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World Championship Baseball
World Championship Baseball (WCB), aka All-Star Major League Baseball, is the second baseball title developed for the Mattel Intellivision.  It was written by Dan Dickerson at APh Consulting under a contract to produce Intellivision games for Mattel Electronics.

According to the Blue Sky Rangers, development of the game was started at APh in 1981, using the code base of David Rolfe's earlier game, Major League Baseball.  Although programming was completed, the game was not given a high priority by Mattel, and APh didn't completely debug it.

However, Mattel's Mike Minkoff is a big baseball fan and took it upon himself to finish testing the game in his own time during 1983.  To help him, Mike integrated a software debugger written by Rick Koenig in late 1982 / early 1983 into his test copy of WCB.  Unfortunately, time ran out and Mike was unable to squash all the bugs before Mattel Electronics closed its doors in early 1984.

This could have been the end of the WCB story, however, when INTV Corp. acquired the Intellivision assets from Mattel in 1984 they included the unfinished WCB. Some time later INTV Corp. dusted off the game, sorted out manufacture and packaging, and in 1986 WCB went on sale in their Spring Catalog.  The Blue Sky Rangers report that the production version of the game still contained the final bug Mike was trying to fix, and the copy of Rick's debugger that he had integrated three years earlier.

WCB Crash Diagnostic Screen
It is true that the retail version of the game does occasionally crash, and when this happens a diagnostic screen, presumably added by Mike, is sometimes displayed.  However, this only shows a dump of a small part of the Intellivision's RAM at the point that the crash was detected, it's not really what you would call a debugger.

So, this leaves a number of unanswered questions...
  • Is Rick's debugger in there?
  • Is it complete? 
  • Can it be isolated, reverse-engineered and tinkered with?
Over the next month these are questions that this RetroChallenge entry hopes to answer.

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