Technical Notes for 2nd Generation Game Systems

The Atari 5200, Intellivision, and Colecovision systems fall under the 2nd Generation systems category.

This generation of systems was marked by enhanced game system control, in the form of keypad based controllers. Orbiter screens are provided for this purpose so that keypad buttons can be used.

To facilitate selecting these game pad controllers, the Set Game Options DCE command is issued, to specify which game controllers to use. This has two parameters:

• Path - An options key to set
• Value to Assign - an options value to set for that key.

For the Second Gen systems, a Path value of KP is used, and a value of P1 or P2 is used to select player 1 or player 2.