Intellivision II compatibility mod

[tz101]

Have read again and again how Intellivision II will not play most Coleco carts. So would it be possible to mod the system to be compatible with all INTV and 3rd party games? I mean, if 5200 4-port models can be modded to make them work with the 2600 adapter, then something like this must be possible on the Intellivision II.

Edited October 17, 2010 by tz101

[jaybird3rd]

The compatibility issues were caused by changes to the Intellivision II's EXEC. The EXEC chip is (I believe) a 40-pin ROM, probably similar to a 16-bit EPROM, which is soldered to the Intellivision II mainboard. Any modification would require desoldering and socketing this chip, which would make for a very cumbersome installation process. My guess is that most Intellivision II owners probably wouldn't want to be bothered with it, especially since the original Intellivision can still be obtained fairly inexpensively. Besides, I'm not sure it would be very easy to "undo" the changes that were made to the EXEC without creating incompatibilities with other games; reportedly, Mattel was reluctant to fix known bugs in the original Intellivision's EXEC (such as negative square roots causing the console to crash) for this very reason.

 

It would probably be easier to simply patch the games that don't work, if this hasn't been done already. You're only talking about a handful of titles, many of which (particularly the Coleco titles) aren't exactly the best ever made for the Intellivision.

 

Of course, the problem with that idea is that you'd need a CC3 (or some other programmable cartridge) in order to play the patched versions on the real hardware.