by 
The Intellivision Amico feels like a distant memory now, but there's still plenty of interest in picking through the wreckage of Tommy Tallarico's ill-fated home console.
Electrical engineering legend and long-time Analogue collaborator Kevin 'Kevtris' Horton has gotten his hands on a prototype of the system and its controller, and the resulting teardown reveals a product that, in Horton's opinion, was all but abandoned from a development perspective as early as 2020.
"I had the opportunity to borrow an Amico and do a teardown of it to expose its innermost secrets," says Horton on the Atari Age forums. "First off, the unit is VERY light. When you heft it, it feels empty. They should've put a weight in it so it doesn't feel like a $10 famicom clone."
He adds that the enclosure for the system was clearly designed "long before they ever knew what was going inside it", as the PCB is "a lot larger than it needed to be, which means it was more expensive to build than it needed to be."
Horton adds that the PCB itself "seems to be well designed; whoever did it was a competent engineer at least." However, it's "very sparse, and they are wasting a lot of expensive PCB space." He shines a light on the "2016 era smartphone chipset" that would have powered the console – one of the key concerns many had back when the Amico was still an ongoing concern.
"Moving onto the top of the shell, their total lack of DFM (design for manufacture) experience shows," continues the engineer:
"THREE circuit boards with old-school ribbon cables connecting everything together is absolutely hilarious to me. This could've been stripped way down; A better idea would've been to use two PCBs in the bottom shell. One small expensive one for the main CPU stuff, and a larger simple 2 layer one for everything else. The LEDs could've all been mounted around its edge and then the side and bottom light guides made into light pipes to direct the light where it needed to go, and the charging pins and NFC could've been put on there also. A flat flex cable instead of those expensive ribbon cables would've made a lot more sense."
Horton's teardown of the controller brings similar concerns, with the small battery and side buttons presenting the biggest issues. "The four side buttons are TERRIBLE," says Horton. "They are very, very mushy, and it's hard to tell when pressing where the contact point is. This would be horrid for any kind of action game. Using the controller as it is is pretty exhausting since you have to kind of contort your fingers. Imagine playing Super Mario Bros with a controller that only had shoulder buttons for jumping and firing. The lack of face buttons was one of the dumbest ideas they came up with."
Kevtris doesn't just pull the system apart; he also tries booting it up to address "the big question everyone had and the shills and Tommy refused to answer: just how long does the Amico take to boot?" The answer is "a really long time."
Horton reveals it takes more than two minutes for the system to boot when you turn it on. It's worth noting that this is a pre-production variant of the system and that boot time may have been reduced had Amico actually made it to market, but a 'fast boot' option in the menu is "totally broken and does not finish booting," according to Horton.
You can read the full teardown notes, along with photos, here.
Atari purchased the Intellivision brand in 2024, but that deal did not include the Amico. Intellivision has since rebranded as Amico Entertainment. As of this writing, the Amico console is still being promoted on the company's website, although the pre-order link is dead. The company has also been releasing some Amico titles on other platforms, like Switch.