the Intellivision was (and still is) an amazing console, with games far beyond competition at that time. It's really the jewel of the 1st generations of video game consoles. I still love it dearly today, and many games are still great to play in 2024. Thank you so much for this great video !
It always amazes me how these console manufacturers got themselves in trouble by wanting to develop home computers, like how Mattel spent a fortune trying to turn the INTV into a computer, the Coleco Adam disaster, and even Atari was not immune - despite the fact they already had a hugely successful computer line, they had a short-lived project to make the 2600 into a home computer. The George Plimpton commercials have held up well, so you have to give Mattel credit for that.
Seemed like just about everyone was trying to tap into the home computer craze back then. There was also the Bally Zgrass and the APF Imagination Machine. Later on you got the SG3000 Famicom Basic cartridge + keyboard addon and Sega's SC-3000. Atari 8-bit and TI 99/4 started development as gaming machines before becoming computers and I think that may have been the case for the Commodore 64 as well. Even the Odyssey 2's membrane keyboard was an attempt to look more like a computer, if a pretty half hearted one.
According to Nolan Bushnell, the Intellivision (and competition for the 2600 in general) was released in 1979 and not sooner because he had an exclusive contract with the major graphic chips suppliers, locking in the market "for about $150.000 a year". Once he was replaced by Ray Kassar in 1978, those contracts were cancelled and (still according to Bushnell) "one [supplier] went to Mattel, one went to Coleco"
Sounds like one of Bushnell's embellishments to me, because the chipset is totally different and it ignores other systems emerging like the Philips Videopac/Odyssey 2 and Advanced Programmable Video System the year before.
@@TheLairdsLair Bushnell claims he never wanted to use the chipset from GI or TI, just to have an exclusive contract preventing them from selling it to other companies. He just strung them along promising a contract for Atari's next-gen console - although to be fair it's unclear how long such a strategy could have lasted.
I have very fond memories of the Intellivision. My grandparents actually had one at their house (although I'm pretty sure one of my aunts and/or uncles were the ones who actually purchased it and left it there), and family gatherings were often marked by my cousins and myself playing around with it. Some of the games were WAY over my head (like what 4 year old is going to know the rules of 5 Card Stud?), but I really didn't care. That machine was my primary video game console for most of the 1980s, until my parents finally bought us a secondhand NES.
It's funny that you mentioned B-17 Bomber (I love the voice on the intro) because I remember showing it to my 18 year old and she was impressed on just how deep that game was, changing viewpoints on the plane and all that. Way ahead of its time. It's a shame the crash happened.
I had no idea George Plimpton was a sports commentator. For much of my childhood, I only thought of him as the host of Disney Channel's Mouseterpiece Theater.
I only know him from the commercials/ads, which I only know from retrogaming TH-cam. I thought he was some pompous know it all book critic or theater snob, something like that, who maybe my mom knew of at the time. "He sounds smart and boring , intellivision must be better"
1979 was the year where the first 16-bit console (the Intellivision) and the first 16-bit micro (the Texas Instrument TI-99/4) were released. The former sported General Instrument chips (CPU, GPU and sound chip) whereas the latter only used TI chips (understandably). As far as the Speak & Spell, the same chip was found in a computer released a few years later (the Exl 100 from Exelvision)
It's not just speculation that the upgraded ROM in the INTV2 broke Coleco games on purpose. The Blue Sky Rangers have documented that they were let in on the secret that the ROM specifically checks that a valid year is put in the location used by the standard "Mattel Electronics Presents" screen. 3rd party games, which did not use the exec routines to show that screen since they were not licensed by Mattel, would of course not have valid years in those memory locations and therefore be mysteriously "broken" on the new console.
@@TheLairdsLair No problem - thanks for the great video. I'm not sure if it was removed from their site, or if I'm remembering it from an interview with one of the BSR's, but it was definitely confirmed as being done on purpose. It was a bad move, in my opinion, as a lot of us owned Coleco carts before the Intellivision 2 came out. I guess they cared more about selling their own carts than making the console successful. Keep making great vids!
The quick cut at 3:34 to the Smashing Pumpkins pic as you referenced 1979 was NOT something I expected from a Lairds Lair video, excellent work! (I did expect multiple instances of the Miami Herald, and you didn't disappoint haha)
Believe it or not I only used the Miami Herald page once in this video! Although I could have used it about 83 times!!! 😂 I did find another similar one to use though, which I did use later on in this vid.
@@TheLairdsLair haha yes, you did use a substitute! Problem is, when I hear "North American video game crash of 1983" my brain visualizes the Miami Herald! Personally, I love it as a little inside joke/meme for the retrogaming community. If you mention the crash, the Miami Herald, and/or the Atari 2600 E.T. boxes from the New Mexico landfill are MUSTS
I have an Intellivision II. I don't have any Coleco games for it, but it plays all the Imagic games I have. Apparently the change to the ROM was to block execution of the game if it didn't find a standard bit in the header of the game, which all Mattel titles had. I've also heard it said that the I2 controller's side buttons were stiffer than in the original ones, but I've never used the originals, so I can't say for sure.
Great episode, as always, my friend. Intellivision probably my 3rd favorite system. I didn't own one, but my Uncle Eric did and I got to play it around Christmas 1982. I grew up with a 2600, but I really didn't have much trouble adapting to the new controller. I feel the controller allowed people to game on a whole new level that wasn't available with other game systems at the time. The list of great games on this system is pretty much endless. Nice job.
I used to have one of these back in the day, while all my friends had the Atari. It had the best port of Burger Time and Bump ‘n Jump. But I hated the stupid disc controller.
i bought most of my Intellivision systems & game's thru goodwill back in the early thru mid 90's. & i still have them all. i even found the Intellivision system changer. good time's
Intellivision, like Amstrad, needs to be focused on at Retroachiements rather than thousands of revisions of later games turning fun sets into 200+ achievement nightmares that noone wants to play. The few on there has got me to play several INTV titles and the system has some very fun titles.
TV commercials from this era are quite aggressive, this day in age you would rarely if ever see a company copy the style of a competitors ad and then directly attack them (Remember Samsung going after Apple recently but that's it). Commodore Vic-20 did this as well with William Shatner splitting the two actors up (who clearly are meant to be mimicking the actors in the Atari and Intellivision commercials).
I love my Intellivision II. I found it for $35 with no power cable. However, it did have the original RF cable. With an adjustable power block and rca to coax adapter, I plugged it in and turned it on. 40 year old game and system.fired up perfect first time. 🎉Ecstatic🎉
There's a video of a guy who made a 286 gaming PC here around TH-cam and it's pretty freaking amazing what you can do with the right video card and sound card
It's certainly possible to make a kick ass 286 using everything available today, but compare a 286 and its games from the late 80s with a Neo Geo and you get my point.
A 286 ~10 MHz with 1 Mb RAM and VGA can run Wolfenstein 3D for DOS decently. Lots of really great games can run on a 286. It's certainly better than any 80s console.
Never seen an Intellivision irl. Growing up just one kid I knew had a Colecovision rather than Atari (admittedly living on one of the small UK islands may have had something to do with that). But man, there is something so cool about the INTV . That built in font - awesome - plus the console's chunky pixel resolution reminds me of the the Lynx which is my favourite system of all.
Same, I never saw one growing up in the UK either, the first time I actually heard about it was reading the first C&VG Guide to Consoles bookazine. The Lynx is also my favourite system of all-time too!
@@TheLairdsLair Ah, C&VG - essential reading back then :) think I remember on the cover on one seeing the Lynx before it released At that point I knew I bloody well had to have it. Took a little while for imports to arrive (advertised in mags here). Software releases slow at the start. I probably had all the available games for ages waiting for more.. Maybe it's why Iove Electrocop so much
One of my best friends went on holiday to California in September 1989 and came back with a Lynx plus California Games and Electrocop, we were all shocked as it had only just come out and nobody in the UK had them except for the press. We were even more shocked when we played it as it was just so advanced compared to everything else on the market. I didn't get one until the following year, as I had to save up a lot of paper round money, but by then the price had gone down to under £100 without a game and there were a lot more titles out. I bought mine from Dixons with Xenophone and a AC Adapter and its still one of the happiest days of my life.
Buying a Lynx in a shop I can see being a very happy day :) I was never able to convince pals to 'lynx up' with me for Xenophobe - but discovered if you had 2 consoles (I think I had 4 back then (thanks Dixon's £29.99 clearance)) ) - you can link then up and leave one idle so when you die, just go and try a char on the other machine until you've used them all up. Xenophobe on Atari Lynx is the dogs bollox.
Mattel really screwed the pooch wasting R&D, resources, etc. on half-baked computer add-ons and systems like the Aquarius and the computer(?)/keyboard add-on for the Intellivision. Each would have cannibalized the other and they were head scratchers when they were released, which isn't hindsight is 20/20 - I remember seeing all of this hardware tat in the stores and owned an Intv II at the time and wanted nothing to do with it. Too bad they didn't devote their resources towards the Intellivision III, as you had covered in a prior video.
Like with the TI 99/4's TMS9900 the Intellivision's CP1600 was comparatively slow, had a complex bus architecture and required +12V/+5V/-5V power. A 1.79MHz 6502 or 3.58MHz Z80 would have almost led to a cheaper and faster system design. But GI and TI seemed determined to shoehorn in their minicomputer style 16-bit processors into video game platforms where they didn't really make sense. It's just another example of how the "bit-ness" of a console isn't usually a terribly useful point of comparison.
Yep, but I came out quite a few years later. I personally argue that the ColecoVision, Vectrex, Atari 5200 and Videopac G7400 are a different generation.
True for the most part but one seemingly small feature, hardware scrolling, made a pretty big difference. The homebrew Super Mario Bros for Intellivision plays a lot better than similar attempts on consoles with TMS9118s like the Colecovision. You could excuse TI for not having this feature when they first released the TMS9118 in 1979 but they had less excuse not putting it in the TMS9118A update which didn't release until 1981. By then Mattel/GI and Atari set clear examples with scrolling in home hardware.
The Colecovision only ran laps around it if you liked sprite flicker and a pastel looking colour palate. Plus, the Intellivision had Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
Do you believe that the Intellivision and the 2600 were both still very popular during the first part of the 90s in sourthern Italy? Yeah, games were insanely cheap and so the consoles, that in most cases have been been given away for free by families which children switched to the NES or even the first 16-bit consoles. That was the perfect recipe for a low-budget gaming console, and in that era southern Italy wasn't that rich generally talking... A little financial boom arrived in the half of that decade, but it didn't last for much long.
I asked something similar about the Colecovision, but was a video card expansion possible with this system? Is so, why didn’t another company buy the hardware design to be upgraded for the post-NES market? I say this because if feels like the Intellivision could have been like a lesser-MSX.
I had a console in the early 80's in Australia, controllers didn't have self centring, basic games with tanks from memory, I can't find it anywhere online.
I'd be willing to bed it was a variation of the APVS, probably a Hanimax, Grandstand or Radofin as all those were sold in Australia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1292_Advanced_Programmable_Video_System
I'm not saying you had the one in the video, that's one I have that is part of the range I linked in the initial comment, some of which are exactly like you explain. You need to go down that list and look at the pictures of the variations that were released in Australia and you will probably find it.
OMG...the APF Imagination Machine and the Fairchild Channel F! I remember those! I also remember a console that was triangular, with (iirc) paddles on one side, a steering wheel on another, and a lightgun on the third. It used triangular cartridges that had three games on each, one for each side. Can anyone tell me what that was called and who made it?
I prefer the Intellivision over the Colecovision. The latter suffers from sprite flicker and has quite a pastel looking colour palette. Plus, you have the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons games on the Intellivision, and lock n chase.
the Intellivision was (and still is) an amazing console, with games far beyond competition at that time. It's really the jewel of the 1st generations of video game consoles. I still love it dearly today, and many games are still great to play in 2024. Thank you so much for this great video !
Atari VCS and Intellivision were 2nd gen.
It always amazes me how these console manufacturers got themselves in trouble by wanting to develop home computers, like how Mattel spent a fortune trying to turn the INTV into a computer, the Coleco Adam disaster, and even Atari was not immune - despite the fact they already had a hugely successful computer line, they had a short-lived project to make the 2600 into a home computer.
The George Plimpton commercials have held up well, so you have to give Mattel credit for that.
Seemed like just about everyone was trying to tap into the home computer craze back then. There was also the Bally Zgrass and the APF Imagination Machine. Later on you got the SG3000 Famicom Basic cartridge + keyboard addon and Sega's SC-3000. Atari 8-bit and TI 99/4 started development as gaming machines before becoming computers and I think that may have been the case for the Commodore 64 as well.
Even the Odyssey 2's membrane keyboard was an attempt to look more like a computer, if a pretty half hearted one.
According to Nolan Bushnell, the Intellivision (and competition for the 2600 in general) was released in 1979 and not sooner because he had an exclusive contract with the major graphic chips suppliers, locking in the market "for about $150.000 a year". Once he was replaced by Ray Kassar in 1978, those contracts were cancelled and (still according to Bushnell) "one [supplier] went to Mattel, one went to Coleco"
Sounds like one of Bushnell's embellishments to me, because the chipset is totally different and it ignores other systems emerging like the Philips Videopac/Odyssey 2 and Advanced Programmable Video System the year before.
@@TheLairdsLair Bushnell claims he never wanted to use the chipset from GI or TI, just to have an exclusive contract preventing them from selling it to other companies. He just strung them along promising a contract for Atari's next-gen console - although to be fair it's unclear how long such a strategy could have lasted.
I have very fond memories of the Intellivision. My grandparents actually had one at their house (although I'm pretty sure one of my aunts and/or uncles were the ones who actually purchased it and left it there), and family gatherings were often marked by my cousins and myself playing around with it. Some of the games were WAY over my head (like what 4 year old is going to know the rules of 5 Card Stud?), but I really didn't care. That machine was my primary video game console for most of the 1980s, until my parents finally bought us a secondhand NES.
It's funny that you mentioned B-17 Bomber (I love the voice on the intro) because I remember showing it to my 18 year old and she was impressed on just how deep that game was, changing viewpoints on the plane and all that. Way ahead of its time. It's a shame the crash happened.
"Watch for flak!" :-) I loved B-17 too... very replayable... surely ahead of its time.
I had no idea George Plimpton was a sports commentator. For much of my childhood, I only thought of him as the host of Disney Channel's Mouseterpiece Theater.
I only know him from the commercials/ads, which I only know from retrogaming TH-cam. I thought he was some pompous know it all book critic or theater snob, something like that, who maybe my mom knew of at the time. "He sounds smart and boring , intellivision must be better"
@@DontCallMeScooterrrPlimpton was a highly educated blue blood that loved bawdy fart jokes and regular Joe stuff. He was far from a snob.
1979 was the year where the first 16-bit console (the Intellivision) and the first 16-bit micro (the Texas Instrument TI-99/4) were released. The former sported General Instrument chips (CPU, GPU and sound chip) whereas the latter only used TI chips (understandably). As far as the Speak & Spell, the same chip was found in a computer released a few years later (the Exl 100 from Exelvision)
It's not just speculation that the upgraded ROM in the INTV2 broke Coleco games on purpose. The Blue Sky Rangers have documented that they were let in on the secret that the ROM specifically checks that a valid year is put in the location used by the standard "Mattel Electronics Presents" screen. 3rd party games, which did not use the exec routines to show that screen since they were not licensed by Mattel, would of course not have valid years in those memory locations and therefore be mysteriously "broken" on the new console.
Thanks for confirming, I didn't come across that info.
@@TheLairdsLair No problem - thanks for the great video. I'm not sure if it was removed from their site, or if I'm remembering it from an interview with one of the BSR's, but it was definitely confirmed as being done on purpose. It was a bad move, in my opinion, as a lot of us owned Coleco carts before the Intellivision 2 came out. I guess they cared more about selling their own carts than making the console successful. Keep making great vids!
I only own a Intellivision Flashback, but it’s pretty great.
The quick cut at 3:34 to the Smashing Pumpkins pic as you referenced 1979 was NOT something I expected from a Lairds Lair video, excellent work! (I did expect multiple instances of the Miami Herald, and you didn't disappoint haha)
Believe it or not I only used the Miami Herald page once in this video! Although I could have used it about 83 times!!! 😂
I did find another similar one to use though, which I did use later on in this vid.
@@TheLairdsLair haha yes, you did use a substitute! Problem is, when I hear "North American video game crash of 1983" my brain visualizes the Miami Herald! Personally, I love it as a little inside joke/meme for the retrogaming community. If you mention the crash, the Miami Herald, and/or the Atari 2600 E.T. boxes from the New Mexico landfill are MUSTS
Yeah, I think everyone should do a shot when they see the Miami Herald!
I have an Intellivision II. I don't have any Coleco games for it, but it plays all the Imagic games I have. Apparently the change to the ROM was to block execution of the game if it didn't find a standard bit in the header of the game, which all Mattel titles had.
I've also heard it said that the I2 controller's side buttons were stiffer than in the original ones, but I've never used the originals, so I can't say for sure.
The worst part about the Intellivision is the fact that anytime I mention it in casual circles people think I'm referring to the Amico 😅
I saw the Intellivision Computer Keyboard on sale at a store in the vicinity of Jackson, MS. Of course I wanted it, but it was $900!
Wow! That's crazy!
Great episode, as always, my friend. Intellivision probably my 3rd favorite system. I didn't own one, but my Uncle Eric did and I got to play it around Christmas 1982. I grew up with a 2600, but I really didn't have much trouble adapting to the new controller. I feel the controller allowed people to game on a whole new level that wasn't available with other game systems at the time. The list of great games on this system is pretty much endless. Nice job.
I used to have one of these back in the day, while all my friends had the Atari. It had the best port of Burger Time and Bump ‘n Jump. But I hated the stupid disc controller.
i bought most of my Intellivision systems & game's thru goodwill back in the early thru mid 90's. & i still have them all. i even found the Intellivision system changer. good time's
Intellivision, like Amstrad, needs to be focused on at Retroachiements rather than thousands of revisions of later games turning fun sets into 200+ achievement nightmares that noone wants to play.
The few on there has got me to play several INTV titles and the system has some very fun titles.
TV commercials from this era are quite aggressive, this day in age you would rarely if ever see a company copy the style of a competitors ad and then directly attack them (Remember Samsung going after Apple recently but that's it). Commodore Vic-20 did this as well with William Shatner splitting the two actors up (who clearly are meant to be mimicking the actors in the Atari and Intellivision commercials).
The Intellivision is still one of my all time favorite consoles. Too bad I missed out on the lto flash. So many fantastic home brew games
I love my Intellivision II. I found it for $35 with no power cable. However, it did have the original RF cable. With an adjustable power block and rca to coax adapter, I plugged it in and turned it on.
40 year old game and system.fired up perfect first time.
🎉Ecstatic🎉
That Play-Cable is a genius idea. (esp back then)
There's a video of a guy who made a 286 gaming PC here around TH-cam and it's pretty freaking amazing what you can do with the right video card and sound card
It's certainly possible to make a kick ass 286 using everything available today, but compare a 286 and its games from the late 80s with a Neo Geo and you get my point.
A 286 ~10 MHz with 1 Mb RAM and VGA can run Wolfenstein 3D for DOS decently. Lots of really great games can run on a 286. It's certainly better than any 80s console.
Blimey! I'd never heard of the PlayCable. Astonishing for the time.
Yeah, that was my favourite part of the video for sure, such an amazing story.
Never seen an Intellivision irl. Growing up just one kid I knew had a Colecovision rather than Atari (admittedly living on one of the small UK islands may have had something to do with that). But man, there is something so cool about the INTV . That built in font - awesome - plus the console's chunky pixel resolution reminds me of the the Lynx which is my favourite system of all.
Same, I never saw one growing up in the UK either, the first time I actually heard about it was reading the first C&VG Guide to Consoles bookazine. The Lynx is also my favourite system of all-time too!
@@TheLairdsLair Ah, C&VG - essential reading back then :) think I remember on the cover on one seeing the Lynx before it released At that point I knew I bloody well had to have it. Took a little while for imports to arrive (advertised in mags here). Software releases slow at the start. I probably had all the available games for ages waiting for more.. Maybe it's why Iove Electrocop so much
One of my best friends went on holiday to California in September 1989 and came back with a Lynx plus California Games and Electrocop, we were all shocked as it had only just come out and nobody in the UK had them except for the press. We were even more shocked when we played it as it was just so advanced compared to everything else on the market. I didn't get one until the following year, as I had to save up a lot of paper round money, but by then the price had gone down to under £100 without a game and there were a lot more titles out. I bought mine from Dixons with Xenophone and a AC Adapter and its still one of the happiest days of my life.
Buying a Lynx in a shop I can see being a very happy day :) I was never able to convince pals to 'lynx up' with me for Xenophobe - but discovered if you had 2 consoles (I think I had 4 back then (thanks Dixon's £29.99 clearance)) ) - you can link then up and leave one idle so when you die, just go and try a char on the other machine until you've used them all up. Xenophobe on Atari Lynx is the dogs bollox.
Oh, this isn't a Lynx video.. 'Hurrah for Astrosmash' ?
Mattel really screwed the pooch wasting R&D, resources, etc. on half-baked computer add-ons and systems like the Aquarius and the computer(?)/keyboard add-on for the Intellivision. Each would have cannibalized the other and they were head scratchers when they were released, which isn't hindsight is 20/20 - I remember seeing all of this hardware tat in the stores and owned an Intv II at the time and wanted nothing to do with it. Too bad they didn't devote their resources towards the Intellivision III, as you had covered in a prior video.
Like with the TI 99/4's TMS9900 the Intellivision's CP1600 was comparatively slow, had a complex bus architecture and required +12V/+5V/-5V power. A 1.79MHz 6502 or 3.58MHz Z80 would have almost led to a cheaper and faster system design. But GI and TI seemed determined to shoehorn in their minicomputer style 16-bit processors into video game platforms where they didn't really make sense.
It's just another example of how the "bit-ness" of a console isn't usually a terribly useful point of comparison.
Fingers crossed for Atari to release an Intellivision mini that's better than the Atgames Intellivision Flashback. 😅🤞
You forgot to mention the Sylvania branded Intellivision. ☺️
Pitfall, hockey, baseball, football in that order
I have never found you to disappoint thank you sir
Wishing you quick healing!
Are you keeping up with the commodore cause the commodore is keeping up with you
The Intellivision is not amused by this comment. Commodore sure is a funny way of spelling Intellivision.
Atari game nostalgia i want my childhood 😢😢😢❤❤❤
The Colecovision ran laps around this console back in the day, to be honest.
Yep, but I came out quite a few years later. I personally argue that the ColecoVision, Vectrex, Atari 5200 and Videopac G7400 are a different generation.
True for the most part but one seemingly small feature, hardware scrolling, made a pretty big difference. The homebrew Super Mario Bros for Intellivision plays a lot better than similar attempts on consoles with TMS9118s like the Colecovision.
You could excuse TI for not having this feature when they first released the TMS9118 in 1979 but they had less excuse not putting it in the TMS9118A update which didn't release until 1981. By then Mattel/GI and Atari set clear examples with scrolling in home hardware.
The Colecovision only ran laps around it if you liked sprite flicker and a pastel looking colour palate. Plus, the Intellivision had Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
We had the Atari VCS, in the early 80s, because it was the cheaper console. 😢
Do you believe that the Intellivision and the 2600 were both still very popular during the first part of the 90s in sourthern Italy? Yeah, games were insanely cheap and so the consoles, that in most cases have been been given away for free by families which children switched to the NES or even the first 16-bit consoles. That was the perfect recipe for a low-budget gaming console, and in that era southern Italy wasn't that rich generally talking...
A little financial boom arrived in the half of that decade, but it didn't last for much long.
I've heard this before actually, it's an interesting story.
I asked something similar about the Colecovision, but was a video card expansion possible with this system? Is so, why didn’t another company buy the hardware design to be upgraded for the post-NES market? I say this because if feels like the Intellivision could have been like a lesser-MSX.
No it wasn't possible, which is why they developed the Intellivision 3.
I had a console in the early 80's in Australia, controllers didn't have self centring, basic games with tanks from memory, I can't find it anywhere online.
I'd be willing to bed it was a variation of the APVS, probably a Hanimax, Grandstand or Radofin as all those were sold in Australia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1292_Advanced_Programmable_Video_System
I've looked at the Acetronic variation of this console on the channel for reference: th-cam.com/video/JttLk4jsO9o/w-d-xo.html
@@TheLairdsLair not the one, it was brown and had dual controllers, I remember playing some basic tank game on it
I'm not saying you had the one in the video, that's one I have that is part of the range I linked in the initial comment, some of which are exactly like you explain. You need to go down that list and look at the pictures of the variations that were released in Australia and you will probably find it.
OMG...the APF Imagination Machine and the Fairchild Channel F! I remember those! I also remember a console that was triangular, with (iirc) paddles on one side, a steering wheel on another, and a lightgun on the third. It used triangular cartridges that had three games on each, one for each side. Can anyone tell me what that was called and who made it?
The Coleco Telstar, I cover it in this video: th-cam.com/video/8fqwzHsKyt0/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=TheLaird%27sLair
Man, that is one slow 16-bit processor! How does it stack up against the Colecovision and 5200?
The ColecoVision and Atari 5200 are both more powerful, especially the latter.
I prefer the Intellivision over the Colecovision. The latter suffers from sprite flicker and has quite a pastel looking colour palette. Plus, you have the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons games on the Intellivision, and lock n chase.
Hey Laird, I have a question about your opening tts. Does it say welcome gunrunner?
STUN Runner - taken from the Atari Lynx port of the arcade game.
This was the bomb back in the day. Way better than Atari