The History of Intellivison Emulators - Part 1

Intellivision For PC (1997)

Intellivision For PC

The first Intellivision emulator, the Intellivision For PC (INTVPC) or Intellipack, as it was later known, has a curious history. It was created by Carl Muller Jr. in 1997, a student from Michigan, USA, who was trying to figure out how the console worked. In the same year, the Intellivision Productions, Inc. group was formed by former Mattel programmers (the company that created the console), Keith Robinson and Stephen Roney, who acquired the rights to the console and its games. Keith and Stephen were already part of the website The Blue Sky Rangers, created in June 1995 by former Mattel programmers to tell a little about the history of the console and Intellivision games. The name was informally given to the group by the American magazine TV Guide in 1982, when they were producing games for the Intellivision.

Intellivision For PC (Volume 2)

At that time, Keith and Stephen contacted Carl, who began working on the team. Stephen Roney also developed the Macintosh version of the emulator, most likely as a port of Carl's emulator. At that time, Intellipack was born, known at the time as Intellivision for PC & Mac, a two-volume collection of Intellivision games, created in August and released for free download in October and November 1997, respectively for Windows 95 (running on MS -DOS), Macintosh and Sharp 68k, on the company's official website. We can say that this was the first emulator created indirectly by the console's creators themselves.

Intellivision For PC (Emulator)

Carl Muller was the general programmer, along with Williams Moeller and Scott Nudds, who took care of the binaries and technical support for the project, among other partners. The Windows version only worked on Windows 95 and DOS, and did not support Windows 3.1. Each collection included three games from the console. Curiosity. Volume 2 of the collection included the game Dep Pockets Super Pro Billiards, unreleased until then. It was created in 1990, but never released by INTV Corporation (Mattel's successor from 1984 onwards in control of the Intellivision). This collection was very interactive, with its own menu to stop the games, and a detailed explanation of the objective of the game, how to play, including explanatory graphics and the settings for the controller keys.

Intellivision Lives! (Front and Back Cover)

Intellivision Lives! (Interface/Battle Tanks)

Intellivision Lives! (Menu/Info)

In 1998, Carl Muller created a new emulator, now for Windows, for the PC release of Intellivision Lives! in October 1998 with 50 games. Despite this, it came with an updated version of INTVPC for MS-DOS on the CD (repeating the same with Intellivision Rocks). Intellivision Lives! was re-released in 2002. Other collections were released in sequence, such as Intellivision Rocks in November 2001, with 30 games, Intellivision Greatest Hits: 20th Anniversary Edition in January 2003, with 25 games, and Intellivision Las Vegas Lounge Trio in July 2007, with 80 games. 

Intellivision Rocks (Front and Back Cover)

Intellivision Rocks (Menu/Info/Pitfall)

Some of these collections were ported to other platforms, such as Intellivision Lives! in 2003 for Xbox and PS2, 2004 for GameCube, 2008 for Xbox 360, 2010 for Nintendo DS, and 2013 for PS3, as well as Windows Phone and iOS. There were also exclusive releases, such as Intellivision Classic Games in 1999 for PS1, with its own, one-time emulator created by Mike Livesay, creator of Action Pack, the first Atari 2600 emulator.

Intellivision Greatest Hits: 20th Anniversary Edition (Front and Back Cover)

Intellivision Greatest Hits: 20th Anniversary Edition (Interface)

Intellivision Las Vegas Lounge Trio (Front and Back Cover)

About the Intellivison For PC collection, it received a new name on the website in August 2000, being called Intellipack, but without any changes to its files. Around April 2001, they released another volume of the collection for download, Intellipack 3, with a completely new look, with four games, a new emulator, its own front-end and released for Windows. In 2003, they re-released the classic volumes 1 and 2 of their collection for Windows, using the same emulator and front-end used in volume 3.

Intellipack 1

Intellipack 2

Intellipack 3

The intention of the Intellivison For PC/Intellipack collection was always to promote the CD-ROMs released by Blue Sky, such as the debut in 1997 with volumes 1 and 2 to promote Intellivision Lives that would be released the following year, in 2001, with volume 3 to promote Intellivision Rocks that would be released the same year, and in 2003, with the re-release of volumes 1 and 2 for Windows to promote Intellivision Greatest Hits, already released that year. In 2019, the company adopted the name Blue Sky Rangers. Interestingly, in 2000, Carl Muller, using Intellipacks, created the first port of an Intellivision emulator for the Gameboy Color, called I4GBC. I believe it was also the first emulator to run on this simple portable device. Carl worked on this project until 2003.

JZINTV (1999)

JZINTV

JZINTV, or simply Joseph Zbiciak Intellivision, was a project that began in 1998, and was first released in August 1999 for Windows by the emulator's namesake. The project was created from scratch, but was inspired by Carl Mueller's emulator, Intellivision For PC. The project was the second to emulate the console, and the first unofficial one. In September 1999, it was released for Linux, Windows, UNIX (Linux) and MacOS. In the September 2000 version, support for Intellivoice was added, a cartridge that ran its own games guided by the player's voice, with an emulator of the peripheral created by Joe. JZINTV is an emulator that runs through MS-DOS-style command lines. This was the case for many years, until in June 2006, Rich Nagel created the first front-end for the emulator, the jzIntv Launcher, for the Windows version of the emulator. Rich is followed in September 2006 by Arnauld Chevallier (also creator of the Intellivision emulator Kinty) who creates the jzIntvGUI front-end. In June 2020, Jenergy creates the Jzintv ImGui front-end.

Jzintv ImGui

JZINTV had several release hiatuses, including the years 2005, 2007 to 2011, 2013 to 2015, and 2019. Its latest version was released in July 2020, when it released all versions in SDL format. We do not know from which year it started supporting the ECS peripheral, but we believe it was from 2006 onwards. ECS was an add-on that transformed the console into a PC, with its own games for it, with support for keyboard and musical keyboard. The following emulators helped directly and indirectly in the project: Frank Palazzolo from the MESS project, John Dullea from the IntvWin project, Carl Mueller from the Intellipacks project, Joe Fisher from the Nostalgia project, among many others. The emulator had versions for DOS, Solaris, MacOS X, and others. It has also been ported to several platforms, such as the Nintendo Wii as JZINTWII in 2010, the PSP handhelds as PSPInt in 2005, GamePark GP2X as GP2X-INT in 2007 and IN2X in the 2000s, and GamePark Caanoo as Caanoo-Int in 2011, and the Android system as jzINTV4DROID in 2012 (created by Jenergy). JZINTV is considered one of the most compatible Intellivision emulators.

A Collection of Classic Games From The Intellivision (A Collection of Intellivision Classic Games) (1999)

A Collection of Classic Games From The Intellivision

It was an Activision compilation released for PSX in September 1999, where an emulator was developed by LTI Gray Matter, headed by Michael Livesay. Mike had become known for having created the first Atari 2600 emulator also for Activision. Unlike the Atari emulator that was released in several compilations, the Intellivision emulator was only released once. The compilation ran thirty games, among them classics such as Boxing, Pinball, Shark! Shark!, Space Armada, and others.

A Collection of Classic Games From The Intellivision (Interface/Boxing)

Mike also worked in the game creation industry with his company (which was created in 1992), for PS1, 2 and 3 until 2008, and has been in the industry since 1980 creating games, since 1982 with Livesay Computer Games and 1986 with Livesay Technologies Incorporated, all his companies.

IntvDOS / IntvWin (2000)

IntvDOS

IntvDOS was created by John Dullea in 1999, using the base of the PC Atari Emulator developed by him in 1996. The emulator was only released the following year, in December 2000 in MS-DOS. In its first version, it already supported the ECS add-on, with support for keyboard and musical keyboard, and Intellivoice. Its interface is identical to the PCAE emulator, also by John Dullea, with a control configuration menu, such as mouse, keyboard, joystick and controls such as GrIP, SideWinder and Intv2PC support, which allowed the Intellivision controller to be connected to the PC. Preference menu, with screen size, change of for, frames per second, among others. Sound menu, with choice of sound frame rate. In addition to on/off switching for the debugger and sound. Like all Intellivision emulators, it also requires the system bios.

IntvWIN

IntvWIN (Pinball)

The Windows version was only released in March 2002, under the name IntvWin, and was also based on John's PCAE emulator. Its interface had options for screen resolution, fullscreen, pause, reset, screenshot, control configuration via keyboard, mouse, joypad and INTV2pc, as well as changing the interface color and font, debugger mode and information menu for each ROM. Unlike its predecessor, the emulator only ran games in .BIN format.

IntvWIN (Menus)

In May 2002, the latest version of the emulator, 1.1, was released. Intv had help from, among others, The Blue Sky Rangers from Intellipacks/Intellivision Lives!. For a good execution of the emulator, a 486 with 32 MB of RAM, DirectX and a sound card with DirectSound support was recommended.