>95C
Holy shit, that's like Dante's Inferno. And yes, Intellivisions are famous for their overheating issues and general unreliability.
>95C
>95C
Holy shit, that's like Dante's Inferno. And yes, Intellivisions are famous for their overheating issues and general unreliability.
Name of the game?
I assume there would be little or no difference if another game had been used. MLB was just a common one.
I assume Major League Baseball. Yes the game was released in late 1980 but they probably had a prototype of it when this test was done in May '79.
>5 millions units sold
>Omit .50 cent heat-sink
>$2.5 million saved in production costs
Wow thats hotter than I expected. I've had 2 and they both didn't work correctly. Since its just a cpu an fpga replacement wouldn't change the feeling of the graphics. I got an intellivision 2 on the assumption it used a newer process so should be cooler but haven't tested it yet.
yet atari has an insanely heavy cast aluminium enclosure
Intellivision 2/3 did have modernized chips that run cooler. The original ones used a dinosaur enhancement load NMOS process with triple power rails, so aside from getting hot they're also vulnerable to PSU problems. Removing the RF shield would help some in preventing heat buildup.
Apparently the console's launch was delayed by chip shortages so it seems General Instruments had trouble manufacturing the chipset, rather like what happened with the Dreamcast's launch.
>yet atari has an insanely heavy cast aluminium enclosure
During Atari's day, FCC regulations for home computing devices were not known and it was believed they would be much stricter than they turned out to be; the design was done in the 1978/early '79 time frame, and tooling costs were essentially all spent and done by the time the FCC regs were finalized, so the only costs associated with the RF shielding left were unit production costs, which for a couple pieces of cast metal were not high compared to the parts in the rest of the machine.
TL;DR Atari installed them anyway since they had already manufactured them prior to new FCC regulations.
Commodore lobbied for and got reduced FCC regulations as the new Reagan Administration was more receptive to the idea. However the 400/800 had been designed before that happened. Also the VIC-20 had composite out only and lacked an internal RF modulator due to the original FCC codes.
the RAM is the most likely thing to shit itself. it's possible with some work to adapt a more modern SRAM chip to fit.
they had sinks on the CPU, GPU, and main RAM. even with those the thermal environment inside the case was really bad for several reasons including the heat generated by the PSU/voltage regulators and the RF shield.
>bent an aluminum sheet
>job well done
at least cut some fins into it
TI used a flat spreader on the TMS VDP and it worked fine. and those definitely did get toasty, at least the original 4 um version from '79 (later die shrunk VDPs didn't need the sink anymore).
That's just the way heatsinks were done back in the 70's
You either had slightly bent steel, or the space age fancy heatsinks with inch thick heatpipes filled with a toxic gas
Fancy looking modern aluminum heatsinks wouldn't be massproduced at scale till sometime in the mid-80's
Nintendo used finned sinks on Playchoice-10 PPUs but that came later and was more in the time frame you mentioned. The TMS VDP and early Famicoms just used a simple flat aluminum spreader.
The Inty was a pretty complex console with a lot of ICs, so more failure points.
It was the first game console in the semi-modern sense and a lot more advanced than the Atari 2600.
>had an actual system BIOS
>had actual frame buffer graphics
>had a limited hardware screen scroll
>could access up to 56k of cartridge ROM without bank switching, far more than any games released in its lifetime used
>Mattel introduced the first licensing policy where you had to sign up with them as a developer
The 5V and 12V regulators are gonna melt. I'm not sure what regulators they mean, but the 7805 is a pretty common 5V regulator, and it's wild to think of that approaching 100C.
from some comments on AtariAge it was common back in the day for Intellivisions to glitch when they'd been running for a while and you'd have to turn them off for about half an hour to let them cool down
That's like the first Famicoms that overheated and...oh wait Nintendo recalled them and worked to fix that issue instead of putting a band-aid on it. Americans gonna American.
>It was noted that no significant difference in temperature occurred when the baseball game was played over the idle condition with the Mattel Electronics displayed on the TV screen
I shouldn't think there would be because the chips were NMOS components that run at a fixed temperature. If it was modern CMOS parts then the chips would be cool at idle and get warmer when you're playing the game.
Baseball was a fantastic game. A kid across the road had an intellivision, we used to hang there playing it even though the kid was a real c**t.
at that time the only alternative was the much cruder 2600 Baseball unless you wanted to spend $2,000 for an Apple II
https://www.mobygames.com/game/genre:baseball/platform:apple2/sort:moby_score/page:1/
And you thought breadbin C64s became a barbecue pit while running.