Vectron - Opinions? (Intellivisionaries)

[+DZ-Jay]

Vectron scares me and gives me nightmares. I have tried to play it a few times, but reading the manual leaves me cross-eyed and gives me a headache; and when I start the game I have absolutely no idea what the heck is going on. It all seems like random stuff moving around and I really can't figure it out.

 

A couple of seconds later I put it back on the shelf where it will remain until I forget how weird the experience was and think I may be able to figure it out this time...

 

 

I joined Mattel Electronics in January 1982.

 

Oh, quick yer' braggin'!!

[m-crew]

Vectron scares me and gives me nightmares. I have tried to play it a few times, but reading the manual leaves me cross-eyed and gives me a headache; and when I start the game I have absolutely no idea what the heck is going on. It all seems like random stuff moving around and I really can't figure it out.

 

A couple of seconds later I put it back on the shelf where it will remain until I forget how weird the experience was and think I may be able to figure it out this time...

 

 

 

Oh, quick yer' braggin'!!

 

Yup ,Sounds like my experience with this game as well.

Lol

I almost gave it another try when this thread started. Lol

But something stopped me !!!

Lucky Me !!

[mr_me]

Everyone should be able to do a couple of levels; but there are 18 levels before they start repeating. What's the furthest any of you guys have gone?

[+DZ-Jay]

Everyone should be able to do a couple of levels; but there are 18 levels before they start repeating. What's the furthest any of you guys have gone?

 

I think I got to the fourth page of the manual...

 

Just kidding. I really have never been able to get into this game. Moreover, had I owned it as a kid, I don't think I would have spent much time with it then either -- unless it was the only game I had.

 

I think I had nightmares like that, in which the only Intellivision games I had were Vectron and Horse Racing, and turning on TV only played CSPAN. OMG!!

 

-dZ.

[Tempest]

Ok, I'm going to give this game a try this weekend. I'm really curious now. Maybe I'll read up on Maze a Tron as well.

 

 

I joined Mattel Electronics in January 1982. When I started, the company was located in a small area on the first floor of the Mattel Toys office building.

 

I never knew that. What did you do there?

[catsfolly]

Ok, I'm going to give this game a try this weekend. I'm really curious now. Maybe I'll read up on Maze a Tron as well.

 

 

 

I never knew that. What did you do there?

I worked on Atari 2600 games like Star Strike and Bump and Jump, and some other projects that I never finished.

And I reverse-engineered the Colecovision, even though I wasn't supposed to....

[Tempest]

and some other projects that I never finished.

 

Oooh! Now you have my attention. Such as ?

[catsfolly]

 

Oooh! Now you have my attention. Such as ?

1. Time Bombs (Intellivision) This was my "do something on the Intellivision to get up to speed" project. Time bombs were bouncing around the screen (why???), and the player had to tag them all to defuse them. Management thought it looked promising, so they encouraged me to keep working on it, but I joined the Atari 2600 team a few weeks later and never worked on it again. (In hindsight, a game where the player's goal is to prevent stuff from blowing up seems like a mistake...)

 

2.Dual Scrolling - This was like a 2600 technical demo where two game characters were in a maze, and the top half of the screen had the camera centered on one game character, and the bottom half of the screen had the camera centered on the other game character...

 

3. Party Line 2600 - Keith and Bill Fisher and Andy Sels conceived of simple games that people could play competitively at parties - they called them the party line games (Nintendo would have a lot of success with this kind of game years later...) I worked on the Atari 2600 version of "Blow Out" but didn't make much progress on it.

 

4. Triple Action Biplanes was very popular among Mattel's programmers. I read the source code of the game to understand how the physics worked, and then wrote a document so others could understand it without having to read the code. Steve Crandall read my document and created a version of biplanes for the 2600. Marketing thought the biplanes game looked too similar to Atari's own 2600 Combat game. But I think this code was the start of what became Rocky and Bullwinkle...

[SiLic0ne t0aD]

1. Time Bombs (Intellivision) This was my "do something on the Intellivision to get up to speed" project. Time bombs were bouncing around the screen (why???), and the player had to tag them all to defuse them. Management thought it looked promising, so they encouraged me to keep working on it, but I joined the Atari 2600 team a few weeks later and never worked on it again. (In hindsight, a game where the player's goal is to prevent stuff from blowing up seems like a mistake...)

 

2.Dual Scrolling - This was like a 2600 technical demo where two game characters were in a maze, and the top half of the screen had the camera centered on one game character, and the bottom half of the screen had the camera centered on the other game character...

 

3. Party Line 2600 - Keith and Bill Fisher and Andy Sels conceived of simple games that people could play competitively at parties - they called them the party line games (Nintendo would have a lot of success with this kind of game years later...) I worked on the Atari 2600 version of "Blow Out" but didn't make much progress on it.

 

4. Triple Action Biplanes was very popular among Mattel's programmers. I read the source code of the game to understand how the physics worked, and then wrote a document so others could understand it without having to read the code. Steve Crandall read my document and created a version of biplanes for the 2600. Marketing thought the biplanes game looked too similar to Atari's own 2600 Combat game. But I think this code was the start of what became Rocky and Bullwinkle...

That's really neat, thanks for sharing your story. I'm curious though, did you do anything software wise on the ColecoVision?

[Tempest]

1. Time Bombs (Intellivision) This was my "do something on the Intellivision to get up to speed" project. Time bombs were bouncing around the screen (why???), and the player had to tag them all to defuse them. Management thought it looked promising, so they encouraged me to keep working on it, but I joined the Atari 2600 team a few weeks later and never worked on it again. (In hindsight, a game where the player's goal is to prevent stuff from blowing up seems like a mistake...)

 

2.Dual Scrolling - This was like a 2600 technical demo where two game characters were in a maze, and the top half of the screen had the camera centered on one game character, and the bottom half of the screen had the camera centered on the other game character...

 

3. Party Line 2600 - Keith and Bill Fisher and Andy Sels conceived of simple games that people could play competitively at parties - they called them the party line games (Nintendo would have a lot of success with this kind of game years later...) I worked on the Atari 2600 version of "Blow Out" but didn't make much progress on it.

 

4. Triple Action Biplanes was very popular among Mattel's programmers. I read the source code of the game to understand how the physics worked, and then wrote a document so others could understand it without having to read the code. Steve Crandall read my document and created a version of biplanes for the 2600. Marketing thought the biplanes game looked too similar to Atari's own 2600 Combat game. But I think this code was the start of what became Rocky and Bullwinkle...

 

I'm guessing the answer is no, but I don't suppose you still have any of your old work do you?

[m-crew]

Everyone should be able to do a couple of levels; but there are 18 levels before they start repeating. What's the furthest any of you guys have gone?

 

I just could not get into the game at all , kept trying to but just could not keep me intrusted long enough to keep playing and learn..

[catsfolly]

That's really neat, thanks for sharing your story. I'm curious though, did you do anything software wise on the ColecoVision?

Well, it's a long story and probably doesn't belong in this thread, but since you asked…

 

The hardware dept of Mattel Electronics bought a Colecovision as soon as it came out, and they took it apart to see what made it tick. Until the Colecovision and Atari 5200 came out, Intellivision was the top of the game console world in power and sophistication, so Mattel's engineers wanted to understand what their new competitor was like.

 

Besides studying the hardware, they also disassembled and printed a listing of the Colecovision BIOS and at least one of the games (I think it was Cosmic Avenger). However, none of the hardware engineers were excited about looking through pages of disassembled Z80 code, so they asked me if I would take a look at it.

 

At that time, Mattel had not publically expressed any interest in developing games for the Colecovision. So I thought if i could get something up and running on the system (and show them how "easy" it was to develop for) it might motivate them to make Colecovision games.

 

So I studied the disassembled listings, and I figured out enough of the code to set up the cartridge header and put up some sprites and read the controls.

 

Unfortunately I didn't have a Z80 development system to try things out on.

Fortunately, in order to speed up shipping, some of the early Colecovision games shipped with EPROMS in the cartridge instead of ROMS. So I took the cartridge of a game I didn't especially like (I think it was "Looping"), unsoldered one of the EPROMS and put in a socket.

 

This was my development platform. I would write code, burn it into an EPROM, put it in the socket, and then try it and try and guess why it didn't work…

 

After many tries I got it to the point where I had the Intellivision running man on the Colecovision screen, controllable with the Coleco controllers.

 

I showed it to Mike Minkoff, and he seemed surprised.

 

What I didn't know was that Mattel had decided to develop Colecovision games, and that they wanted to use a "clean room" reverse engineering approach.

 

The "clean room" approach would work like this: a team of engineers outside Mattel would study the Colecovision and its code. These engineers would then create a document that described the Colecovision memory map and BIOS routines.

Mattel Engineers would then write Colecovision games using only this document, and would never look at any Coleco code. That way, Mattel couldn't be accused of copying any Coleco code.

 

Since I had studied the Coleco code personally, I was "tainted", and therefore not elegible to work on Coleco games.

 

But, there was plenty of Atari 2600 work to do, so I was fine (well, until the whole game industry collapsed and Mattel Electronics shut down a little over a year later…)

 

Catsfolly

Edited March 4, 2017 by catsfolly

[catsfolly]

 

I'm guessing the answer is no, but I don't suppose you still have any of your old work do you?

No.

If I had known that people would still be curious about what went on at Mattel Electronics 35 years later, I would have taken some notes....

 

Catsfolly

Edited March 4, 2017 by catsfolly

[m-crew]

@Catsfolly,

 

Thanks for sharing your experience's at Mattel , very interesting for sure..

 

Cheers

[+DZ-Jay]

Well, it's a long story and probably doesn't belong in this thread, but since you asked…

 

The hardware dept of Mattel Electronics bought a Colecovision as soon as it came out, and they took it apart to see what made it tick. Until the Colecovision and Atari 5200 came out, Intellivision was the top of the game console world in power and sophistication, so Mattel's engineers wanted to understand what their new competitor was like.

 

Besides studying the hardware, they also disassembled and printed a listing of the Colecovision BIOS and at least one of the games (I think it was Cosmic Avenger). However, none of the hardware engineers were excited about looking through pages of disassembled Z80 code, so they asked me if I would take a look at it.

 

At that time, Mattel had not publically expressed any interest in developing games for the Colecovision. So I thought if i could get something up and running on the system (and show them how "easy" it was to develop for) it might motivate them to make Colecovision games.

 

So I studied the disassembled listings, and I figured out enough of the code to set up the cartridge header and put up some sprites and read the controls.

 

Unfortunately I didn't have a Z80 development system to try things out on.

Fortunately, in order to speed up shipping, some of the early Colecovision games shipped with EPROMS in the cartridge instead of ROMS. So I took the cartridge of a game I didn't especially like (I think it was "Looping"), unsoldered one of the EPROMS and put in a socket.

 

This was my development platform. I would write code, burn it into an EPROM, put it in the socket, and then try it and try and guess why it didn't work…

 

After many tries I got it to the point where I had the Intellivision running man on the Colecovision screen, controllable with the Coleco controllers.

 

I showed it to Mike Minkoff, and he seemed surprised.

 

What I didn't know was that Mattel had decided to develop Colecovision games, and that they wanted to use a "clean room" reverse engineering approach.

 

The "clean room" approach would work like this: a team of engineers outside Mattel would study the Colecovision and its code. These engineers would then create a document that described the Colecovision memory map and BIOS routines.

Mattel Engineers would then write Colecovision games using only this document, and would never look at any Coleco code. That way, Mattel couldn't be accused of copying any Coleco code.

 

Since I had studied the Coleco code personally, I was "tainted", and therefore not elegible to work on Coleco games.

 

But, there was plenty of Atari 2600 work to do, so I was fine (well, until the whole game industry collapsed and Mattel Electronics shut down a little over a year later…)

 

Catsfolly

 

Thanks for sharing that. I believe you also designed or were somehow involved with the development of the arcade game Klax, right? (Oh, I see your name right there on the Wikipedia page, so that's a fact.)

 

To everyone who didn't know, yes, Catsfolly is our resident honest-to-goodness BSR right here in our community. How cool is that?

 

-dZ.

[SiLic0ne t0aD]

That's really cool, again, thanks for sharing!