You may already know this but you can add additional games pretty easily using a third party desktop app. I found zips of the complete catalog for NES and SNES and then used the app to add a subset of the games. Don’t over fill the storage or you wont be able to create save points. I added a bunch games before giving both systems as a gift.
Speaking of which Retro NES and SNES for sale.
This is a second pair of systems that I never took out of the box. If someone is interested send me a PM.
They are actually sitting behind my monitor as I type this.
I did know there was a home way of doing this…but I am not inclined to take the DIY route. I’d prefer to simply buy an Xpac…assuming its a reasonable price.
To me I feel like it would costs them pennies to mass produce a thumb drive type xpac of games and I think people would reasonably pay $10-$40 for them depending on the number of games and such.
Yes, I agree. I think it is short sighted on their part to not make managing the games on the system available for a minimal price.
I didn’t have any issues adding and removing games but I understand being cautious about borking the thing up and getting the family angry. For what it’s worth, the first part of the process you save off the factory image and theoretically if you screw things up you can always revert to that image and have everything like it was out of box. Of course one should consider if the borking is too bad might it make reimaging not possible? From the quick research I did it seemed like a lot of people have been doing this without problems. I also had duplicate systems as a back up so I was maybe more bold that if I only had one of each system.
By “modern” I mean graphically modern. Also, running on hardware similar to existing platforms (whether mobile or PC) to use existing development tools to make games for it or, more likely, allow for the porting of existing mobile/PC games to run on it.
But yeah, it’s the absurdity - if you want to play retro or retro-like games, cheap hardware and/or emulators with ROMs totally scratch that itch without having to buy overpriced hardware that’s also a lackluster modern console. These new retro consoles seem poised to simultaneously discover this.
ET overproduced by less than a million copies, whereas Pac-Man made 5 million copies they didn’t sell (but it was also the best-selling game at the time, and sold enough copies to be pretty decent sales even today). But yeah, both those games were part of a wave of over-produced cartridges that led to the crash. Everyone - including a lot of third party developers that had recently gotten into game publishing - essentially expected the industry to be at least tripling in size when it only doubled, but they had already produced games to meet the expected demand… Games cost hardly anything to develop at the time, so most of the retail cost of games were due to the high per-unit cost of making the cartridges, which not only meant that was a lot of sunk money they could never get back, but that they had wiped out the profits from the games they did sell.
Although I must say, as horrible as the Intellivision controller felt in your hand, it’s (more) difficult to play some Intellivision games without that numberpad and overlays.
“The code! The code! Figure out the code!” - it talks!
I’m guessing this console will have video touch screens on the controllers to allow for the overlays. And there shouldn’t be an annoyingly short curly cord tethering you to the main console. Still. Meh.
Before I had the Intellivision II, I had a friend who had the original system and the voice module. He had Bomb Squad, B-17 Bomber, and Tron Solar Sailer, if I recall correctly. He was posh.
ETA while looking to make sure I had those names right, I ran across this:
which seems like a great source for anyone wanting to learn more about this system and its games.
That was a selling point, actually- their marketing verbage was that it was the arcade version and not some half-baked port. I remember playing Zaxxon and Pepper II (a pacman style game, but with slightly different gameplay mechanics) quite a bit on it; We also had the expansion module for it which allowed atari 2600 games to be played on it as well, which was pretty innovative at the time. about the only thing that sucked on it was the controllers, because they were slightly more fragile.
That was my realization when I bought the Atari joystick with pre-packaged games thing. As a kid, I was constantly wearing out the controllers on the orignal Atari and assumed I was just an aggressive player. Nope, with the new thing I was screaming out, “Left. Left! Go left!! WHY WON"T YOU GO LEFT!!! Gah!”
My Intellivision-owning friends would come over to check my ColecoVision out and inevitably twist the weird controller ‘knob’. That’s all it would take to need a replacement.
I loved some of those Imagic games so I’ll be keeping a close eye on this. But seriously, who thought it would help to feature photos of “the team”?? And let’s put the marketing and PR folks in there FIRST, before the actual developers!
Yep. ours eventually died a death from controller failure. it didn’t help that it sat in a non-air conditioned storage unit in arizona for several years between the time when we moved out here to when we were able to set it back up.
