object on screen that is the Inty "olive brown" colour (BONUS, which is only just visible, is dark green). So perhaps it's just not being rendered and/or picked up well by the camera? As has been suggested, CRT output was decidedly variable. I've had a fiddle at this section of the video with FFMPEG and GIMP to see if I can apply any Bladerunner like zoom and enhance, but I've not managed to achieve anything conclusive. The nearest I have to something is an image take from the frame with 15:41:59;08 in the top right corner, see below. By removing the red and blue channels and then applying a narrow filter to the green channel you get the image on the right. There might be something to the left of the barrels, if you tilt your head to one side and squint. Personally I'm unconvinced, I would have expected to find something better in the video, so this is perhaps hopeful that DK really has vanished. Console glitch / fault - I've checked a copy of DK on a SSVA and it plays fine, so it's not a M/C model bug. I guess it could be a console issue. I think DK is an animated background tile that uses BackTab sequencing, rather than a sprite. Jump Man uses two sprites, there seem to be up to five barrels and the final sprite is reserved for the hammer. So if BackTab is at fault the 6 locations where DK is located would all have to be faulty, but the rest of the screen looks fine, so most of the rest of BackTab is working OK? Looking in GRAM the three parts of DK's animation are stored in two different areas. His animation and GRAM are below, notice how DK's idle stance is stored in images 2-5, his picking stance is in images 27-30 and his rolling stance is in images 31-36. These locations don't change as the game plays. So for this to be a GRAM graphical glitch all 112 of these GRAM locations (14 * 8) and only these would have to be borked. Similarly, the DK graphics are not stored consecutively on the ROM, but have the ladders and girders between them like GRAM. Therefore, it seems improbable that a missing DK would be caused by a console fault. DK glitch / bug - What is definitely true is that DK is littered with bugs. In addition to the ability to jump and stand in the air next to the girders (see below), some presses of the disc will be interpreted as keypad entries on the game selection screen for example up and right is seen as "2"). Also if you hit an upper action button before the intro tune plays at the start of the first level Jump Man will never appear and the game will freeze. Press a lower action button at the same point and the game will crash with the first note of the tune playing. If you spam 1 to start the game and then tap right once Jump Man appears, the walking sound will not stop when you release the disc. I'm sure there are others. Could one of these cause DK to disappear? Well, the code that draws DK (starting at $53df for those playing along at home) is also used to draw the levels, so it can't be something intrinsically bad with that. This function is called by three separate pieces of code in different areas of the ROM, one for each of DK's three stances ($5475, $58a3, $5885), so it seems unlikely that all, but only these three pieces of code are bad. So we'd be looking for a glitch that would either allow the girders to be drawn on both screens but not draw DK (in both cases the code just follows on immediately after, $53fe flows into $5475 and $5489 is followed by a call at $54ec), or that doesn't draw DK as barrels are initialised (although this code does jump around a bit, the barrel in DK's hands is initialised at $5877, immediately after DK's idle stance is drawn at $586e). Could it be a bug or glitch? Possibly, but I've not found it yet. So nothing concrete I'm afraid, just lots of "doesn't seem likelies" at the moment. If I was to hazard a guess, I would go with a filming aberration, but that's only really based on Occam's Razor.

I've been interested in the release dates of the original 125 for a while, mainly through trying to understand which games were broadcast on PlayCable and when: Currently, the primary source of release date information is blueskyrangers.com. The dates published there vary significantly in precision, with Mattel games prior to the end of 1982 typically having day specific release dates, whilst third party titles and games released in 1983 or later only stating a release year. However, there is other information that has been consolidated on Wikipedia for some titles, including some of the excellent work by the Atari Archive. This information seems to be largely be derived from adverts and issues of Video Game Update (VGU). Personally, I'm not inclined to trust the timing of adverts too much, however, VGU looks to be a great source, with reviews, release schedules and game sales charts. To the best of my ability I've consolidated the information VGU contains with existing data on blueskyrangers.com and Wikipedia to come up with a spready of "best guess" release dates accurate to the month: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1A5JxISTJAFX0koFpd_f8oVXpboyuGaGM0v8R5rcoKnE/edit?usp=sharing In general, my best guess is within a month of the dates on Atari Archive. However, sorting this stuff out is open to some interpretation and a bit fiddly, so there may be errors on both sides, which I will seek to review and correct over time. So what can we learn from this? Well, the first thing to note is that according to the September 1982 issue of VGU any release dates originating from Mattel should be taken with a pinch of salt: The need for caution is apparent when comparing the Mattel and VGU dates for games released in the latter half of 1982. Where the BSRs report precise dates, VGU typically only acknowledges games as being with distributors a couple of months later (where no precise dates are given on blueskyrangers.com I push the release date to the end of the period, so a "1982" release date is assumed to be before December 31st 1982). Looking at the release schedule in aggregate we can see some interesting trends: Then as now, game releases tend to be clustered in the run up to Christmas to hit the holiday season. Mattel may have missed an opportunity to build their market in the Christmas 1981 season. Having released 19 games in the fall of 1980 in support of the nationwide launch of the console, they only released six games in October and November for Christmas '81 (Astrosmash!, SNAFU, Space Armada, Triple Action, Bowling and Boxing), bringing the full catalogue to 25 games. It's really noticeable how game production ramps up in the second half of 1982 as Mattel opens the taps and third parties enter the fray. Only 31 games arrived in the 27 months prior to September 82, roughly one a month. A further 70 hit the market over the next 15 months, more than four a month on average. 20 of these second wave titles were released in the final 3 months of 1983. This is more games than were released in the whole of 1981 and nearly seven titles a month! Looking in more detail at specific releases: The first third party game was probably Donkey Kong released in September or October 1982. This seems to have been followed by Atlantis and Demon Attack in October. I won't bother listing all the third party release dates, they're in the spready if you're interested. We can put some more accurate dates on Mattel's 1983 releases. We appear to have: January - Shark! Shark! and Sharp Shot (perhaps they just missed a Christmas launch?) February - Tron Solar Sailer April - Chess May - Vectron June - Burgertime July - Buzz Bombers and Mission-X September - Pinball October - Motocross and Treasure of Tarmin November - Bump 'N' Jump, Kool-Aid Man and Masters Of The Universe December - Loco-Motion I've deliberately missed the ECS titles off this list. Although it seems the peripheral hit the stores in late November or December 1983, it's unclear which games were released when. At the moment I've just assumed they were all released in December, although Atari Archive has Mind Strike and WSMLB as being released in June 1984. So what does this mean for my interest in PlayCable? If we assume PlayCable launched at the beginning of 1981 it would have had an initial selection of 19 titles to select the 15 game schedule from. The PlayCable advertising on the internet seems to come from the end of 1981 as it shows all 25 titles available at the end of the year. In some instances new games made it to PlayCable pretty quickly, for example in the schedule above Lock N Chase should be broadcast in November 1982, two months after its release in September. September / October 1982 seems to have been an important time for PlayCable... The release of the Intellivoice meant it was not compatible with the full catalogue of Mattel games for the first time. Donkey Kong hit the market highlighting that the service was a walled garden, closed to third party titles. Licensing constraints surfaced for the first time as Tron Deadly Discs could not be broadcast. The monthly roster of games that were broadcast was increased from 15 to 20 for the first time in October. It might be tempting to see the increase in the number of games broadcast as being a response to one or more of these events, however, talking to Jim Wiesenberg this was not the case. As the Intellivision catalogue grew the roster was increased to provide customers with more value in an attempt to increase sales. However, as Jim notes "We had not reached 3% subscriber level on any system so revenue/profit contribution was negligible so going to 20 games did not make difference needed." After the Intellivoice games, the next game to be incompatible was Chess owing to its additional RAM. This didn't hit the shelves until April 1983. The first game to be released that specifically breached the 8K game size limit was Vectron released in May 1983. The next was Pinball, which wasn't with retailers until September, this was followed by Bump N Jump and Masters of the Universe in November. However, Paul Hilt says that the writing was on the wall for PlayCable by the fall of 1983, and he was tasked with negotiating the termination contracts with cable companies. His primary objective when doing this was to maintain a good relationship with the cable companies as they would continue to be significant customers for Jerrold's broadcast equipment business. As a final aside, Video Game Update is well worth a read with lots of excellent bits and pieces scattered through its pages. Sure, some of its review scores are rather intriguing, for example is Donkey Kong really a better game than Tron Deadly Discs, as reported in November 1982? That said, it's scathing review of Turbo in February 1984 is totally justified in my view, and the commentary on the industry is great. At an industry level the way that Video Game Update added the secondary "Computer Entertainer" in June 1983, then switched the newsletter name in March 1984, dropped all video game console content in January 1985 only for it to come back in February 1986 is cool to see. You can also follow the demise of Mattel Electronics in July, September and December 1983, and February and March 1984. Intellivision's resurrection can be found in October 1985, and there's an interview with Terry Valeski about INTV's plans in February 1986. Overall, Intellivision is well represented in its pages with 85 of the 100 titles released after mid-1982 being reviewed. In April 1988 VGU asked readers to write in with requests for help collecting rare titles. Sure enough, in May three people had written in with requests to buy and trade games for various second generation systems. Could this mark the formal recognition of retro game collecting as a hobby?

Scudding around eBay, it seems we have the first proven Intelligame ROM variant... https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/185916993091?hash=item2b49842e43 Looks like someone has stuck a bit of the manual to the label for some reason... ...and those red disc stickers are definitely there to hide the fact that someone has dug through the label to get to the screws and open up the shell... ...internally, although it has the same 3x 16pin ICs and 3x 14pin ICs as my copy of Utopia, the EPROMs are larger 28pin ICs (probably 8x8K 2764s rather than 8x4K 2732s) and the board layout is different. And now the money shot... ...got to love the 1985 date on the EPROMs and title screen. That's a rarity in the world of Intellivision, I could be wrong, but the only other ones I'm aware of are Championship Tennis and World Cup Soccer. I wonder if what seems to be an electric screwdriver is included in the 299Euro asking price?! For completeness the game looks to be standard from the one available screen shot... I've updated the entry in the Brazilian Pirate game database: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Gg49VKGUp8k7y5MeHOFcnsFeO77G8FPPwPOUYrA8yhE/edit?usp=sharing

Sorry to disappoint everyone, but my reference to Killer Tomatoes rather than Bees was just a typo. Hanlon's razor and all that! @DZ-Jay is correct, I have been collecting variations of Killer Bees, my last posting on the subject, which has a video where I build and run @David Rolfe's original program and mentions the relationship between Killer Bees, Killer Tomatoes and Crazy Clones, was here: I think that since then I've turned up another version created by Joe Jacobs, and a quick look at the version posted by @BSRSteve above suggests it might be different again. Perhaps a small comparison project and posting is in order, if that would be of interest?

That's a really good point! Well we can't have that! I think this is the 6-frame animation of the Children's Discovery System (CDS). It's a bit tricky to be certain because the screen has so much ghosting: The CDS running man is unique. It's the only one that uses square pixels! As a consequence, it doesn't have half pixels, and therefore is 8x8 rather than 8x16 pixels in size. Nonetheless I think it does a good job of evoking the original. On a different point, it seems that the intellivision Productions / Intellivision Entertainment logo (right), is not quite the same as frame 4 of the Football Running Man (left): In addition to the square pixels, notice how his arm and waist are one pixel shorter and the ankle is thicker, as highlighted in the middle image. I could be wrong, but don't think it's actually extracted one-for-one from any of the animations. Finally, I've put together a small ROM that allows you to try out all the Running Man animations in one place. Tap the disc left and right to select a different animation. Use keypad 1-8 to freeze on a particular frame of animation, or 0 to start the animation again. All animations are set to cycle in about 40 frames, so the smoother animation of 8-frame cycles is really apparent. The ROM should work in JzIntv or on a Flash cart and it can be downloaded from here: runningMan.rom And here is a video of the ROM running (please excuse the CDS animation not having square pixels, but the Intellivision can't show them )

Something that bothers me a little bit is the way the Intellivision Running Man (tm) is often drawn using square pixels. I'm looking at you Intellivision Productions and Intellivision Entertainment... It makes him feel squashed to me, with thin limbs. To be honest, looking at the Intellivision Productions logo, I think Keith viewed pixels as more of a loose guideline, rather than a hard constraint. In reality, the Intellivision's pixels are slightly taller than they are wide, with 5x4 being an often quoted ratio. This seems to be based on the pixel aspect needed to get a 160x96 resolution (5:3 aspect ratio) to fit onto a 4:3 TV screen. Whilst this doesn't explicitly take into account screen borders or the vagaries of CRT overscan (mal)adjustment, it seems a reasonable scaling. If so, the Running Man should be drawn like the version on the right below, rather than the square pixels on the left... I've also been rather intrigued as to why the canonical Running Man seems to be taken from Football, rather than the first game written Baseball. I don't know the answer to this, but it seems to go back to the Mattel Electronics days... It looks as though the Intellivision Productions and Intellivision Entertainment logos are taken from the fourth frame of this image, although I notice that Mattel realised the Intellivision has rectangular pixels Anyway, that got me to wondering what the other Running Man animation cycles really look like. So here they are, all 14 of them! Let's start with this familiar eight frame sequence from Football. Our hero, complete with helmet and belt. This animation was also reused by INTV in Super Pro Football... This run cycle seems to be one of only two, the other being WSMLB, where the avatar faces to the left in the ROM. It also doesn't start on the same frame as the Mattel logo, so let's standardise by having all cycles facing right, and starting on the thinnest animation frame to make comparisons easier like this... Next up we have Baseball. The helmet is replaced with a cap, and our guy is less bulky. This animation was reused by David Rolfe in his tutorial game Killer Tomatoes, however, as we will see, it does not appear in either WCB or WSMLB... Soccer drops the cap from Baseball, but otherwise is quite similar, with the exception of the bulky first frame... Then we have Basketball. Here the belt is always present, and figure is slightly squashed with a torso that is a pixel shorter than normal... ...this is because this animation is intended to be shown stretched vertically like this... Making the players' slightly out of proportion with longer legs relative to their body, and then stretching the MOB, really makes the Running Man seem tall in this variation. The stretched basketball animation was reused by INTV in both Slam Dunk and Spiker. Next we have Tennis. This is the first game that uses a smaller run cycle with only six frames. Like Basketball, the squat figures are expected to be stretched, and although similar, none of the frames are actually shared by the two games (even frame 2 has the figure one pixel to the right in Tennis)... To round out the Mattel sports titles we have World Series Major League Baseball. This is rather tricky as there are a ton of animations in the game. Not surprising, given the sophistication of the game. I think the nearest to a classic Running Man is this 4-frame cycle used for fielders. Four frames might seem a little frugal, but I guess resources were limited, even in a 24K game... OK, on to Action Network games and we have the minimal four frame cycle of AD&D that reuses frames 1, 3, 5 and 7 from Baseball. This makes Baseball guy and his low frame rate AD&D derivative the most common Running Man, having been used in nearly 1.8 million cartridges according to the sales figures in Intellivision Lives... I think that comparing this AD&D animation to the one in WSMLB really shows how the WSMLB is also based on the original Baseball, even though superficially it looks quite different. Night Stalker reuses all but frame 1 of Soccer, replacing the the bulky figure with something more svelte. Is this the purest form of the Running Man?... The figures in Tron Deadly Discs are obviously based on Football, sharing the helmet and leg animation, but the belt has been removed and the torso leaned out a bit... And finally for the Mattel roster we have Maze-A-Tron, with it's very weird leaning, kicking 5-frame gait. I'm not even sure if this qualifies as a Running Man really... And so we move on to the INTV titles. As already mentioned, SP Football, Slam Dunk and Spiker reuse the run cycles from Football and Basketball. However, WC Baseball replaces the regular side profile animation for an isometric view when running sideways... And World Cup Soccer ditches the elegant original for this 6-frame freak show... Finally we have the two INTV action games Thunder Castle and Tower of Doom, both based on Knights with their face guard open. Tower of Doom has a 7-frame animation with a couple of slightly awkward lunging poses in frames 3 and 4... Thunder Castle cuts this cycle down to six frames. Frame 1 is shared with Tower of Doom, with frames 2, 3 and 6 being minor variations. The less said about frame 4 the better... Now I've probably been a bit unfair here, because in both Tower of Doom and Thunder Castle your avatar carries a shield, which partially obscures the character. This probably makes it necessary to exaggerate the limbs so they can be seen. I think the variations we see in the Running Man animations shows why it was a good idea for Mattel not to bake the run cycle into GROM. Personally, I like the small variations that each game brings, allowing each to have its own personality whilst still belonging to a common brand. It's a bit like the way each model in a well designed car line up has its own identity, but evokes common themes of the manufacturer. So, did I miss any running men, and which is your favourite? I wonder which was the first one drawn by David James for the CES demo back in January 1978?

Yes indeed sir!... <pedantAlert>Unusually, the CP-1610 at the heart of the Intellivision doesn't have an OR instruction, but it can do an XOR 🤔. So perhaps the name is inadvertently appropriate for the Inty, although Ian Downend and Paul Carruthers didn't know this when they wrote the original back in 1987</pedantAlert>

Happy New Year everyone. For the traditional January 1st posting this year I'd like to share a little something I've been fiddling with... K-VADER is a single player, TV POWWW style game for the Inty. It's based on 1NVADER for the C64 by Darren Foulds (I recommend you also check out 1NVADER, as it's a more comprehensive game with 2 player competitive and co-op modes). In K-VADER you have 30 or 60 seconds to shoot down as many kamikaze aliens as possible. Luckily, the invading hoard are not the greatest strategic thinkers, and they hurl themselves at you one at a time! You'd be on easy street if it wasn't for your canon's glacial reload times, and the fact that every time it fires, your turret reverses direction. K-VADER should work on a stock Inty using the LTO Flash or similar, although it will probably look better in JzIntv. On real hardware the game can be played using a regular controller or the TV POWWW replica voice trigger. The following zip archive contains a ROM of K-VADER, an instruction manual, overlay and box art. As always, all feedback is most welcome... kvader.zip I hope you enjoy K-VADER and that 2023 is a good year for you and your loved ones. Cheers decle

Yes, it's possible, because providing you're happy playing the non-steering version of the game, it was done back in 2018... 😀 This port was built using the TAS spreadsheet of the game created by Omnigamer during the Todd Rogers cheating drama, so the behaviour of Bottom Gas mirrors the 2600 original. Bottom Gas is primarily focused on the Intellivision's little brother, the Unisonic Champion, but it does include versions that will run on the Intellivision. The ROM and instructions for the game can be found here: bottomGas.zip I also did an enhanced version that tried to answer the question "could the Unisonic Champion have been a viable system with some minor hardware differences?". This was the result: And here is the Intellivision ROM for that version: lilBroBottomGasUp2.rom Yes all the appropriate Li'l Bro ROMs should work in JzIntv and on the LTO Flash (or similar). If you're interested in more details of the Unisonic Champion thought experiment you can find them here: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/273767-lil-bro-ii-a-better-unisonic-champion-simulator-for-the-intellivision/?do=findComment&comment=3944424 https://forums.atariage.com/topic/273767-lil-bro-ii-a-better-unisonic-champion-simulator-for-the-intellivision/?do=findComment&comment=4025407 With regard to controls, the Unisonic Champion is even more challenged than the Intellivision: Despite appearances there are only two buttons labelled "Yes" and "No" on each hard-wired controller. The third, black button is directly connected to the CPU's reset pin, ready for the moment you rage quit when you realise what you just blew 150 dollars on in 1978. 🤔 There are no discs, joysticks, paddles, etc. For Bottom Gas the controls are mapped as Yes = Shift and No = Gas, that's it. On the Intellivision they map to Shift = 1, 2 or 3 on the keypad and Gas = 7, 8 or 9. I don't know if you'd call it playable, but it is an accurate port of the Activision original's gameplay. If anyone wants to use Bottom Gas as the basis of a more fully fleshed Inty port of Dragster send me a PM and I'll share the CP1610 source code (sorry, the Unisonic Champion is too constrained to use IntyBASIC) 👍

Well here we are, the last of the Keyboard Component tapes that Mattel released. Like Conversational French and Spelling Challenge, Jack LaLanne is written in assembly language using the PICSE audio / visual framework developed by APh. As a consequence, it can make use of the Master Component's colour graphics and pre-recorded audio from the Keyboard Component tape drive. Jack probably slots into the silver position when it comes to K/C software 🥈, behind Conversational French 🥇, but ahead of the rather lackluster Spelling Challenge 🥉. The program is broken into 6 parts. First there's an audio / visual introduction to the program by Jack LaLanne: Initially the new user then does a fitness test which comprises 12 exercises and lasts about 15 minutes. Based on their performance, they are then allocated to either a "personalized" or "specialized" exercise program, more on this later: Then the tape suggests you enter some body measurements which it check periodically and track over time: At this point the weekly exercise programme starts. This consists of a daily 20 minute workout and weekly fitness tests. Each daily routine has a number of aerobic and stretching exercises, interspersed with short bursts of jogging. The Personalized Exercise Session seems to be the baseline. It starts off with 1 minute of jogging, followed by four sets of 3 exercises. Between each block of exercises there is another minute of jogging. There are several different introductions to each exercise to mix things up a bit on each day, and Jack finishes off with an inspirational pep-talk: The Specialized Exercise Session seems to be the more advanced program which is selected once you achieve a high enough score on a fitness test. The structure is the same as personalized session, with four blocks of 3 exercises, but they seem to be a bit tougher this time, and each jogging session is 90 seconds, rather than the minute of the personalized program: I'm guessing that the number of repetitions and length of the jogging sessions probably increases as you get into the programme and your fitness improves. However, given each session takes 20 minutes and I'm a lazy, pizza-eating developer, I've not tested this. Finally, there is the Jog Log and Exit options. Because this is a new account the Jog Log isn't terribly inspiring. In fact it's better to look at the demonstration of it in action found in Jack's introduction here. Clearly, in order to do all the tracking of your performance etc. it is necessary to write your current state to a record at the start of the tape, hence why it takes a while to exit the program: Now, you might notice that, contrary to what the manual states, what Jack's commentary says and what @David Rolfe and @Shal (Shal Farley) remember, there is no music while the exercises play Trust me, @Lathe26 and I have had a good hunt for it, behind the sofa and everything! But we just can't find it. What we know from David Rolfe is that the music was generated by the sound chip in the Master Component, rather than being recorded on the tape itself. It was implemented using an enhanced music tracker called Jazz which David wrote in CP1610 assembly language (David still has images of the source code which he kindly shared with us). This tracker supported the three tone channels and single noise channel of the M/C sound chip, as well as adding musical effects such as volume envelopes (rising, falling and tremelo), glissando, trill and vibrato. According to David and Shal the music for Jack LaLanne's exercises was written by Bob Randles. To try to find the music we have converted recordings of two separate tapes and checked that they result in the same data files. These recordings come from an example of both an early tape (black shell with a red paper label), and a later tape (white shell with the title printed on it). As you can see, the resulting conversions don't have music when played on a K/C. Then we searched the data on the converted tapes for sequences of instructions we can see in David's Jazz source code, but no dice. Finally, we can also play Ron's copy of Jack LaLanne on his Keyboard Component. Here's the bit where Jack thinks there should be music (you can hear the tape drive clicking in the background as it loads the program data for the exercise): Unfortunately, there seems to be no music to be found. Sadly, I think we have to say that the copies of Jack LaLanne we have access to don't seem to have the music on them . If you have a copy of Jack LaLanne you'd be willing to record, and you want to try to help us find the music, let us know. 👍 Before I sign off this project of documenting K/C software I want to thank everyone involved, @Ron The Cat for enabling my participation through his Keyboard Component, @Knarfian for sharing his tape recordings and tools, @Lathe26 for his tool enhancements and work converting the BASIC tapes, @intvnut for his technical insights and guidance, and @David Rolfe,@Shal and Mark Stroberg for their recollections and clarifications. It was a real team effort and putting together these videos would not have been possible without their participation. If you missed one of the previous threads on other tapes, here are links to the other software (from best to worst, IMHO): Conversational French Spelling Challenge Geography Challenge Crosswords 1, 2 & 3 Family Budgeting Keyboard Component Demonstration Tape Super Football Prototype BI 2.0 Prototype Demonstration Tape Keyboard Component BASIC manual type-in programs Finally, a big thank you if you're one of the many AtariAge members who took the time to provide feedback and comment on this work, it's much appreciated.

@mr_me asks some really good questions. Yes, we do have the BASIC listings of the programs 😉. Here's a snippet of the relevant section that chains the report program: 5200 PRINT CHR$ (12): PRINT : PRINT : PRINT : IF D = 0 GOTO 5225 5205 PRINT " It will take approximately 3 " 5210 PRINT " minutes to prepare summary." 5215 PRINT : PRINT : PRINT " Saving data on records 10"; 5220 GOSUB 6000: VSAV 10: PRINT : PRINT : PRINT 5225 PRINT " Loading summary program." 5230 SLOD 5 5300 GOSUB 1000: GOSUB 1150 5302 LL = 2:CC = 1: GOSUB 1200 The critical lines are 5220, where the VSAV stores our variables, and 5230 which loads the program starting at record 5. I've put together a little demo which illustrates the chaining behaviour and variable clearing (it uses PLOD rather than SLOD because the programs are stored on the R/W track, not the R/O track, but the behaviour is the same). It also shows a nice little quirk we've found: Clearly the PLOD command line bug poses all kinds of questions, like what happens if you delete a duplicated line?, or if a program uses GOTO or GOSUB?. However, I suspect this is all a bit moot, because the behaviour can only be instigated manually on the command line as far as I can tell, so it's just an interesting quirk and not really of any practical use.

Who said that the Keyboard Component was boring?... ...oh yeah, that was Keith Robinson, well he may have had a point! 🤔 Buckle up for the white knuckle ride that is... Family Budgeting: Family Budgeting lets you set up annual budgets in up to 30 categories covering various types of income and expenditure. Then track your actuals against plan by adding month-by-month data. And at any point you can review your financial status in one of five report styles. It doesn't get more bean-countery than this. 1️⃣2️⃣3️⃣4️⃣... The program is split in two, the first half deals with setting a budget and recording actual data. The second part (accessed through the rather cryptic "SUMMARIZE DATA" option on the main menu) generates status reports. The highlight has to be the three minute wait (cut from the video) while starting the reporting engine where the program... Saves the current budget and actual data to tape Loads the report program Reloads the budget and actual data As convoluted as this is, it's necessary. K/C BASIC doesn't have any commands to manipulate data on tape at a low level. The only thing it can do is save and load ALL BASIC variables. So all your precious data sits in BASIC arrays. These are belched to the tape in one big block, the reporting program is loaded (which nukes the variables), and then the variables are slurped back in again. This is the penultimate video in the great K/C software adventure. Next time we step things up for a grand finale with Jack Lalanne! 💦🏅

As has been pointed out by @DZ-Jay and @cmadruga, like so many things in the Intellivision world, JoeZ got there first. In this case just over a decade ago... Whilst this posting contains the instructions to run the ROM, I think the latest greatest version can be found in the following posting, but you might want to take a look through the thread...