Mattel's Intellivision (1979) fought the Atari 2600 with better graphics and a strange controller: a disc for moving, two side buttons, and a numeric keypad you covered with a card printed for each game.
We have about 110 Intellivision games on My Abandonware. They are small files, a few KB each.
Intellivision emulators
FreeIntv, a RetroArch core, is the easiest way to play, and it draws the keypad on screen. jzIntv is the most complete emulator. Both need two files from the console.
- FreeIntv: a core for RetroArch, on every system. It was made for modern gamepads, and since late 2025 it shows the keypad on screen, which solves the biggest problem of this console. Recommended.
- jzIntv (Windows, Mac, Linux): the most accurate and complete Intellivision emulator, with support for the add-ons of the time, the voice box included. No menus: you start it from the command line.
- MAME also runs the Intellivision and its add-ons.
The two console files
Every Intellivision emulator needs two files from the machine: exec.bin, its main program, and grom.bin, which holds the shapes and characters it draws.
Put both in the system folder of your emulator; in RetroArch, that is the system folder. See our page about BIOS files to get them. Without these two files, the emulator shows a black screen.
Running a game
Unzip the game and open the file: .int, .bin or .rom, they are all the same cartridge. Nothing else to set up.
Our Intellivision archives hold one file each, a few KB. A game with two players uses the two controllers: in FreeIntv, the Select button swaps them if the game answers the wrong one.
The keypad and the overlays
The hard part of this console is its keypad: games ask you to press a number to choose a weapon, a play or a direction, and the meaning was printed on a card you slid over the controller.
In FreeIntv, the L and R buttons open a small keypad on the screen, and the right stick chooses a number. Without the overlay card, you have to guess what each number does. We hold few Intellivision manuals, so look for the manual or a picture of the overlay on the web before you start: both were printed together, and the community has scanned most of them.
A few games also used the voice box, the Intellivoice, which said words aloud. jzIntv and MAME emulate it; it needs its own file.
I need help!
We do not provide support for running abandonware games. The Intellivision has a small, long-lived community.
Ask on the Intellivision forum of AtariAge, where the people who write these emulators and new games for the console meet. The Emulation General Wiki compares the emulators.
Checked in October 2026 against each emulator's own documentation and, where it exists, its source code. Game counts and file sizes come from our own catalogue. These guides were drafted with the help of an AI assistant and checked by hand before publishing. If something here is out of date, tell us.