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New Versions of Intellivision and Coleco Color

GI did offer a 10 bit-wide ROM.

The picture is a bit more complicated--and horrifying. The first word of an instruction uses 10 bits out of 16--the unused 6 bits were apparently reserved for a coprocessor or some other function.

The second and third words are, in fact, a full 16 bits, unless they're direct jump operands--in which case they're 10 bits as well; you have a three-word instruction.

In the case of a relative (conditional) jump, a 16-bit displacement is used as the second instruction word. However, the sign of the displacement is part of the first instruction word, so if you've got a 10 bit instruction ROM, you're limited to +/- 1023 words either side of the jump, so not so bad.

However, there's a "prefix" instruction for people using 10 bit ROMs "SDBD" - set double-byte data, which allows the 16-bit operand of a non-jump instruction, such as a load/move immediate to be represented by 2 following bytes.

Bizarre, and inefficient, but this was 1975. The principal 16-bit competition was the NS PACE, which went the other way--all instructions were one word, which had problems of its own--and, like the CP1600, it was slow.

If you weren't in the defense industry, practical chips like the Fairchild 9440 were basically unobtanium.
 
That's bananas. Putting the sign of the displacement in the opcode is just goofy -- why arbitrarily shorten your opcode space when you can just put it in the displacement value? You've got 16 bits there! What a strange design.

If I had a choice, I would have easily chosen the NS PACE; it sounds much faster to get up and running.
 
Trixter said:
Yeah, but with crap. Market saturation was the cause of the crash, so those bin games were all pretty terrible.
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Everything went into the bins: good games and bad games. Stores just wanted video games gone. A little selectivity and one got a great collection.
 
Trixter said:
If I had a choice, I would have easily chosen the NS PACE; it sounds much faster to get up and running.
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Well, the ISA is somewhat similar to the DG Nova, but with drawbacks. IIRC (this is all from memory), you've got a 10-deep stack, after which, you service an interrupt and empty or fill it again. The chip was the typical 3-supply (Vss, Vcc, Vbb) MOS affair with most signals requiring special interface chips. Not particularly fast (a Z80 could beat it) with some awkward ISA quirks.

Only two "immediate" instructions; a "load immediate" of an 8-bit quantity and a "complement and add immediate". A strange "skip if AND of the addressed memory location and AC0 is zero" instruction. Many other ISA oddities.

All in all, it wasn't really worth the effort.
 
Selectivity and timing. If you weren't there first, the games were already picked through. I seem to remember getting one or two good games, and a dozen or more bad games in triplicate. I think I have four copies of STAR STRIKE, which at the time we thought was a horrible game (and apparently everyone else did too). Ironically, it's one of my favourite games now.

The best game I got at that time (as I recall) was SPACE ARMADA. I thought it was a great game, but it was too stinking hard, so I never played it. I remember that one specifically because it was the one game that I recall was in the bins with its box and overlay. But it came with black&white instructions and only one overlay! These days, I enjoy playing it, but can't do it for very long.
 
KC9UDX said:
Does the one actually power off during play, or just change to a black screen? I've found that in most cases, bad cartridge contact is actually the problem. These cartridges for whatever reason seem more prone to this than other machines'.

The failure mode of the one I have was to go to a black screen during play. It would do this sooner and sooner and finally stopped playing altogether. I always meant to find out why but never did. The power supply was not the problem because I didn't change that when I swapped parts with the Sears unit.

Matt.
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I honestly can't remember. It's been a while since I have used one.

My friend and I used to play IT Football before watching a real game on Sunday morning. The one issue was with the color choices they made. It seems no one ever considers the fact the person playing a video game may be color blind. So it's a BAD idea to put a red guy on a green background - it's just doesn't stand out to someone who is color blind. So I always had to be the red guy since I could follow him because I knew where I was moving. The black guy stood out on the green background so my friend always had to use that controller.

Joe
 
Now, for the really important question...will there be a repro Intellivoice unit, or are we going to have to use originals/build our own? :p
 
I thought those had one built in.

It's irrelevant, there's no cartridge slot and likely no attempt to emulate the system bus, so no way to adapt an Intellivoice.
 
KC9UDX said:
I thought those had one built in.

It's irrelevant, there's no cartridge slot and likely no attempt to emulate the system bus, so no way to adapt an Intellivoice.
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Unless they're building in a pretty unpopular module for a repro, I doubt it's built in, it wasn't originally either...the Intellivision III was supposed to have it built in, but that never came to be. I suppose it depends on the actual design of the repro system, as I recall you could wire in your own cartridge slot for the Atari Flashback systems that came out a few years ago, but that may have been deliberate on the designers' part.
 
I don't think it was unpopular. I knew people that had one or even two, who didn't even have the games that required it.

This new thing must have it built in. I know I've seen Heligans (Space Spartans) and Bay Seventain Baumer advertised for it. I can't imagine anyone wanting to play those without it.
 
Bay Seventain Baumer
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I'm sorry, sir, you really must learn to spell. It is, in fact, spelled Bee Sevuhnteen Baaaaahmer.

I wouldn't think it's a given. It seems exactly the mentality to throw another game in for the stats, never mind that without the voice the game loses a major play dimension. (Almost like Mind Strike without the ECS keyboard.)
 
ClassicHasClass said:
I'm sorry, sir, you really must learn to spell. It is, in fact, spelled Bee Sevuhnteen Baaaaahmer.

I wouldn't think it's a given. It seems exactly the mentality to throw another game in for the stats, never mind that without the voice the game loses a major play dimension. (Almost like Mind Strike without the ECS keyboard.)
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Energy level nine thousand. Zero Heligans.

I'm considering buying one just to find out. I'll have to peruse the list of included games and see if there's any I don't have that would make it worthwhile.
 
I guess I'm not thoroughly impressed with the game list. Someone on Amazon had the gall to say that those are all the games there were.

Sharp Shot? Really?

I might get it anyway though. There's a couple included which are games I've lost and wouldn't mind having again. Specially Motocross. I've never played the newer Baseball game, so that might be interesting.
 
I have a Sylvania GTE Intellivision (that I repaired the controller pads on) with an Intellivoice and a Cuttlecart. That is how you Inty. This thing is a joke.

I confess I did buy the ColecoVision version to investigate further but I was not impressed.
 
I'm pretty sure the Cuttle Cart boat has sailed.

Oddly my controllers still work fine, aside from a bad cable on the right one which I've been meaning to replace for decades. It works most of the time.

I'm torn about buying a Flashback. I'm sick to death of miniaturised replicas. Just the size of the PiDP-8 is the main reason I can't get the ambition to assemble it.
 
krebizfan said:
The various Flashback units (Coleco, Atari, Intellivision, etc.) are all using the same basic ARM board to drive an emulator. Only the plastic shells and controllers differ.
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Actually, the Atari Flashback II(2?) is actually an atari, not an emulator, with a rom chip soldered to the board. it actually has the header for the cartridge slot and everything, and can accept all original controllers, and mod boards for them.

I found this out when I was doing research into upgrading the video on my Sears Tele-Games 2600 clone, and subsequently just added a cartridge slot to my up till then "useless" flashback 2 :) Works great, have to do a bit of solder, and I kept the rom chip, so that was an extra switch so I could flip between cartridge and ROM :)

The instructions for modding a flashback 2 are easily found via google, happy hunting! :)
 
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