pkIntvMCP

In 1982 I worked at APh Technological Consulting, writing Intellivision games in CP-1600 assembly. One of mine, Air Strike, was an airplane game that never got past the demo stage — Mattel passed on it, and the playable demo eventually shipped on the 1998 Intellivision Lives! CD-ROM, but the full game never did.

This summer, an AI flew it.

pkIntvMCP is an Intellivision emulator and debugger built to be operated by AI assistants. It speaks MCP — the Model Context Protocol, the standard way tools expose themselves to models like Claude — so instead of memorizing debugger commands, you ask questions: “Why does my ROM crash at $5020?” “What’s in R1 right now?” “Run until the first call into the Exec and show me the trace.” The AI drives the machine; you drive the AI.

What’s in it

• A complete CP-1600 CPU core — all 79 instructions, validated against jzIntv (the reference Intellivision emulator) with zero divergences and 9,700+ consecutive matched trace steps of a real game boot.
• The real boot path: the 1978 Exec ROM, GROM, cartridge loading, the STIC display chip with sprites and collisions, controller input.
• An MCP server with 26 tools — sessions, breakpoints, execution traces, symbol-annotated disassembly, screen rendering, even a tool where the AI files its own bug reports.
• Scope, a browser cockpit for watching the AI work: the screen as a live movie, registers, disassembly, and the agent’s tool calls scrolling underneath.

It’s a debugger, not a gameplay emulator — deliberately not cycle-exact. For playing games, jzIntv remains the real thing, and this project owes Joe Zbiciak a debt: jzIntv was the reference that kept every instruction honest.

The part I keep telling people about

Air Strike scrolls over an infinite mountain range — on a machine with a few hundred bytes of RAM to spare. The whole terrain state is twenty bytes. The trick, which I’d half-forgotten and the AI reconstructed and verified from my old source: the mountains are a pure function of position, seeded from the Intellivision’s own operating-system ROM used as a free table of random bits. Procedural world generation, 1982, in assembly. There’s a machine-verified write-up of how it works in the repo.

The other story

The code itself was largely written by AI agents working under my direction — several weeks of Claude sessions, with me steering design and the agents doing the assembly-level archaeology, emulation work, and validation. Watching an agent learn to fly the plane in my own game, forty-four years later, through a debugger it helped build — that’s as strange and good as making things gets.

Try it

npm install -g @pkintvmcp/server

Then point Claude Desktop or Claude Code at it — setup guide, release notes. If you’re an Intellivision person: bug reports and homebrew war stories equally welcome.