Shut your Intellivision II off quickly

Perhaps the most annoying thing about the Intellivision II is that there's no convenient way to turn it off quickly. Smacking the button on the console only resets the unit. You have to hold it down for about four seconds before it will actually shut off.

Four seconds may not sound like much, but it's an eternity when you want that console off now. To make things worse, there's no indication that you've held the button down long enough. Release it a millisecond too soon, and you have to start all over again.

With only a little prodding, Kevin Horton devised a solution that's just too easy not to do to your own console. This is purely his idea, but I've tried it out, and it works fantastically.

Inside the unit on the left side is the power supply board. Locate R15 (10Mohm) toward the bottom edge of this board. You'll be soldering another resistor right across it in parallel. Lower resistance here makes the unit shut off faster. Kev reports that using a 1Mohm resistor here makes it push on/push off. Perhaps a little too quick if you want to keep the "reset" function. I used a 2.2Mohm resistor on mine, and the unit shuts off after holding the button for less than half a second.

Jay Tilton
06/28/98