Info for intv

Mattel Intellivision (1979)

History and Trivia:
At the end of 1979, Mattel Electronics released a video game system known as Intellivision
along with 12 video game cartridges. Poised as a competitor to the then king of the hill
Atari 2600, Mattel Electronics called their new product "Intelligent Television", stemming
largely from their marketing plans to release a compatible computer keyboard for their video
games console.
Mattel fiercely battled with Atari but the Intellivision suffered greatly from the video game
market crash of 1984. After Mattel sold the rights to the system soon afterwards, the
Intellivision was kept alive through their new owners, INTV Corp. Another 35 games were
released from 1985 to 1990, mostly through mail order service. The system was generally very
successful in the end, with over 3 million units sold and 125 games released before the system
was finally discontinued in 1990.
During its lifetime, several models of the base system were released, as well as some
interesting peripherals including a full computer adaptor, music keyboard, Intellivoice
speech synthesis module, system changer to play Atari VCS games and PlayCable (an accessory
to download games from your cable provider).

Features:
CPU: General Instruments 16 bit microprocessor (1 Mhz)
Memory: 4K internal ROM operating system, 2K RAM
Controls: 12 button numeric key pad, four action keys, 16 direction disk, overlay support
Sound: Sound generator capable of 3 part harmony with programmable ASDR envelopes
Color: 16 colors
Resolution: 192v x 160h pixels

Links:
Bluesky Rangers -- http://www.intellivisionlives.com

FAQ:
http://www.intellivision.ca/intellivisionfaq.pdf

Usage/Known Issues:
This driver is almost complete.

Still TBD are:
collision detection - 16-way controller mapping - default mapping of the right player
controller - Only .ROM format cartridges (Intellicart) are supported in this release.