Entertainment Computer System

Add on peripheral for the Intellivision

The Entertainment Computer System (ECS) was an add on peripheral for the Intellivision. It was Mattel Electronics' second attempt at creating a peripheral to upgrade the Intellivision into a home computer, and was rushed into production to appease the Federal Trade Commission after they began fining Mattel for false advertising following consumer complaints about the repeated delays in releasing the originally planned Intellivision Keyboard Component add on. The ECS includes the Computer Module, Music Synthesizer, and additional hand controllers; each sold separately. Any Intellivision Master Component is compatible and a requirement to use the system. A second requirement is a cartridge plugged into the ECS, although any ECS or Intellivision cartridge will do; pressing anything on the Intellivision hand controllers will then bring up the three option menu of BASIC, CARTRIDGE or MUSIC.

Initially, at least a half dozen ECS supporting software titles were slated to roll out along with the ECS, with more to follow. Unfortunately, as noted above, by the time the ECS made its retail debut in 1983 a new management team had taken over at Mattel Electronics which was no longer interested in selling or promoting hardware add ons, which they viewed as money losers that had tied up too much of the company's capital for too little return. (Perhaps not without some justification, given the history of the long delayed, never released Keyboard Component and the lower than expected sales of the Intellivoice module.) The Marketing and Applications departments were also not particularly enthusiastic about the ECS unit, since it really didn't add any revolutionary features to the system and it was a struggle to come up with game ideas that would justify requiring the user to have one. As a result, the ECS was not well promoted, and few of the planned software titles were released before Richard Chang's "Design & Development" group was closed down in August 1983, effectively halting further work on ECS supporting titles. A very few titles that were already well in progress were eventually completed, but none of them made it to production before Mattel Electronics ceased operations in January 1984.

The BASIC keywords built into the ECS, discussed at length in the manual, are a maximum of four characters long. Some ECS BASIC keywords are simply a truncation or abbreviation of the standard BASIC terms, e. g. "print" becomes PRIN, "input" becomes INPU, and "gosub" becomes GSUB. The ECS will display help menus covering its commands: type MENU 0 for monitor commands, MENU 1 for BASIC keywords, MENU 2 for BASIC functions, and MENU 3 for BASIC routines. Eight sprites at a time may be SHOWn or GRABbed from a storehouse of such images in each individual Intellivision cartridge, and such sprites can then be manipulated by changing their colors (1 color available per sprite), doubling their height or width, flipping their shape to a mirror image, creating motion sequences, and so forth. However, the sprites are only "borrowed" and cannot be integrated into the user's own program unless the same cartridge is on board when the program is run.

In BASIC mode, the display on the ECS is 20 columns across (while the maximum program line length is 39 characters), and any text is shown in all capital letters. The normal text color is black against a green background. Color codes are used by the ECS to mark different elements of a program as each line is entered or (in immediate mode) executed. The color coding scheme, which is explained in the back of the manual or can be discerned from direct observation, is useful in determining how the ECS understood (or misunderstood) any command. As to graphics, the background screen is composed of 240 "cards" (20 wide by 12 high, numbered 0 to 239, each composed of 8x8 pixels), in a choice of one of 16 colors (eight primary and eight pastel). Eight sprites at a time may be SHOWn or GRABbed from a storehouse of such images in each individual Intellivision cartridge, and such sprites can then be manipulated by changing their colors (1 color available per sprite), doubling their height or width, flipping their shape to a mirror image, creating motion sequences, and so forth. However, the sprites are only "borrowed" and cannot be integrated into the user's own program unless the same cartridge is on board when the program is run. (Professional programmers found ways to create the illusion of putting more than eight sprites on the Intellivision screen at the same time through multiplexing redefining and repositioning a single object from one frame to the next and back again, resulting in flickering images of two objects and sequencing graphics RAM to animate background cards.)