BI Tape 2.0 for the Keyboard Component

[+Lathe26]

The BI Tape 2.0 appears to be an early or alternative version of the Keyboard Component Demo tape.  As mentioned in the other thread, the voice actor is different and some of the spoken sections have a different script (the words spoken) while others have the same script as the normal Demo tape.  The data tracks are similar but not identical to the Demo tape as well.

 

I uncovered an Easter Egg in this tape and later confirmed the same Easter Egg is also in the normal Demo tape.  The triggering mechanism is unknown but the text is interesting, especially at end.  🙃

 

Here's the text, somewhat reformatted.  The names are a literal who's who on the Intellivision.  Are any of the names new to the community?

 

ARMOR BATTLE   Chris Kingsley

 

AUTO RACE   Larry Zwick

 

BACKGAMMON   Kevin Miller

 

BASEBALL   Dave Rolfe

 

BASKETBALL   Ken Smith

 

BLACKJACK and POKER   David Rolfe

 

BOXING   Tom Loughry

 

CHECKERS   David Rolfe

 

FOOTBALL   Kevin Miller, Ken Smith

 

GOLF   Scott Bishop

 

HOCKEY   Ken Smith

 

HORSE RACE   Chris Hawley

 

MATH FUN   Kimo Yap

 

ROULETTE   Walter Bright, John Brooks

 

SEA BATTLE   Ken Smith

 

SKIING   Scott Reynolds, Terry Ligocki

 

SOCCER   Kevin Miller

 

SPACE BATTLE   Hal Finney

 

TENNIS   Gavin Claypool, Chris Lutz

 

WORD FUN   Kevin Miller, Don Bacon

 

AUDIO EFFECTS   Hal Finney, Mike Kong, Chris Lee

 

ASTROLOGY   Kevin Miller, Greg Favor

 

DEMO CASSETTE   Ken Smith, Hal Finney

 

EXERCISE   Robby Butler, Tom Loughry, Hal Finney, John Brooks, Mark Stroberg

 

FRENCH   Mark Stroberg, Scott Bishop, Alan Blanchard, Hal Finney, Kirsi Allison, John Tomlinson, John Brooks, Jon Buss

 

STOCK   Jon Buss, Bill Chapman, Kevin Miller, Scott Reynolds

 

MASTER COMPONENT MONITOR   Dave Rolfe

 

KEYBOARD COMPONENT MONITORS   Ken Smith, Larry Zwick, Dean Inada

 

DEVELOPMENT SOFTWARE   Dave Rolfe, Dean Inada, Hal Finney, Tom Soulanille

 

HARDWARE DEVELOPMENT   Will McCown, Yin Shih, John Brooks, Scott Bishop, Gloria Webster

 

PROJECT ADMINISTRATION   Heather Edison, Sandy Shrader, Marilyn Mehren

 

BOTTLEWASHER   Glenn Hightower

 

WITH APPRECIATION TO:   Mattel Electronics, General Instrument Corp. (without whose help this product would have been available two years earlier)

 

[+DZ-Jay]

What's a bottlewasher?

 

    dZ.

[+Lathe26]

[mr_me]

There's a saying, "chief cook and bottlewasher", but they left out the chief cook part.

[Zendocon]

On 8/26/2022 at 12:28 PM, Lathe26 said:

WITH APPRECIATION TO:   Mattel Electronics, General Instrument Corp. (without whose help this product would have been available two years earlier)

 

That's funny.

[+DZ-Jay]

On 8/27/2022 at 7:40 PM, mr_me said:

There's a saying, "chief cook and bottlewasher", but they left out the chief cook part.

 

Ah, ok.  I wasn’t sure if it was a joke or some old term of art for engineers.

[mr_me]

Leaving out the chief cook part is telling of what they think of their boss.  It can be interpreted as a joke.

[decle]

On 8/26/2022 at 5:28 PM, Lathe26 said:

I uncovered an Easter Egg in this tape and later confirmed the same Easter Egg is also in the normal Demo tape.  The triggering mechanism is unknown but the text is interesting, especially at end.  🙃

This is very cool @Lathe26 , of course you knew the implicit challenge couldn't go unanswered.  When you're next in your local Sears, watching gobsmacked as the K/C demo plays on the kiosk, you need to key in "DEI" instead of using the space bar to fire within the Space Battle section of the demo.  Then, at the end of the current show, you will see the following...

 

 

...accompanied by another rousing rendition of Ride of the Valkyries.  I like the smooth scrolling, I guess this is a feature of the TI TMS9927 chip that the K/C uses to generate it's text overlay.

 

(Apologies for the really poor sound, but I don't have my capture rig set up).

 

 

 

Edited August 29, 2022 by decle

[+Lathe26]

7 hours ago, decle said:

This is very cool @Lathe26 , of course you knew the implicit challenge couldn't go unanswered.  When you're next in your local Sears, watching gobsmacked as the K/C demo plays on the kiosk, you need to key in "DEI" instead of using the space bar to fire within the Space Battle section of the demo.  Then, at the end of the current show, you will see the following...

 

 

...accompanied by another rousing rendition of Ride of the Valkyries.  I like the smooth scrolling, I guess this is a feature of the TI TMS9927 chip that the K/C uses to generate it's text overlay.

 

(Apologies for the really poor sound, but I don't have my capture rig set up).

 

 

 

Nice detective work, decle!

[+DZ-Jay]

Quote

 

When you're next in your local Sears, watching gobsmacked as the K/C demo plays on the kiosk, ...

Man, that would have been a sight!

 

    dZ.

[mr_me]

14 hours ago, decle said:

...accompanied by another rousing rendition of Ride of the Valkyries.  I like the smooth scrolling, I guess this is a feature of the TI TMS9927 chip that the K/C uses to generate it's text overlay.

 

(Apologies for the really poor sound, but I don't have my capture rig set up).

 

 

 

Edited 14 hours ago by decle

So how are you playing this.  Were you able to make your own copy from the original tape dumped by Lathe26.

[+Lathe26]

5 hours ago, mr_me said:

So how are you playing this.  Were you able to make your own copy from the original tape dumped by Lathe26.

Decle used one of the production versions of the Demo tape, which also has the same Easter Egg as the prototype version I have.

[Walter Ives]

On 8/26/2022 at 9:28 AM, Lathe26 said:

The names are a literal who's who on the Intellivision.

Well, this list only includes APh employees; it doesn't include any Mattel or GI personnel. It was prepared and surreptitiously included on the cassette by Mark Stroberg, an APh programmer, in early 1980. It doesn't include any of the projects that were started that spring or summer and is missing some that had been worked on as late as the fall of the preceding year but paused waiting for hardware to become available. If these same credits appear on any tape dated after that, it was because nobody bothered to update them. The projects and personnel listed represent the view from Stroberg's particular trench and is incomplete even as to APh employees. Stroberg also prepared the credits Easter egg for the French Cassette.

On 8/26/2022 at 9:28 AM, Lathe26 said:

ASTROLOGY   Kevin Miller, Greg Favor

Glyn Anderson worked on Astrology too (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cVR7OjYosI at 08:44). Keith Robinson reported that Astrology was complete but Jeanne Dixon wouldn't sign off on it. (The_Intellivisionaries_-_Episode_11_Jul_2014.mp3 at 02:28:40) I suppose that's to be expected when you have scientists write your astrology programs--they're likely to include some tongue-in-cheek to ensure the final product isn't a downright fraud. Among other things the cassette prominently displayed this quote from Carl Sagan's Cosmos (1980), “God provides for every animal his means of sustenance—for the Astronomer He has provided Astrology.” —Johannes Kepler

 

On 8/26/2022 at 9:28 AM, Lathe26 said:

WITH APPRECIATION TO:   ... General Instrument Corp.

The French Cassette credits "General Instruments Corporation," with an "s." There should be no "s." Steve Maine made sure that the Mattel personnel he interacted with were aware of the distinction, but Stroberg wasn't one of those. This suggests that these credits were prepared after the ones for the French Cassette and that someone in the know, upon being shown the French credits, brought the mistake to Stroberg's attention.

On 8/27/2022 at 5:35 AM, DZ-Jay said:

What's a bottlewasher?

Basic bottlewasher singing a happy working song: 20 bottles/hour

 

Industrial no-nonsense model: 37,500 bottles per hour

 

On 8/29/2022 at 4:29 AM, Zendocon said:

That's funny.

Mattel had a culture of keeping its vendors and even other groups within the company in the dark, which greatly impeded progress and led to no end of exasperation. Chandler himself was quite open with APh and instructed his people to be likewise, but ingrained habits die hard. This caused numerous problems that had to be painfully unraveled later.

One notable example was the third-party lockout feature. APh had in early 1979 proposed a robust scheme that accommodated third-party licensing but GI had already designed the circuit board and Mattel didn't want to revise it or add any more cost to the system. The Intellivision II was originally intended to be a cost-reduced version of the original based on the APh-designed STIC 1A chip (APh designed the logic and implemented it in TTL, Toshiba laid out a mask based on that design, Valeski eventually used the part on the INTV 88 board when his stash of original GI STIC chips ran out). APh's design for the STIC 1A logic board included its lockout scheme. When Mattel's management decided to repackage the original chipset in the Intellivision II housing as an interim measure it ordered two Mattel programmers to hack a lockout feature into the EXEC and keep it secret from everybody else. Their efforts yielded a crude scheme that (1) introduced execution problems, notably with Math Fun, (2) was trivially circumvented and (3) compromised the integrity of the source code management process. In the meantime, APh had thoroughly vetted its robust scheme in connection with the development of the Intellivision III. When APh learned of the Intellivision II scheme in early 1983 it immediately saw the problems and reminded Mattel management of the robust scheme. By that time upper management had become so concerned about third-party software that it ordered the robust scheme rushed into production. Before that effort could get very far Mattel Electronics upper management was replaced and all hardware development halted.

Another example was that marketing ran a "send-in-a-photo-of-your-score" Astrosmash contest without consulting either John Sohl or David Chandler, either of which would have immediately pointed out that players could easily get unearned high scores by playing the game in one of the slow-speed modes.

Even subgroups within engineering were kept in the dark. Information about the introduction of Intellivision into the European market was so closely held that the game programmers weren't informed until after the fact. It would have been trivial to include a mechanism for cartridges to detect whether they were running at 60 or 50 Hz and fix their timing. All it would have taken is a single bit in the EXEC ROM.

Probably the absolute worst example: the Intellivision II plastic designers were so isolated that manufacturing tooling was too far along to be changed before anyone who actually played the games got a chance to use the new controllers. The lead designer was actually surprised to learn that after a short learning period players dispensed with the overlays and played the games by feel and became all defensive about how important cost reduction was and how his (brilliant) design decisions shaved a few cents off the manufacturing cost.

 

On 8/29/2022 at 8:55 AM, mr_me said:

Leaving out the chief cook part is telling of what they think of their boss.

Authoritatively asserted. Possibly even just a little bit vicious. Nevertheless wrong:

 

On 8/29/2022 at 8:06 AM, DZ-Jay said:

Ah, ok.  I wasn’t sure if it was a joke...

I take it as more a wry display of ironic humor, both self-deprecating and gently mocking those who print exalted titles on their own business cards. But what do I know—I'm probably just projecting my own world view. I've often been amazed at just how wrong inferences can be, and we make a lot of them on this forum.

The card is from a huge collection amassed over the 50 year career of someone who worked with Chandler back in the day. Two other cards of his in the collection bear no title at all. The other APh cards in the collection aren't very pretentious either, reading simply "Member of the Technical Staff" or "Senior Member of the Technical Staff." That struck me as rather egalitarian. My overall favorite, though, is a Mattel Preliminary Design employee's card that just reads, "Toymaker." I thought that bespoke a certain amount of class.

 

[First Spear]

On 12/3/2022 at 8:19 AM, Walter Ives said:[snip]My overall favorite, though, is a Mattel Preliminary Design employee's card that just reads, "Toymaker." I thought that bespoke a certain amount of class.

 

 

The new Intellivision FAQ is getting much better based on input from this and other threads. Many answered questions. Thank you for the depth!