Emulation is the bane of my existence. I boarded the Emulation Express for a while, reliving my childhood with countless arcade ROMs for MacMAME and all those console emulators, but I grew tired of it. I didn't like the countless updates that would break compatibility with my ROMs, and I especially didn't like trying to play some of these games with a computer keyboard or game pad.

Nowhere was this more apparent than with Intellivision Lives!, the Mac compatible collection of classic Intellivision games released by Intellivision Productions, Inc. I know that many people claim they'll never be able to hold a pen again because of the Intellivision keypads, but just try playing one of their games without them. Remapping the keypad to the keyboard or a game pad is an exercise in futility, making most of the games on Intellivision Lives! unplayable.

In my review of Intellivision Lives!, I mentioned how great it would be for someone to create a USB game pad fashioned after the Intellivision keypad. What I didn't know was that Chad Schell at Schell's Electronics had already taken a more bizarre route; he created Intellicart.

Simply put, Intellicart allows you to play Intellivision ROMs from your Macintosh through your Intellivision on the TV. You plug one end of the Intellicart into your computer, the other end into the cartridge slot of the Intellivision, then download (or upload, depending upon which way the wind is blowing) a game ROM to the Intellivision. From there, it's like you're back in your parents' living room in 1981...only you have many more cartridges than you ever did before, and you don't have to worry about the boxes being smashed.

Setting up the Intellicart is quite a chore for Mac users, but it's not as bad as the manual would have you think. Loaded with memory map, bankswitching, and CRC-16 algorithm information, the manual can prove quite terrifying to a guy who just wants to play some Frog Bog. Happily, most users will never need to turn past page eight. They will, however, need to connect a lot of hardware.

Remember that you'll need an actual working Intellivision to take advantage of the Intellicart, which plugs directly into your Intellivision's cartridge slot. Systems are fairly easy to find on ebay, but beware of dying keypads and cartridge reading troubles. These systems are old, after all. Very, very old.

You'll also need some method of plugging a DB9 serial connector into your Mac. More than likely, you'll need to shell out additional cash for a DB9 to miniDIN 8 adapter. This isn't too complicated or expensive, but that's providing you have an older Mac with a serial port. iMac, Cube, G4 and most G3 owners will have to spend a little more money on a USB serial adapter. I went with Belkin's USB Serial Adapter for Mac (model number F5U103-MAC), which provides not only the DB9 port required for the Intellicart, but a miniDIN 8 port as well.

Once you have the computer connected to the Intellivision and the Intellivision connected to a TV set, it's time to get the games. Although there are downloadable ROMs out there (the Intellicart ships with six), your best bet is to pick up the aforementioned Intellivision Lives! CD. It provides immediate access to dozens of games, some of which were previously unavailable even in cartridge format. In addition, Intellivision Productions, Inc. will soon release Intellivision Rocks!, another volume of games that, for various reasons, didn't make it onto the first CD. With these two discs, the classic video game afficionado will have access to nearly every Intellivision game ever made.

Getting all of these games into the Intellivision requires one more step. The Intellicart ships with software called the Intellicart Uploader, but it comes on a floppy disk. That's not a real disappointment, however, because it's also a 68K file. The PPC version is available online at Tim Lindner's website, so you'd have to perform the download anyway.

Once the Uploader is installed, launching it scans its folder for ROMs that can be uploaded to the Intellivision. If it doesn't find any in the folder, you only need tell the software where they are. After plugging in the Intellicart and turning on the Intellivision, you then need to select the ROM of choice on the computer or CD and click Upload (make sure the Uploader knows how the Intellicart is connected to you Mac, as it tends to forget). If everything worked as it should, you're now ready to play.

So that's the question; who is going to bother with all this hassle and expense to play games that are twenty-years-old? Well, me, for one; My brother, for two; and just about any other Intellivision lover who pines for Saturday afternoon Sea Battles. I'd still like to see a USB Intellivision keypad, though; some corporate competition to secure the highly coveted Macintosh Intellivision emulation gaming market would do wonders for our economy, I'm sure. Whether or not that happens, thanks to Intellicart, Intellivision now truly does live.

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