History Of Home Video Games
Magnavox Odyssey was designed by Ralph Baer, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch of Sanders Associates, a military electronics firm in 1966-67. It was introduced in 1972 at a price of $100. Because micro chips were so expensive at that time, the Odyssey was designed using only 40 transistors and 40 diodes. Odyssey was able to generate only very simple on-screen effects and the players had to keep score by themselves, because the machine was incapable of doing so. Odyssey was packaged with screen overlays (to be placed on the TV screen to simulate complex graphics), two controllers, six game cards, play money, playing cards, a roulette and football playfield, a fold-out scoreboard, poker chips and a pair of dice. It wasn't a successful game.
Atari Pong
Pong was the home version of the successful arcade game. It was designed by Al Alcorn, Bob Brown, and Harold Lee and introduced in 1975. It became a big hit and spawned many clone machines.
Atari 2600
Atari 2600, also known as Atari Video Computer System (VCS), was designed by Joe Decure, Harold Lee, and Steve Meyer. It was released in 1977 at introductory price of $199.95. It was the most popular videogame console of its day and it was available until 1990, being on the market longer than any other system in history. Several hundred games were developed for it. It featured an 8-bit CPU, MOS 6507 @ 1.19 MHz, 16 color graphics, 2 channel audio (noise and sound). It only had 128 bytes of RAM memory and no video memory (CPU had control the video chip with screen refresh). The games were supplied in ROM cartridge, with the maximum size of 4 kilobytes. Later-on the limit of 4 kB was exceeded with paging ROM pages.
Coleco Colecovision
Coleco released the Colecovision in 1982 at $199.95. It had 48 Kbytes of RAM and 3.58 MHz, 8-bit, Z80A CPU making it the most highpowered home system of its time.
Atari 5200 Super System
Atari released the 5200 Super System in 1982. It was basically an Atari 400 home computer without a keyboard. It had 1.78, 8-bit, 6502C CPU and 16 Kbytes of RAM. It was capable of 320x192 resolution with 16 colors from 256 color palette and it 4-channel sound. It was the first system to come equipped with 4 controller ports for multi-player games. Despite that it had much better hardware than the Atari 2600, it never became the success Atari expected. Cheap home computers started to gain market from video games in the beginning of the 80's and it took too much time before quality game titles were developed to Atari 5200.
Milton Bradley/GCE Vectrex
Vectrex was designed by John Ross, Gerry Karr, John Hall and ex-Atari employees Paul Newell and Mark Indictor from an idea by Jay Smith. It was released in 1982 at a price of $199. It incorporated a 9 inch Vector graphic monitor and used a Motorola 68A09, 8-bit microprocessor. It wasn't a success, but it had loyal fans.
Nintendo Entertainment System (Famicom)
Nintendo Entertainment System, briefly NES, was designed Masayuki Uemura. It released in 1985. It had an 8-bit CPU (6502 @ 1.79 MHz) and 2 kilobytes of RAM. The Graphics were capable of maximum of 256*224 pixel (NTSC) resolution and 16 simultaneous colors from a palette of 52 colors. It had 2 kilobytes graphics work RAM and 64 simultaneous sprites. Its sound system had 2 square wave channels, 1 triangle wave channel, 1 noise channel and 1 PCM channel.
NEC Turbografx
NEC Turbografx was released in Japan in 1988 as the PC Engine, the system was renamed the Turbografx-16 when it reached North America in 1989. Although it was advertised as a 16-bit game machine, it actually had an 8-bit CPU, 65802 @ 16 MHz. It did contain a separate 16-bit graphics chip however. The Turbografx-16 became the first system to have a CD-player attachment.
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