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The Magnavox Odyssey², known in Europe as the Philips Videopac G7000, in Brazil as the Philips Odyssey, in the United States as the Magnavox Odyssey² and the Philips Odyssey², and also by many other names, is a video game console released in 1978.
In the early 1970s, Magnavox was an innovator in the home video game industry. They succeeded in bringing the first home video game system to market, the Odyssey, which was quickly followed by a number of later models, each with a few technological improvements. In 1978, Magnavox, now a subsidiary of North American Philips, released the Odyssey², their new second-generation video game console.
[edit] Design
The original Odyssey had a number of removable circuit cards that switched between the built-in games, of which there were ten in Europe and Asia, and twelve in America. The Odyssey² followed in the steps of the Fairchild Channel F and Atari 2600 by being designed to play programmable ROM cartridges. With this improvement, each game could be a completely unique experience, with its own background graphics, foreground graphics, gameplay, scoring, and music. The potential was enormous, as an unlimited number of games could be individually purchased; a game player could purchase a library of video games tailored to his or her own interest. Unlike any other system at that time, the Odyssey² included a full alphanumeric membrane keyboard, which was to be used for educational games, selecting options, or programming (Magnavox also released a game cartridge called Computer Intro! with the intent of teaching simple computer programming).
The Odyssey² used the standard joystick design of the 1970s and early 1980s: the original console had a moderately-sized silver controller, held in one hand, with a square housing for its eight-direction stick that was manipulated with the other hand. Later releases had a similar black controller, with an 8-pointed star-shaped housing for its eight-direction joystick. In the upper corner of the joystick was a single 'Action' button, silver on the original controllers and red on the black controllers.
One other difference in these controllers is that the earliest releases of the silver joystick were removable. They could be plugged and unplugged from the back of the unit, while all later silver and all black controllers were hardwired into the rear of the unit itself.
One of the strongest points of the system was its excellent speech synthesis unit, which was released as an add-on for speech, music, and sound effects enhancement. The area that the Odyssey² may be best remembered for was its pioneering fusion of board and video games: The Master Strategy Series. The first game released was Quest for the Rings!, with gameplay somewhat similar to Dungeons & Dragons, and a storyline reminiscent of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
[edit] Market life
[edit] United States
The Odyssey² sold moderately well in the US. Even without third-party developers, by 1983 over a million Odyssey² units were sold in the US alone. The lack of third-party support kept the number of new games very limited, but the success of the Philips Videopac G7000 overseas led to two other companies producing games for it: Parker Brothers released Popeye, Frogger, Q*Bert and Super Cobra, while Imagic released versions of their hit games Demon Attack and Atlantis. Finally, in 1983 the two Imagic games were brought to the US; these became strong sellers.[citation needed]
[edit] Europe
European models had no power button, and black action buttons
In Europe and Brazil, the Odyssey² did very well on the market. In Europe, the console was most widely known as the Philips Videopac G7000, or just the Videopac, although branded variants were released in some areas of Europe under the names Radiola Jet 25, Schneider 7000, and Siera G7000. Philips, as Magnavox's European parent company, used their own name rather than Magnavox's for European marketing. A rare model, the Philips Videopac G7200, was only released in Europe; it had a built-in black-and-white monitor. Videopac game cartridges are mostly compatible with American Odyssey² units, although some games have color differences and a few are completely incompatible. A number of additional games were released in Europe that never came out in the US.
[edit] Brazil
In Brazil, the console was released as the Philips Odyssey; the Magnavox Odyssey was released in Brazil by a company named "Planil Comércio", not affiliated to Philips or Magnavox. Since just a few units were sold, the Brazilian branch of Philips released Odyssey² without its number. Odyssey became much more popular in Brazil than it ever was in the US; tournaments were even held for popular games like K.C.'s Krazy Chase! (Come-Come in Brazil).
The Odyssey² was released in Japan in December 1982 by Kōton Trading Toitarii Enterprise (コートン・トレーディング・トイタリー・エンタープライズ, a division of DINGU company) under the name オデッセイ２ (odessei2). "Japanese" versions of the Odyssey² and its games consisted of the American boxes with katakana stickers on them and cheaply printed black-and-white Japanese manuals. The initial price for the console was ¥49,800. It was apparently not very successful; Japanese Odyssey² items are now very difficult to find.
[edit] Technical specifications
- Video:
- Intel 8244 custom IC
- 160×200 resolution (NTSC)
- 16-color fixed palette; sprites may only use 8 of these colors
- 4 8×8 single-color user-defined sprites; each sprite's color may be set independently
- 12 8×8 single-color characters; must be one of the 64 shapes built into the ROM BIOS; can be freely positioned like sprites, but cannot overlap each other; each character's color may be set independently
- 4 quad characters; groups of four characters displayed in a row
- 9×8 background grid; dots, lines, or solid blocks
- Audio:
- Intel 8244 custom IC
- mono
- 24-bit shift register, clockable at 2 frequencies
- noise generator
- NOTE: There is only one 8244 chip in the system, which performs both audio and video functions.
- Input:
- Two 8-way, one-button, digital joysticks. In the first production runs of the Magnavox Odyssey and the Philips 7000, these were permanently attached to the console; in later models, they were removable and replaceable.
- QWERTY-layout membrane keyboard
- Output:
- Media:
- ROM cartridges, typically 2 KB, 4 KB, or 8 KB in size.
- Expansion modules:
- The Voice - provides speech synthesis & enhanced sound effects
- Chess Module - The Odyssey2 didn't have enough memory and computing power for a decent implementation of chess on its own, so the C7010 chess module contained a secondary CPU with its own extra memory to run the chess program.
[edit] Emulation
An open source console emulator for the Odyssey² called O2EM is available. It includes Philips Videopac G7400 emulation among other features. The emulator works on Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, DOS and other platforms. O2EM, (originally not open source) was created in 1997 by computer programmer Daniel Boris.
The open source multi-platform multi-system emulator MESS has rudimentary Odyssey² support, although many games have problems and 4KB Challenger Series games are completely unsupported.