Intermission Code (Pause)

[daldude]

How exactly does the "Intermission Code" or Pause feature on the Intellivision work? Is it a built in function of the hardware that has to be enabled by each game or is it something that is there by default and would have to be intentionally disabled by the programmer of a game?

I ask this because there are a few games by third party programmers that will not respond to the intermission code when 1 an 9 or 3 and 7 are pressed. The Games I know of are Pit Fall, Happy Trails, Sewer Sam, Vventure and Blockade Runner.

Atari Games have a different and in my opinion Better Pause Feature, when you dod the Intermission code thing it pauses the game but still displays the game screen and then after a few minutes will black the screen and then you hit the disc or any button once to get the image back and then a second time to un pause the game.

[+DZ-Jay]

The "pause" feature is built into the EXEC, i.e., the "operating system" included in the Intellivision ROM. It runs as part of the game loop. However, although the EXEC was very useful for many things, it was slow and buggy, and eventually most games bypassed it; using their own custom game engines. This was even more pronounced on third-party titles, like Activision and Imagic, which had to reverse engineer the Intellivision hardware, and had very little knowledge of the EXEC.

 

Only the first generation of Mattel titles used the EXEC; these are the games release from 1979 to 1981 or thereabouts. After that, some Mattel programmers added the sequence of 1+9 to pause their games, mostly out of convention, but they had to build it themselves.

 

Fun Fact: I included this feature in Christmas Carol, so you can press 1+9 at any point and pause the game--just like the old Mattel games used to do. I decided to make the screen blank, to prevent the player from being able to study the play-field during pause, which I thought was a form of cheating.

 

-dZ.

[intvnut]

dZ covered it pretty well. The only things I'll add:

• Unpause isn't 2 stage as daldude describes. You tap the disc or hit a key, and the game is immediately unpaused.
• The intermission / pause feature was inspired in part by a direct FCC request that video game manufacturers address how they are going to handle display burn-in problems, apparently(!)

Some interesting documents from Dave "Papa Intellivision" Chandler's Intellivision memorial website:

• Selection of the intermission code: http://papaintellivision.com/pdfs/CCF10232011_00005.pdf
• OSCO Drug asking about how Mattel intends to address the FCC's concern (page 2): http://papaintellivision.com/pdfs/CCF10232011_00011.pdf

[daldude]

With Atari Games when you hit 1 and clear it pauses the game with the game screen still visible and after 30 seconds it then blacks the screen but the un pause is still 1 step. It has been such a long times since I messed with the different pause function of Atari Games that I forgot the details.

 

 

dZ covered it pretty well. The only things I'll add:

• Unpause isn't 2 stage as daldude describes. You tap the disc or hit a key, and the game is immediately unpaused.
• The intermission / pause feature was inspired in part by a direct FCC request that video game manufacturers address how they are going to handle display burn-in problems, apparently(!)

Some interesting documents from Dave "Papa Intellivision" Chandler's Intellivision memorial website:

• Selection of the intermission code: http://papaintellivision.com/pdfs/CCF10232011_00005.pdf
• OSCO Drug asking about how Mattel intends to address the FCC's concern (page 2): http://papaintellivision.com/pdfs/CCF10232011_00011.pdf

 

Edited April 25, 2014 by daldude

[intvnut]

Intermission code on Atari Games Is 2 steps.

 

I just tried Pac-Man, Defender and Centipede, and they all resume immediately after pause.

[+DZ-Jay]

 

I just tried Pac-Man, Defender and Centipede, and they all resume immediately after pause.

 

My guess is that the two-step unpause may have been for a custom implementation by one of the third-parties. Mattel seems to have been pretty good in maintaining the convention. Personally, I don't recall ever seeing the two-step unpause feature. I also didn't tend to pause in games when I was a kid.

 

-dZ.

[intvnut]

With Atari Games when you hit 1 and clear it pauses the game with the game screen still visible and after 30 seconds it then blacks the screen but the un pause is still 1 step. It has been such a long times since I messed with the different pause function of Atari Games that I forgot the details.

Ah, ok, that makes sense. Either I had forgotten about the 1 + Clear behavior, or never new about it. When I tested earlier, I only used 1 + 9, and that behaves the same as other EXEC-based games.

 

[+DZ-Jay]

Ah, ok, that makes sense. Either I had forgotten about the 1 + Clear behavior, or never new about it. When I tested earlier, I only used 1 + 9, and that behaves the same as other EXEC-based games.

 

 

Hmm... Weird... I see a post from daldude that quotes intvnut, but has not content other than the quote, and then I see intvnut responding to some secret message from daldude.

 

Daldude, could you check your post to see if something happen to it? perhaps it has some runaway BBCode tag...

 

-dZ.

[intvnut]

 

Hmm... Weird... I see a post from daldude that quotes intvnut, but has not content other than the quote, and then I see intvnut responding to some secret message from daldude.

 

Daldude, could you check your post to see if something happen to it? perhaps it has some runaway BBCode tag...

 

-dZ.

 

 

No secret at all. daldude typed his message in the top line of my quote.

 

And later, then edited it to say something different (still in the top line of the quote box, so it looks like I said it).

 

I replied to both versions.

Edited April 26, 2014 by intvnut

[+DZ-Jay]

 

 

No secret at all. daldude typed his message in the top line of my quote.

 

And later, then edited it to say something different (still in the top line of the quote box, so it looks like I said it).

 

I replied to both versions.

 

I didn't think it was a "secret," I just thought that he edited his message and screwed up the BBcode. Tapatalk has a tendency to do that.