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Wishing for New Intellivision Hardware - a Modem


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Maybe not exactly a modem, but...

 

I am day-dreaming of a plastic case that is sized/styled to resemble the ECS. It fits into the cartridge slot of an Intellivision, but inside the case is a Raspberry Pi. The "modem cartridge" puts the Intellivision into a kind of bootstrap mode waiting for a game to load, with the Pi actually getting it onto the contemporary internet, connecting to a game server in the cloud, and net-booting the Intellivision to do multiplayer games.

 

Kind of like the http://ivanx.com/rasppleii/

 

Not my most thought-out nutty thing, but there it is.

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It already exists. It is called the PlayCable and all it needs is for someone to backwards engineer the proprietary cable modem signals, build the adaptation hardware, and write the software.

 

The PlayCable connects to... errr... well nothing right now since hardware the cable companies used appears to have been lost to time. But it can hold any Intellivision game that is 8KB or smaller.

 

But there is more! You don't have to wait for the hardware and software to be built. You can enjoy the PlayCable as it stands today. You play such games as "PlayCable title screen" and listen to the sound from Dumb and Dumber.

 

post-37124-0-41814300-1457458447_thumb.gif

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S8ynIDYyG4

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For some reason, I thought that the printer port on the ECS could be a serial port of sorts... though perhaps only at 300 baud.

 

The tape drive input and output are serial data (represented at audio electrical levels) and I believe that UART-to-ECS adapters have been made. I think that they run at 300 baud. At that point, you could hook it up to an actual modem and issue AT commands by hand.

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I almost posted doctorclu's youtube video of him using the CC3 to dial into a BBS using Joe's sample code, but was trying to suss out whether it was possible without any additional hardware.

 

I'm almost positive that you can use the Aquarius printer w/ the ECS … but have never dug into how they communicated. Was it serial?

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I almost posted doctorclu's youtube video of him using the CC3 to dial into a BBS using Joe's sample code, but was trying to suss out whether it was possible without any additional hardware.

 

I'm almost positive that you can use the Aquarius printer w/ the ECS … but have never dug into how they communicated. Was it serial?

 

From what I heard, the ECS/Aquarius printers is also Keyboard Component compatible. The apparently reused it.

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