New Intellivision console coming?

[Flojomojo]

11 hours ago, poconojo said:

I would definitely buy a new Intellivision console.

And THAT is why retro people are so susceptible to scams like “Ibtellivision Amico.” THINK!  

[mr_me]

An Intellivision made with new hardware and is not software emulation, full cartridge compatibility with modern video output.  There are lots of people that already have a library of cartridges for it, I think more than a few would be interested.  Still not an easy project, we'll see what happens once it's priced out.

[Rev]

4 hours ago, Flojomojo said:

And THAT is why retro people are so susceptible to scams like “Ibtellivision Amico.” THINK!  

Sadly its really not just retro gamers, people everywhere get scammed!   
 

I will NEVER invest or crowdfund a gaming console. Well unless its from a company like nintendo. 

[1980gamer]

1 hour ago, Rev said:

Sadly its really not just retro gamers, people everywhere get scammed!   
 

I will NEVER invest or crowdfund a gaming console. Well unless its from a company like nintendo. 

If Nintendo gets to a point where they need your money to develop a new console, then certainly do not fund it!

 

I backed the collectorvision and I am happy I did.  I wish it had an Intellivision core.   Maybe that is what should happen.  With a cart slot add-on.

 

Most likely out $100 on the Amico.  Time will tell.  But I have already wrote the money off.  Like 4 or 5 other stock purchases over the past 2 years. ( except I can truly write them off! )

 

[Flyindrew]

1 hour ago, Rev said:

Sadly its really not just retro gamers, people everywhere get scammed!   
 

I will NEVER invest or crowdfund a gaming console. Well unless its from a company like nintendo. 

Back in 2018/2019, I truly dont think the powers that be at Intellivsion (Tommy etc.) planned on scamming people out of their money. Rather, Tommy, in his braggadocios ego centric style, promised the earth, the moon, the stars and the galaxy with regard to Amico, when in fact the product, in reality, wasnt even at the 15-20 percent point of development.  I predict one way or another the Amico will be released, but I predict eventually they will either partner up with or be bailed out by a 3rd party hardware/software developer. 

[atarifan88]

If it's coming, it isn't coming from Intellivision Entertainment. Glad I never invested. Never give someone your money before the physical product exists! I can't believe it still needs to be said!

[poconojo]

On 1/3/2023 at 7:12 AM, Flojomojo said:

And THAT is why retro people are so susceptible to scams like “Ibtellivision Amico.” THINK!  

?

[Walter Ives]

On 12/10/2022 at 5:01 AM, mr_me said:

While the specification described some items as a goal

As I've mentioned elsewhere, the document you refer to as "the specification" wasn't. It had no impact whatsoever on the actual development of STIC 1b. Drafting it was a useful exercise for a new employee, and it included in its list of objectives many ideas that had been floating around since 1978, but no one intimately familiar with the Intellivision, or indeed video games in general, would have specified "2 or 4 color objects" as he did in his second bullet point. What did the author mean by "Reversible Objects (Goal)?" Did he not know that objects could already be mirrored in x and y? Etc., etc.

 

WJI

 

[Walter Ives]

On 9/1/2022 at 11:19 AM, DZ-Jay said:

Yes, I know.  I was asking if the reason those bits are set in some games is really because of sloppy programming (as suggested by @Lathe26), or because they were being used by the program with the assumption that the STIC would ignore them, i.e., not sloppy but clever programming.

Neither assumptions or cleverness here: the bits were explicitly documented (by GI even) to be ignored by the STIC and available for general storage use. There was sloppiness, though: the INTV 1988 boards have jumpers that were supposed to be used to disable the extra GRAM in non-Tutorvision systems to ensure compatibility with the few games that used them, and they weren't.

 

By "Tutorvision" I mean specifically the private label systems in the white housing w/blue highlights delivered to World Book. I don't include the functionally identical Super Pro Systems that use INTV 1988 STIC 1A logic boards because, well, those systems aren't Tutorvisions. They're just Super Pro Systems that implement the running change to the logic circuitry that Mattel was going to make for Intellivision II when its inventory of original chipset ran out.

 

WJI

 

Sorry about the changing fonts in the above posts. They didn't show up on the browser I was using.

[Walter Ives]

On 12/10/2022 at 5:01 AM, mr_me said:

The original Stic could have done the full 192 lines of graphics with more ram...

Well, an internal STIC circuit change would have been required, although a trivial one, but there wasn't enough RAM in the 9600 for 24 lines of BACKTAB and increasing its die size was out of the question. Because of pin limitations any additional GRAM wouldn't have been accessible in foreground/background mode. So the least impactful way to implement this functionality would have been to modify the STIC to fetch the high half of each GRAM card from the additional higher order GRAM. Then you’d have to decide what to do about GROM—leave it the same or double the resolution and cut the number of characters in half. Decisions, decisions.

 

It is easy to lose track of how little memory one could put on a chip and how fast things were changing. Early CRT terminals cost about a thousand dollars and could display 24 rows of 80 characters, or about a thousand characters—just holding the ASCII values for a screenfull of characters took a kilobyte of memory. In 1975 memory was so dear that the typical terminal designs used recirculating shift registers for that memory instead of RAM, because a dynamic shift register cell was less than a quarter the size of a random access cell.

 

For non-production purposes the Master Component could have been fitted with additional logic that fetched the high half of each GRAM card from higher-order GRAM. See next comment.

 

WJI

[Walter Ives]

On 12/10/2022 at 5:01 AM, mr_me said:

... was 20x24 tile graphics part of Stic1b?  What about 40x24 alphanumerics? How about reusing the eight sprites per scanline?  Or three colours per sprite/tile? Sixteen pixel wide sprites and tiles in one colour, 320 pixels per line? Or the sixteen colour palette being programmable?

Yes to all of these. In fact, all of the things you list here were proposed in 1978 for what was then called Intellivision II. APh even jury-rigged a Master Component with extra GRAM as described in the previous comment well before the 1979 Fresno test market. It also piggy-backed a second STIC subsystem whose V outputs were selected if non-black to get more objects.

 

WJI

[Walter Ives]

On 12/10/2022 at 5:01 AM, mr_me said:

What is "The Design and Development of the Mattel Intellivision" by D. Johnson?  Is it a recent document?

A monograph prepared in consultation w/Chandler, Chang & others. © 1986, revised 1998.

 

WJI

[+DZ-Jay]

13 minutes ago, Walter Ives said:

Neither assumptions or cleverness here: the bits were explicitly documented (by GI even) to be ignored by the STIC and available for general storage use. There was sloppiness, though: the INTV 1988 boards have jumpers that were supposed to be used to disable the extra GRAM in non-Tutorvision systems to ensure compatibility with the few games that used them, and they weren't.

 

Fair point.  I was basing my comment on our current experience:  as home-brewers, most of us have little context on the explicit documentation of the device, so when suggests something like, "hey, you know, the STIC will never read these bits, so we can use them for our own game state data," it seems more clever than it is.  :)

 

Thanks again for the additional information.

 

    -dZ.

[+DZ-Jay]

21 minutes ago, Walter Ives said:

A monograph prepared in consultation w/Chandler, Chang & others. © 1986, revised 1998.

 

WJI

 

 

Oh, dear!  Fascinating.  I don't suppose you know if this paper still exists in some form, and if it can be reproduced for research and historical analysis?

 

    -dZ.