So the Xbox One and Play Station 4 have just came out, promising insanely realistic gaming, lots of streaming media like Netflix and movies and music, and next-generation goodness. On the other side of the spectrum, are thousand-dollar desktop computers built for super gaming, that far surpass the Xbox One and PS4 in specs and ability. Oh, and they can actually do real work, unlike the Xbox One or PS4. Consoles have been like this forever, that is at least since the mid-80s. At one time, the line between computers and game consoles was blurred, they were one and the same, hooking up to your TV, and letting you play primitive games on cartridges, and some, with the proper attachments, let you do simple programming and word processing. One well known system from that time, that still has a cult following today, is the Mattel Electronics Intellivision.
Origin & How it Works:
I found this in a retro game shop in Malvern, Arkansas. It was in full working condition at a good deal, well except that on the right controller, some of the keypad buttons aren't working. Let's talk about the controllers for a moment...shall we?
What are these, telephones or video game controllers??
Wow. Quite different from modern controllers. The disk serves as the joystick, you can rock it in 16 directions (quite a few for the time, the Atari only supported 8 directions) and press it in the middle. There is a keypad, that you could cover with an overlay that would have animations and indicators for what all the buttons would do for that particular game. there are two buttons on either side, usually acting as fire buttons.
This would slide over the buttons so that you could tell what the buttons do.
Overall, its a very cumbersome controller to play with on some games, though with others it can be pretty useful. The right controller as I said has some buttons broken, which would be ok if I could just replace it, but that's not so easy, since the controllers are hard wired into the console! This wouldn't be a big deal for me, since I can open it up and unplug it, but since they are normally not replaceable there aren't many spares in existence. Plus they are hard to fix, since all they are on the inside is cheap plastic sheets sandwiched together. So I'll have to keep my eye out for spares and do my best to fix the controller I have.
A classic game, Astrosmash.
The Intellivision had one slot on the right side where you could insert games, and later add-ons for the console were developed that would plug into this slot. The games were really hard to insert, and they had to be inserted just so to be started correctly. For example, my particular copy of Astrosmash has to be inserted slightly crooked to start properly. All the cartridges made for the Intellivision look basically the same.
Check out that wood grain on brown plastic with gold accent! The pinnacle of class.
The Intellivision hooks into the TV traditionally with one cord, that plugs into a box with a switch, that hooks into the TV with screws and with an antenna or cable connection hooked into the box. Modern technology has replaced this cumbersome, unreliable, obsolete box with a tiny adapter that just converts the old coax game connection straight into the cable coax connector on the TV. Tune to channel 3 (or 4 if you flip a switch under the Intellivision) and you can play!
No HDMI here.
One thing the Intellivision had the Atari 2600 beat on was with graphics, they were far higher resolution and you could usually tell what the shapes on the screen represented. Still nothing close to modern consoles though. Sound was...definitely like Atari 2600. Primitive and sometimes hilarious. And then in 1982 they released the Intellivoice module!
Oh yeah, the Intellivoice module!
The Intellivoice had a special processor chip that enabled real voices to play during games. You shoved this box into the game cartridge slot, then shoved the game into the box. Computers in this time had a habit of having one expansion slot and just daisy-chaining add-ons. A particular TI home computer had so many add-ons you could grow it to be 8 or 9 feet long! It even had a convenient additional volume wheel just for voices. Only a very few games were released that had voices on them, they were expensive and not very popular, the Intellivoice was ultimately a flop. I have one Intellivoice game, Space Spartans. The voices enable you to get information through voice prompts rather than on screen displays or gauges, an innovative way to overcome graphic limitations that made on screen counters and gauges impossible to display. Unfortunately it didn't catch on and it's just an oddity now.
Imagine shoving a box into the side of an Xbox 360 to get better graphics...
There was a heavily advertised keyboard component for the intellivision that would have enabled word processing and turn the Intellivision into a home computer, but it was delayed and ultimately cancelled. Later on they did release a computer component, but it was not well received, only a few programs were made for it before it was cancelled. There was even an online game service, where you could plug your Intellivision into a compatible cable television service and download new games every month, the first downloadable game service of its kind.
So that's the Intellivision, I've uploaded some videos so you can see the graphics and gameplay, check the Space Spartans video to hear voices through the Intellivoice module!
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