The Mattel Intellivision console will always have a special place in (the geeky part of) my heart.

It was the first console I played games on as a kid. Our neighbors owned an Intellivision and I spent countless hours at their place playing Triple Action and Space Invaders.

Fast forward nearly three decades, an Intellivision console became the cornerstone of my (now vast) collection of vintage hardware and games. I had found one on willhaben.at ("the Austrian eBay") and it even came with the Triple Action game, I had spent so many hours playing.

You can imagine my horror 😱 when I recently wanted to give it a spin and the image on the TV (I use an actual CRT for these games) was blurry and completely unstable! Most likely, the RF modulator had reached its end of life. It could have been a problem with the capacitors as well, but I had an extra AV mod board from my work on Atari 2600s and I decided to give this a chance first.

AV Mod to the Rescue

I had ordered this AV mod board from Donking's Konsolenservice a while ago and it's a fancier mod than the "3 resistors, 1 transistor one" I often used with Atari 2600. A fancy mod board - exactly what this beloved piece of hardware deserved.

Note: I'm not affiliated with Donking's Konsolenservice in any way but I appreciate good service and products so it's just fair to give them proper mention here.

Opening up the Intellivision is straightforward ... until you hit the RF shielding box that houses the mainboard 🤯! This thing is soldered up along the side to last for eternity!

After a couple of fruitless attempts with a solder sucker and solder wick, I found a technique, though, that let me open the box relatively easily.

I upped the temperature of my solder station/iron to its nearly maximum of ~450° C, added some fresh solder to the joints and pried the tabs outward with a screwdriver. This approach left the solder blobs in place but opened the box nonetheless.

Nice - now I had access to the mainboard, where the actual RF modulator box was waiting to be removed.

Desoldering the RF box also took me a while - not so much the pins, but the four tabs that held it to the mainboard - but I succeeded.

At its place I put the AV mod board and wired it up. The audio and video signals can be taken from the solder points previously connected to the modulator box. I took 5V and ground from the ribbon cable that connects the mainboard and power board.

Instead of drilling holes into the case and attaching RCA (cinch) connectors like I did for my Atari mods, I tried something different this time and used a DIN connector.

I only need 3 (audio, video, ground) but this allowed me to reuse the opening in the case where the RF cable had been connected previously.

Nice and clean 😎.

Finally, I soldered a matching DIN to AV plug, reassembled the console and gave it a spin.

Nice - now I can also easily connect my Intellivision console to modern TVs and monitors and enjoy my nostalgic games 🤓.

Bonus: New Intellivision Hardware 🤩

While writing this blog post and searching for some Intellivision facts, I stumbled over this and could not even believe I had not heard about it so far.

... THE INTELLIVISION SPRINT ... SOLD BY ... ATARI 🤯

• It comes with 45 built-in games.
• It comes with actual overlays for these games.
• It has wireless controllers, that charge when put back on the console.
• Most importantly (to me, at least) - it comes from Atari! Apparently, they bought the rights to the brand and brought the two brands I have the most nostalgic feelings for finally together!

Needless to say, I immediately had to order one as an early birthday present for myself 😆.