IntellivisionMASTER COMPONENT #2609 DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
GI was enthusiastic about working with Mattel and helped make design changes. (The most important of these was adding a way for programmers to define new graphics for each game; the original design only allowed for a ROM library of graphics that would be used for every game. Design & Development artist Dave James insisted this would be a debilitating limitation.) The Mattel executives, however, were reluctant to compete with Atari in the videogame market; they put the videogame project on hold. Instead, Richard Chang's group started producing handheld electronic games, many programmed by APh. These games, marketed under the name Mattel Electronics, were very successful. In the Mattel boardroom, executive Jeff Rochlis started pushing the idea again of a videogame system. He finally sold upper management on it; in 1979, the Intellivision project started moving forward again. The actual engineering of the hardware (including design of the infamous hand controllers) was done by a team at Mattel headed by Dave Chandler, earning him the nickname "Papa Intellivision." The internal software (the "Executive") was programmed at APh. (Midway through development, Texas Instruments approached Mattel and pushed hard to get TI chips used in the Intellivision instead of GI chips. Although they offered a great deal price-wise that was seriously considered, Mattel stuck with GI since it would have caused a six to nine month delay. A good thing, says Glenn Hightower, who fought against the TI chip set as being "inferior.") The Intellivision was test marketed in 1979 in Fresno, California, along with four cartridges: Poker & Blackjack, Math Fun, Armor Battle, and Backgammon. The test was a success, and in 1980 the Intellivision went into wide release. 175,000 were sold in 1980, 500,000 in 1981 and another 500,000 in 1982. Counting the Intellivision II and the Sears, Radio Shack and INTV clones, approximately 3 million master components were ultimately sold. The Intellivision originally retailed for $299. Within a year the price had dropped to $249, and in 1982 a $50 rebate brought the actual price under $200. The cheaper-to-produce Intellivision II (which did not come with a game cartridge as the original Intellivision had), was introduced at around $150, but by late 1983 retailed for $69.95. That became the final Intellivision price point. Master Components sold by Mattel Electronics' successor, INTV Corp., from 1985 through 1990 were sold for $69.95 each. Most Mattel Electronics cartridges were introduced at $39.95, then dropped in price as new titles were released. Intellivoice games originally sold for $43.95 each. Chess, which included RAM in the cartridge, was the most expensive Intellivision cartridge ever at $55.95.
Mattel decided not to pay; after careful analysis, the legal department concluded that the patent would never stand up in court. Wellllll.....it did. Magnavox sued, won, and Mattel coughed up a few million dollars.
This document covers the main components of the Intellivision (product number 2609) that are of interest to the programmer. These are:
In addition, the Intellivision includes components not directly accessed by the game program. The principal functions of these components are to (1) generate the 3.579545 MHz system clock, (2) convert the digital sound and video signals to an RF output and (3) supply power for the system. These are not discussed further here. The information here also applies to the Radio Shack Tandyvision One, the Sears Super Video Arcade, and the INTV Master Component (also called INTV System III and the INTV Super Pro System), which are all simply clones of the Intellivision Master Component with minor cosmetic differences. CPU Since most 1610 instructions are 10-bits wide, game programs are stored in 10-bit wide ROMs. This 10-bit "byte" is referred to as a decle (rhymes with "heckle"). Some instructions require 16 bits; these are stored in two successive 10-bit locations, referred to as a bidecle. (For prototyping, dual 8-bit EPROMs are used, with the low 8 bits of each decle stored in one EPROM and the top 2 bits stored in the other.) STIC The STIC will display a background field of 240 "cards" (20 wide and 12 high; each card is 8 by 8 pixels), giving a resolution of 160 pixels wide and 96 pixels high (each pixel is 2 TV lines high and is in the proportion of 5 wide by 4 high). NOTE: The STIC does NOT display the far right column of pixels, giving an actual displayed resolution of 159 by 96 pixels. Each pixel can be in any of 16 colors (eight "primaries" and eight "pastels."). In addition, the STIC controls 8 "moving objects", each of which can be 8 wide by 8 high or, at double resolution, 8 wide by 16 half-pixels high (each moving object can also be double-sized in width and/or height). The beauty of this system is that once the CPU has defined a background and a moving object shape, it can change the location of an object merely by writing a different address to the STIC. NOTE: The moving objects can be located on a grid space wider and taller than the displayed background, allowing them to smoothly slide on or off the screen at the edges. [Blue Sky Rangers comment: Two methods were developed to get around the limit of only eight moving objects: (1) multiplexing is redefining and repositioning one object from frame to frame to give the illusion of two separate objects; (2) sequencing GRAM is writing directly to the Graphics RAM locations, normally only accessed by the EXEC, to animate background cards. Because it causes objects to flicker, marketing forbid the use of multiplexing (common in Atari 2600 and Colecovision games). Sequencing GRAM, however, was used often, including in Space Armada, Star Strike and TRON Solar Sailer to create screens full of movement.] The STIC will take care of changing the location of an object, background, overlaps, etc. The STIC will also keep track of moving object interactions with other moving objects or with the background field, and will signal the CPU when crashes occur. As an example, the CPU can define a playing field and a ball moving on it. Then the CPU can move the ball around the field merely by writing a new X,Y location to the STIC. The STIC will make sure that the background properly reappears after an object moves away, and (if requested) will signal the CPU when the ball moves off the edge of the playing field or intersects another moving object such as an opposing player. The STIC also can cause the entire background to move smoothly, one pixel at a time, either in the X-direction or the Y-direction. Moving objects move with the background. (Special subroutines are available to the programmer to use this feature to create continuous scrolling backgrounds.) Obviously, the STIC takes a lot of work off the CPU, and it makes it possible for Intellivision to have higher quality graphics than any other video game or home computer system. However, the STIC has limitations which the programmer has to work within, particularly in defining colors: Moving objects can have only ONE color each; a multicolor character must therefore be made up of more than one of the only eight moving objects. Each 8 by 8 background card can have only TWO colors on it. There are two methods for defining these colors: (1) Foreground/Background mode allows the colors for each card to be defined individually, but one of the two colors on each card is limited to the eight primary colors. Two pastel colors cannot appear on the same card. (2) Color Stack mode restricts one of the two colors on each card to either the current or next color from a programmer-defined four-color circular stack. However, since all 16 colors are available for the color stack, two pastel colors CAN appear on the same card. Modes cannot be mixed on one screen. In general, a complex screen design is easier to create in Foreground/Background mode, but a simpler (or very clever) design using Color Stack can be more colorful. (NOTE: There is a third mode, Colored Squares mode, that allows four primary colors to be defined per card, but it is literally limited to colored squares -- four equal-sized blocks per card. Therefore, the entire background must be made up of 4-pixel by 4-pixel solid-color squares. [This mode was only used three times, for Snafu and the unreleased games Empire and Brickout!]) SYSTEM
RAM SOUND
CHIP GROM AND
GRAM GRAM has space for 64 program-defined 8 by 8 bit images. Both background and moving object images are stored here; since there can be up to 8 double-resolution moving objects defined in GRAM, there are always at least 64-(8*2)=48 background locations which the program can define. GROM contains 213 predefined 8 by 8 bit image locations (TRIVIA: it was intended to contain 256 images, but space was stolen for an overflow of system software from the EXEC ROM) which include numbers, upper and lower case alphabetic characters, punctuation, and graphics characters (triangles, lines and whatnot). For example, GROM location #37 contains the character E stored as: 01111110 The 240 BACKTAB locations each points to a location in GRAM or GROM. For example, if BACKTAB location #1 points to GROM location #37, an E will appear in the upper left corner of the screen. BACKTAB contains other information on the display, such as foreground and background color, and whether the character is in GROM or GRAM. Therefore, one GROM or GRAM image can be used to produce different colored images on different parts of the same screen (e.g. you can have a white E on a black background on one part of the screen and a red E on a blue background on a different part of the screen; both use the same bit images pattern stored in GROM location #37). GROM is a GI RO-3-9503 2K ROM. GRAM is made up of two GTE 3539 256-byte static RAM chips. THE
EXEC
When the Intellivision II was being designed, consideration was given to fixing the square root routine bug. But the fear was that games developed and tested principally on an Intellivision II would then be more likely to crash on an original Intellivision. The bug was left as is.
SCRATCHPAD
RAM HAND
CONTROLLERS 1. The top action keys are wired together, so there are really only three separate action buttons: left bottom, right bottom and the left/right top button. 2. The 12-number keypad duplicates the disc controller and the action keys, so you can either use the disc controller and the action buttons -- OR -- the keypad, but not both at the same time. Each hand controller is hooked to an 8-bit input port. (These are physically the input ports of the sound chip, but that's not relevant to the programmer.) The disc controller outputs a 5-bit code; the action buttons output a 3-bit code. The 12-number keypad outputs an 8-bit code. The EXEC contains routines which debounce key inputs and convert 5-bit disc hardware codes to numbers, 0 through 15, which indicate directions. A game program can access the input ports directly, but the EXEC routines are usually used, instead.
Intellivision IIMASTER COMPONENT #5872 DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
1. Redesigned circuitry that lowered the component count and, therefore, the cost. 2. Easier repairs by making the components most prone to failure - the power supply and hand-controllers - plug-in, replaceable parts. 3. An external video input on the cartridge port to make the System Changer possible. (The plug-in controllers also provided an opportunity to propose alternate types of controllers such as track balls and light guns. While most of these never got beyond the brainstorming stage, a trigger-joystick controller - code named Dandelion - was shown at the January 1984 Consumer Electronics Show for a "proposed 1984 introduction.") For game design, Intellivision II was supposed to be identical to the original - the main chips and their functions are the same as described for the Intellivision Technical Overview. But there turned out to be a major difference.... When Intellivision II was released, it was discovered that three of the Coleco Intellivision games on the market, Donkey Kong, Mouse Trap and Carnival, would not work on it. Why not? Mattel said it wasn't sure - maybe software changes needed for the System Changer to work were causing the problems.... But as more and more games in development at Mattel were found not to work with the Intellivision II, programmers were filled in on the truth - but only on a one-to-one, need-to-know basis. The reason the Intellivision II doesn't work with the Coleco games is that it was designed not to. The EXEC contains a subroutine to display the Mattel copyright notice; the programmer merely needs to provide the year in a certain memory location. Since a competitor's game would not use this routine, that location could have anything in it. The Intellivision II EXEC checks on a particular bit in that location; if the bit isn't set, the EXEC doesn't allow the game to play. With a valid date in that location, the bit will be set; anything else and there is only a 50-50 chance the bit will be set. This was a deliberate attempt to render competitors' cartridges useless, and therefore it may very well have been illegal. No one was to know. But as game size went from 4K to 8K and larger, more Mattel programmers started using special title screens that by- passed the EXEC copyright routine. These programmers had to be told to make sure the bit was set. Of course, once the Intellivision II was on the market, competitors were able to figure out how to make their new cartridges work on it.
The change in the Intellivision II EXEC also introduced a slight timing error in the system. Minor problems with sound effects started cropping up. Once aware of this, the programmers were able to get around it, but two already released games, Space Spartans and Shark! Shark!, were effected. The biggest timing problem appeared years later, with INTV's release of Super Pro Football. The cartridges were manufactured before anyone tried the game in an Intellivision II -- and discovered that the quarterback didn't appear on the screen until after the ball was hiked. An errata slip had to be included with the (already-printed) instructions.
Intellivision IIIMASTER COMPONENT [UNRELEASED] DEVELOPMENT HISTORY When was introduced, Mattel's marketing positioned it as the cornerstone of a home computer system, implying that while the Atari VCS (2600) was a toy, the Intellivision -- Intelligent Television -- was an educational tool. After its release though, Marketing discovered that most people who chose Intellivision over Atari did so because of better graphics. Educational games and the Keyboard Component were dropped in priority and the focus shifted to exploiting the graphics with a series of commercials showing side-by-side comparisons of Intellivision and Atari games. This backfired when Colecovision was introduced in early 1982. Suddenly, Intellivision was no longer the superior graphics system. Atari tried to compete with the introduction of the Atari 5200, but consumers were disappointed it couldn't play Atari 2600 cartridges. Marketing decided that the only way for Mattel to respond was to introduce a new game machine -- Intellivision III -- that had graphics as good or better than Colecovision and could still play all the original Intellivision cartridges. The solution to this was actually fairly simple since the Intellivision contains a separate video processor, the STIC chip. Mattel commissioned General Instruments to build an improved STIC for the Intellivision III. This new Super-STIC (STIC 1B) would have a double-resolution background mode and allow for more moving objects (sprites) and colors, but otherwise would be compatible with the original STIC. By having the Intellivision III based on the same CP1610 processor as in the original Intellivision, the old games would still run, and new games could take advantage of the improved graphics features. General Instruments prototyped the Super-STIC, Design & Development modified an Intellivision to use it, and began writing the expanded EXEC program to control it. The project was code named Coffee. Had that been the extent of it, an Intellivision with a new STIC chip, expanded EXEC ROM and some extra RAM (to keep track of all those moving objects) -- the product probably could have hit the market fairly fast. Unfortunately, Intellivision III fell victim to Kitchen Sink Syndrome, as in Everything-But-The. While Intellivision III was in development, Intellivoice hit the market. Consumers liked the concept of talking games, but they didn't like that they had to buy an add-on module. Sales were sluggish. To save the voice program (which represented quite an investment), it was decided to incorporate Intellivoice into the Intellivision III. Now, the Intellivoice contains a buffer chip to interface the speech processor with the Intellivision CP1610; it was designed so that other peripherals could also interface with the CP1610 through this buffer chip. On the drawing board at the time: wireless hand controllers. Since the buffer chip would have to be built into the Intellivision III, it was decided to add the (as yet undeveloped) wireless hand controllers, too. Of course, if you're going to double the graphic resolution, you really should double the audio quality, so an extra sound chip was added to the design. And, since the input ports of the Intellivision sound chip are used for the hand controller inputs, that meant you could add two more hand controllers to the Intellivision III and design 4-player games. All of these extra features meant the new EXEC had to be even more complex to control everything. Not only that, but the Intellivision programmers wanted to see frequently-used subroutines, such as screen scrolling, added to the EXEC instead of having them use up precious game cartridge space. Ray Kaestner (Burgertime) was sent to APh to represent the Mattel Electronics programmers during the development of the new EXEC. These expanded design features were grafted on one at a time over several months, causing a lot of rework and frustration and delays. In private rooms in the Mattel Electronics booth at the June 1982 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Chicago, major toy buyers were told of the upcoming improved Intellivision to bolster their faith in the product line. At the January CES in Las Vegas, they were told, they would see the working system. But by January 1983, Intellivision III still hadn't progressed beyond the preliminary breadboard stage in the Design & Development lab. So if it never left the lab, what were the toy buyers looking at in the private rooms of Mattel's booth at the January CES? Not a prototype Intellivision III as they thought. They were looking at a plain old Intellivision displaying some really good graphics. Six cartridges were shown; two were supposedly games in progress, the other four demonstrated enhanced features of Intellivision III. The nearest thing to a real technical advancement in these cartridges was that they contained up to 16K of memory. Since they were all graphics, special effects and music (by Bill Goodrich) and no game play, they could be a lot flashier than the then common 4K real game cartridges.
Grid Shock was the beginnings of an actual game by Andy Sells. A wall that swept back and forth across the playing field, changing perspective as it moved, gave the screen a strong 3-D feel. Grid Shock had been abandoned by Andy since he was spending so much time doing sound effects and music for other games (e.g. Shark! Shark! and TRON Solar Sailer), but what was complete was visually interesting enough to pass as Intellivision III. The other cartridges, written by Ray Kaestner and programmers at APh, used sleight-of-hand to demonstrate Intellivision III features -- multiplexing moving objects put more than the normal limit of eight on screen at one time (albeit flickering); updating moving object positions every 1/60 of a second instead of the EXEC's normal 1/20 gave the illusion of smoother, faster motion. So what games were really in development for the Intellivision III? Well, none. Since both systems were CP1610-based, it was decided to just keep writing for the Intellivision. Then, when (and if) the features and release date of Intellivision III were finalized, any Intellivision games nearing completion would be quickly upgraded for the new system by tossing in fancy graphics and sounds. In October 1982 for a meeting with Marketing and distributors, Gabriel Baum, VP of Application Software, listed the likely candidates to be released as Intellivision III games: the then-in-development Basketball II, Mission X, Thin Ice, Air Battle and Mystic Castle; proposed Winter Olympics and Dungeons & Dragons cartridges; and a to-be-determined children's title using one of the newly acquired licensed characters. But no upgrading was ever needed, because in mid-1983 Intellivision III was killed, done in by the delays. Retailers saw it as too little, too late to compete with the then year-old Colecovision. And with the Aquarius Home Computer System and the Intellivision Entertainment Computer System (ECS), there was already a glut of hardware in the 1983 pipeline. With Mattel Electronics starting to pile up hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, it was announced that Intellivision III was being canceled, officially because most of its features had been incorporated into the ECS. (A bogus claim; the extra sound chip and hand-controller ports are the only features they share.) The last hope for the future of Intellivision now rested with the top-secret project code-named Decade: Intellivision IV. NOTE: The Intellivision III should not be confused with the INTV System III, which was simply INTV Corporation's re-release of the original with minor cosmetic differences. To make it worse: at the January 1987 CES, INTV Corp. announced the INTV System IV, which shouldn't be confused with the Intellivision IV. The INTV System IV was really the Intellivision III; Glenn Hightower of had convinced INTV's Terry Valeski that the system was still viable. INTV Corporation, however, was not; despite making the announcement, they didn't have the financial resources needed to actually resume the development that had stopped three-and-a-half years earlier.
Intellivision IVMASTER COMPONENT [UNRELEASED] DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
Code named Decade, since it was to be the cornerstone product of Mattel Electronics for the rest of the eighties, Intellivision IV was developed from mid-1982 to mid-1983 secretly in an unmarked building a mile away from Mattel headquarters. Being away from the daily whims and pressures of marketing and administration, Chandler's group was able to create freely. The system they created was based on the MC68000 processor, the CPU later used in the first Macintoshes and the Amiga. Video was handled by a custom chip named Magic. Screen resolution was 240 by 192 pixels (40 by 24 4-color 6x8 cards) with a programmable 16-color palette, 16x16 4-color sprites and hardware scrolling. Onboard software supported 3-D graphics along with music and speech synthesis. The Combo chip coordinated peripheral devices, including a built-in modem: a point-of-view two-person tank battle played over phone lines was talked about as a typical Intellivision IV application. Unlike the other hardware in development in 1983, the Intellivision IV had the potential of being a significant step forward; after Intellivision III was canceled, many people saw Intellivision IV as the last hope for the company. The hope didn't last long. Losses kept mounting and on July 12, 1983 the president of Mattel Electronics, Josh Denham, was replaced with Mack Morris. Morris set about shifting the company from hardware to software; on August 4 most of the hardware people were laid off, including those working on Intellivision IV. The shift didn't help; January 20, 1984, Mattel Electronics was shut down. Would Chandler's group have succeeded in creating a super game machine at an affordable price, or would it have been another Keyboard Component? With all the secrecy surrounding the project, it's not known how far along the system really was. We do know it never reached the stage of actual game development; about the only involvement the Blue Sky Rangers had with Intellivision IV was when Dave Chandler borrowed a couple of graphic artists to create some demo screens. The actual screen shot on this page of Castle Grayskull from Masters of the Universe, rendered by Joe Ferreira, is about all that remains of the game machine that was going to save Mattel Electronics.
IntellivisionKEYBOARD COMPONENT #1149 DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
The Keyboard Component contained 64K of dual port dynamic RAM and its own 6502 processor to handle I/O functions. Special programs were available on cassettes. The built-in tape deck featured a sophisticated block-addressable cassette interface; an audio track could be synchronized with a program and its graphics. With the provided microphone, parts of the audio track could be re-recorded and played back under program control. A cartridge port allowed standard Intellivision games to be played without removing the Master Component, and a printer port allowed output to a 40-column thermal printer. The Keyboard Component (code named the Blue Whale, occasionally referred to as the Intelliputer) was developed by Dave Chandler's engineering group, the same group that did the final engineering on the Intellivision itself. The Keyboard was certainly an impressive piece of work, but, from a marketing standpoint, was hopelessly impractical; there was no way to produce it for a reasonable selling price. If it hadn't been for Dave "Papa Intellivision" Chandler's reputation, the project probably would have been killed off early on. Instead, his group was allowed to continue tinkering, trying to bring the cost down. Scheduled to be available in 1981, the Keyboard's release was delayed time and time again. When Jay Leno entertained at the Mattel Electronics 1981 Christmas Party, he did his homework; he got his biggest laugh with the line: "You know what the three big lies are, don't you? 'The check is in the mail,' 'I'll still respect you in the morning,' and 'the Keyboard will be out in the spring.'" Consumers weren't laughing, though. Complaints from people who bought the Intellivision specifically because it could be upgraded to a computer caught the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, who started investigating Mattel for fraud. Mattel insisted that the Keyboard was a real product that was still being test marketed; a trickle of Keyboard Components was made available to selected stores and offered by mail to consumers who complained (at a loss to the company). The thermal printer was only available mail order; this was apparently the same printer (except for the nameplate) that later received somewhat wider release as part of the Aquarius system. Several programs on cassettes were available; some (Conversational French, Jack LaLanne's Physical Conditioning, Spelling Challenge, Jeane Dixon Astrology) were programmed in 1610 assembly language and took full advantage of the Intellivision system sound and graphics, others were more limited BASIC programs (Geography Challenge, Family Budgeting, Crosswords I, II & III) that required a BASIC cartridge to be plugged into the game port. With the BASIC cartridge, the user could also write his or her own programs. Finally, in mid-1982, the FTC ordered Mattel to pay a monthly fine (said to be $10,000) until the Keyboard was in wide distribution. Mattel was forced to go with its back-up plan: it released instead the Entertainment Computer System (ECS) that had been quietly developed by a different division. Although less powerful than the Keyboard Component, it minimally offered what had originally been promised: to turn the Intellivision into a computer. It was sufficient (along with an offer to buy back all outstanding Keyboards) to get the FTC off Mattel's back. The Intellivision Keyboard Component, with only 4,000 produced, was officially canceled. But it didn't go quietly: Compro, Inc., the Costa Mesa, California company that had been contracted to manufacture the Keyboard, sued Mattel for ten million dollars, claiming breach of contract, fraud, and nonpayment for the last 1,300 units. This was just one of the lawsuits Mattel, Inc. settled early in 1984 when Mattel Electronics was closed. (For its part, Compro was fed up with the videogame industry. Once a major supplier to Atari, Sega, and Commodore as well as Mattel, they got out of the business. Today, under the name Mexmil, they manufacture insulation for McDonnell Douglas and Boeing aircraft. When asked what happened to all the videogame and computer manufacturing equipment, an employee said "I think they sold all that stuff to Nintendo.")
While slower to download a game than a Magus board (which read data from the computer over parallel lines), the Black Whale proved to be a quick, cheap solution. By the middle of 1983, half of the development systems in Hawthorne and all of the development systems at Mattel Electronics France used Black Whales.
PlayCableINTELLIVISION/CABLE
TV ADAPTER (MODEL PCR)
The PlayCable Company was a joint venture of Mattel and General Instrument, the company that designed the Intellivision chip set. The units themselves were manufactured by General Instrument's Jerrold Division, which supplies cable TV converter boxes. The PlayCable matched the original Intellivision Master Component in design. It plugged into the Master Component's cartridge slot and hooked up to the TV cable. Switching on the Intellivision brought up several pages of on-screen menus, displaying the available games. Twenty titles were available at a time, rotated monthly. The object code for these games was being continuously broadcast over the cable; when one was chosen, its code would be "tuned in" and fed into the PlayCable's memory (taking about 10 seconds). The Intellivision would then read the PlayCable's memory as if it were a game cartridge. Several factors contributed to the systems demise:
Subscribers rented the PlayCable Adapters from the cable companies. When the system was discontinued in 1983, the adapters had to be returned.
IntellivoiceSPEECH SYNTHESIS MODULE #3330 DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
They took advantage of the Orator's onboard 16K of ROM to build a set of generic words and phrases that could be used in any voice game to pad its vocabulary. These included, read in a male announcer's voice, numbers, "left," "right," "up, "down," and the familiar "Mattel Electronics Presents." These onboard phrases, called the RESROM (for Resident ROM), along with the voices for the first voice game, Space Spartans, were recorded and digitized in New York, at General Instruments' voice lab. Ron Carlson and Patrick Jost supervised the sessions in New York and sent the data back to Ron Surratt in California, who loaded it into the Intellivoice prototype. But once switched on, all it could do was keep repeating "Auk yooo! Auk yooo!" which didn't go over well with the Mattel executives and marketing personnel. In several heated phone calls between Hawthorne and New York, Carlson blamed the problem on Surratt's software and Surratt blamed it on Carlson's hardware. "I really didn't know what I was talking about," Surratt admits today, "but luckily it did turn out to be the hardware." Eventually the bugs were ironed out and Mattel fully committed to developing voice games. A state-of-the-art voice lab was built in the Mattel Electronics building in Hawthorne; this heavily soundproofed facility was ideal for editing, as well as for after-hours (and occasional during-hours) hanky-panky. Voice editing was crucial, since each game cartridge could only hold 4 to 8K of voice data. Words had to be digitized at the lowest possible sampling rate at which they could be understood; often, the sampling rate would be changed three or four times within the same word - lower for vowels, higher for consonants - to save space. Despite these space-saving efforts, the number of words that could be fit into a voice game was extremely limited, which probably contributed to the Intellivoice's failure. While orders for the initial voice game releases were around 300,000 each, orders for the fourth game, TRON Solar Sailer, released later, hit only 90,000. A completed children's game, Magic Carousel, was shelved. A restyled Intellivoice, designed to match the Intellivision II, appeared in the January 1983 Mattel Electronics catalog; a working prototype, however, was never built. The module shown in the catalog was merely a carved and painted block of wood. At least two prototypes were built, though, of an International Intellivoice module. The prototypes look like a regular Intellivoice, but they contain additional ROM with French, German and Italian versions of the RESROM. Foreign language versions of Space Spartans were produced, but neither they nor the International Intellivoice module itself were ever released. An attempt to recoup the Intellivoice investment was made by deciding to include the Orator chip and RESROM in the Intellivision III master component; no add-on module would be needed to play the original or new Intellivoice games. Unfortunately, the Intellivision III never got off the drawing board. On August 4, 1983, all Mattel Electronics personnel related to Intellivoice were laid off.
The 3330 produces audio speech signals when used in conjunction with a Master Component and/or Keyboard Component, and Voice Compatible game cartridges. Cartridges are deemed "Voice Compatible" if they make use of the 3330 speech facilities. Cartridges which are not voice compatible do not make use of the speech facilities, nor allow certain of the required speech production signal functions to be performed. Nonetheless, non-voice compatible game cartridges can be used with the 3330, but no voice gameplay enhancement is provided. When used in gameplay, the Intellivoice unit "speaks" through the sound channel of the television. It uses the same audio channel as the sound generator in the Master Component. A volume control on the 3330 allows variance of the voice loudness level. This control does not affect the normal game sounds - only voice. The 3330 unit will be the base for future peripherals. Additional hardware was included to provide for controlled communication between the Master Component and those peripherals. Future peripherals will plug into the top-mounted connector of the 3330. The 3330 consists of a VLSI speech synthesizer, an LSI buffer/interface chip, an active audio filter/amplifier section, and provisions for current assistance to the Master/Keyboard Component's +5V power supply. SPEECH
SYNTHESIZER
The SP-0256 can also accept serial speech data from an external source. For the 3330, the RESROM contains a variety of words and phrases that may be useful in video games. The PROGRAM consists of 17 different parameters used by the VOCAL TRACT model to imitate human speech patterns. BUFFER/INTERFACE
CHIP Controlling input to the buffer/interface chip is primarily from the Master Component Microprocessor bus signals. Other controlling inputs are generated by the speech synthesizer during speech production. The buffer/interface chip has three methods of transmitting data to the speech synthesizer and peripherals connected to the stacking connector. The first speech-oriented data transference method causes the synthesizer to produce speech segments contained in its internal ROM (RESROM): the buffer/interface chip allows the address of the desired speech segment to pass onto an 8-bit peripheral data bus connecting the buffer/interface and synthesizer chips, and sets the proper control lines for the synthesizer to generate the segment. The second method of moving speech data allows the Master/Keyboard Component to load custom speech data into the synthesizer: data from the game cartridge is loaded into the buffer/interface chip's 640-bit FIFO array and converted to serial data, and the buffer/interface chip sets the proper control lines for the synthesizer to read the serial data and convert it to speech. Finally, the buffer/interface chip also allows moving data to and from peripherals through the top-mounted stacking connector: the buffer/interface chip sets the proper control lines for the peripheral bus to carry bi-directional microprocessor data. ACTIVE AUDIO
FILTER/AMPLIFIER SECTION A series of filters (an LM-324C Quad OP Amp and related components) converts the PWM signal to conventional audio which is then amplified (an LM-358C Dual OP Amp and related components, including volume control) and fed to the Master Component. The effective passband for the speech signals is from 150 Hz to 5KHz. Within this is also a 3db/octave bass pre-emphasis. POWER SUPPLY
BOOSTING/SUPPORT Power supply boosting can be accomplished by allowing power input to pin six of the stacking connector. This unregulated voltage is applied through an 8.2 Ohm, 2W resistor to the Master/Keyboard Component Vcc on pin 43 of the cartridge port to supply an approximately 270mA boost.
Entertainment Computer SystemCOMPUTER ADAPTOR
#4182 & KEYBOARD #4184 (Sold together as #4187) DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
Only a few people knew the real purpose behind the BDS. The Federal Trade Commission was starting to look into fraud charges against Mattel for not releasing the Intellivision Keyboard Component. Key people at the top of Mattel Electronics, concerned that Dave "Papa Intellivision" Chandler's engineering group would never make the Keyboard Component cost-effective, started looking for something they could release in its place. Afraid Chandler had the political clout within Mattel, Inc. (the parent company), to kill any effort to develop an alternative to the Keyboard, they had to keep their intentions secret. The Design & Development group was challenged to build a module for the Intellivision that would be inexpensive (under $150 retail) but would fulfill the basic original promises of the Keyboard Component: turn the Intellivision into a computer, make it possible to write programs and store them to tape, and interface with a printer. The design for the module was worked out by Jan Chodak and principally implemented by Greg Goodknight. The simplified BASIC interpreter was mainly programmed Jay Hastroudian. As work on the module progressed, it was officially listed and discussed in memos as an additional product for the Intellivision line, never as a replacement for the Keyboard Component. But the issue was forced when the FTC started fining Mattel monthly until the Keyboard Component was released. Finally, the Basic Discovery System was openly advanced as a possible alternative to the Keyboard. Renamed Lucky (from LUCKI: Low User-Cost Keyboard Interface), it was presented to the programmers to start developing games. A computer-style keyboard, an extra pair of hand controllers (for four-player games) or a music keyboard could be plugged into the Lucky adaptor. (The idea of a music keyboard add-on came from within Design & Development. Musical instruments were pet projects of the group. They had already produced Synsonics Drums, and electronic guitars, basses, and brass/woodwinds were in the works. Other ECS add-ons briefly worked on in D&D: a Biofeedback Module and a Camera Module.) In fall of 1982, at the annual meeting of Mattel's marketing people, sales staff and distributors, Lucky -- the Computer Module, the Computer Keyboard, and the Music Synthesizer -- was presented under its final name: the Entertainment Computer System (ECS). Everyone at the meeting was delighted (mainly by the low retail price) and the obvious became official: the Intellivision Keyboard Component was dead. A pre-Christmas commercial was rushed onto the air with Mattel Electronics spokesman George Plimpton teasing the introduction of the ECS (using the inside joke "[Intellivision owners] won't believe their luck!"). Although the ECS wasn't available for Christmas 1982, the aim of the commercial was to get people to buy Intellivisions instead of Ataris or ColecoVisions with the promise (once again) that a computer add-on was just around the corner. Officially introduced to the public at the January 1983 Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas, ECS hit the market later that year with a handful of games. Satisfied, the FTC dropped the monthly fine. By the time ECS was released, however, the focus at Mattel Electronics had shifted. After the June 1983 CES in Chicago, Josh Denham and Stav Prodomou, Mattel Electronics' President and Senior Operations VP, resigned. Josh and Stav had been blamed for pushing the company too far into hardware production; hundreds of millions of dollars had been tied up in the development, beyond the original Intellivision, of the Keyboard Component, Intellivoice, Intellivision II, the System Changer, ECS, Aquarius (and peripherals), Intellivision III and the top-secret Intellivision IV. On July 12, 1983, Josh was replaced by Mack Morris, a marketing man famous for putting the blue dot on Breath Savers mints. (The gimmick or hook that set a game apart quickly became known as its "blue dot" around Mattel.) Under Mack Morris, the emphasis was put almost entirely on software (nearly everyone related to hardware development was laid off on August 4, 1983). The ECS received very little marketing push and further game development for it dropped to almost nothing. An announced Program Expander, containing 16K of additional RAM and extra features (including expanded BASIC) in 12K of ROM, was never completed.
For the game designer, the Computer Adaptor essentially adds five components to the Intellivision:
Invisible to the programmer is the SDCC (Super-Duper Custom Chip) that integrates these components and controls bus traffic. The Computer Adaptor also requires its own power supply to supplement that of the Master Component. SOUND
CHIP ECS EXEC/BASIC
ROM
The default on reset for the ECS is to display a menu selection of game, BASIC, or music. However, the game designer can program his or her cartridge to bypass the ECS menu and go directly to the cartridge's title screen. Even if the menu screen is bypassed, the ECS features are available to the programmer. [No policy on this was defined; it was left to the individual programmer on whether or not to bypass the menu. Pre-ECS Intellivision game cartridges all allow the menu to be displayed; the ECS games Mind Strike and Scooby-Doo's Maze Chase, for example, bypass it.] SYSTEM
RAM Note: Use of the ECS/BASIC features also eats up some of the Master Component's 147 8-bit scratchpad RAM locations normally available to the programmer; from 3 to 14 locations, depending on the features used. CASSETTE
RECORDER/PRINTER INTERFACE [The ECS was designed to work with standard audiocassette recorders, and in fact came with a list of current models that it was compatible with, and the same 40-column thermal printer sold both for the original Keyboard Component and the Aquarius system. At the June 1983 CES, the ECS was shown with Aquarius Data Recorders and Printers affixed with "Intellivision" nameplates; they were never actually released with those labels.] INPUT
PORTS
The ECS EXEC has routines to decode the key presses from any of these devices for use by the game programs. Note that functionally, the Music Synthesizer is just a keyboard; the "synthesizing" takes place in the Master Component and Computer Adaptor using their two sound chips under the ECS EXEC's control.
System ChangerATARI
2600 ADAPTOR #4610
Many people expressed amazement that the Intellivision's processor could emulate an Atari 2600. Well, it can't. The System Changer is itself simply an Atari 2600 clone -- essentially a 6507 processor, a TIA (Television Interface Adaptor) video/sound chip, and a 6532 RIOT chip (128 bytes RAM, I/O ports, and a general purpose timer). The System Changer only uses the Intellivision for its power supply and RF modulator. (The Intellivision reads the System Changer as a game cartridge called M Network and actually draws an M Network title screen. With no cartridge in the System Changer -- hence no external video signal -- this title screen is displayed on the television. When a cartridge is plugged in, the external video signal takes over the RF modulator, displaying the output of the System Changer, instead.) Although Atari threatened to sue, Mattel's lawyers concluded that it would be legal to clone 2600s since they contained all off-the-shelf hardware and no copyrightable software (as an Intellivision or Colecovision does). No lawsuit appeared, and clones started appearing from other companies. Don't bother opening a System Changer to read what the chips are. Instead of being housed in the familiar DIP (multi-pin) packages, the integrated circuits are soldered directly to the printed circuit board using microscopic wires, then protected with a blob of epoxy. This cost saving technique was also used in most of the later game cartridges. The only problem was that the Intellivision doesn't have an external video input. The Intellivision II was designed with the System Changer in mind -- it can accept an external video signal on pin 2 of the cartridge port and pass it to the RF modulator. But the Intellivision (and its clones -- the Tandyvision One, Sears Super Video Arcade, any of the INTV Master Components) requires a circuit-board modification. Mattel used to perform this modification for people who brought their units to a service center. Following are the instructions used by the service centers for making the modification. But first, the disclaimer: The Blue Sky Rangers provide this information for historical interest only. They will not be responsible for damage to you, your Intellivision or your house in the event you are foolish enough to actually attempt this modification and wind up blowing something up.
January 13, 1983
|
In 1977, Richard Chang, head of the Mattel Toys
Design and Development department, began investigating
the idea of producing a videogame system. He hired Glenn Hightower's 
FUN
FACT: Magnavox actually patented the
concept of the home videogame when they created the Odyssey Game System.
When Atari released the 2600, they obtained a license from Magnavox,
reportedly at a very low price. By the time the Intellivision was
released, Magnavox realized their mistake. They demanded a hefty fee from
Mattel for each Master Component sold.
[With some corrections and clarifications, the
following information is from an in-house document dated October 31,
1980.]
BUG:
The EXEC's square root subroutine will crash the system if it's given a
negative number. Other EXEC routines which calculate position and velocity
of moving objects use this subroutine; a game can freeze if one of them is
called after an object moves off the top or left side of the screen, into
negative coordinates. On many games this problem showed up during testing
and extra code had to be added to check for a negative position. But on
some games the problem showed up too late: the released version of 
There were three reasons for replacing the
original 
FUN
FACT: One of the pre-Intellivision II Mattel games,
Electric Company Word Fun, uses its own copyright
routine, and therefore won't work on an Intellivision II. The
powers-that-be decided it was more important to screw up the Coleco
releases than to make the Intellivision II 100% compatible with Mattel's
own games.
The two "games in progress," shown with printed
packaging, were Treasure of the Yucatan and Grid
Shock. The first was a static picture of a stone idol overgrown
with jungle vines. An impressive, complex screen, it had been done a year
earlier by Eric Wels (Mr. Color) when he
was first hired, simply to learn how Intellivision graphics worked. The
screen eventually found it way into Bill Goodrich's
D&D voice game, 
After the 
From the beginning, Mattel attempted to distinguish the
Intellivision from the Atari 2600 by stressing that the Intellivision
wasn't just a toy -- it was going to be the basis of a home
computer system. Slipping the Master Component into the Keyboard
Component would unlock the full power of the 16-bit microprocessor in the
Intellivision.
FUN
FACT: All the money spent on the Keyboard Component didn't
go totally to waste; as the ranks of the programmers
swelled during 1982, development systems could not be assembled fast
enough. The bottleneck was the hand-built Magus board --
the interface between the development computer and the Intellivision. Then
some bright person realized that a Blue Whale would make a dandy
development system! A slightly modified Keyboard Component (dubbed a
Black Whale) would accept the compiled object code for a
game serially to its internal RAM; that RAM, mapped to the same addresses
as an Intellivision cartridge, would be read by the attached Master
Component as if it were a cartridge.
Introduced in 1981, PlayCable: The All
Game Channel enabled local cable operators to send Intellivision
games over the wire with the TV signal. Subscribers used a special
converter -- the PlayCable Adapter -- to download the games to play on
their Intellivision Master Components. While reportedly popular in the
areas in which it was available, PlayCable was discontinued in 1983.
Since the Intellivision was based on a General
Instruments chip set, it didn't take long for someone to realize that the
FUN
FACT: There was one last-ditch effort at Mattel to produce
voice games. Late in 1983, seeing that the price of voice-synthesis chips
had dropped dramatically, Keith Robinson, manager of M
Network Colecovision games, and Tom Priestley, programmer
of Number Jumble, came up with a scheme of producing
Colecovision games with a voice chip built into the cartridge. Using the
components of a talking-clock kit they bought at Radio Shack, Tom cobbled
together a prototype talking Colecovision game. Their idea was to produce
Colecovision versions of 
[The following material is excerpted from the
Intellivoice (Model 3330) Product Engineering Specification by
Thomas L. Randolph, project engineer, March 18, 1982,
revised May 6, 1982; from the General Instruments Product Specification
for the Orator Speech Processor; and from the Intellivoice Service
Manual.]
Midway through 1981, Richard Chang's
Design & Development group began work on the Basic Discovery
System (BDS). This was announced within the
company as a plug-in module for the Intellivision that would introduce
kids to computer programming through an inexpensive keyboard and a
simplified, color-coded version of BASIC.
FUN
FACT: The ECS components sold in Europe were molded in
brown plastic instead of light gray. Introduction of the 
[The following information comes from the
preliminary ECS User's Guide written by Keith Robinson
(
The System Changer, developed
under the code name Portofino (after the Redondo Beach
hotel where the first design meeting was held), was introduced in 1983
just so Intellivision could be advertised as the system that played the
most games.