Inside the Magnavox Odyssey, the First Video Game Console - reimereaketury

Riant Birthday, Magnavox Odyssey!

Cardinal eld agone, Magnavox lifted the veil on the world's first commercial video game console, the Odyssey. Fashioned to work with a internal Telecasting fixed, the Odyssey blazed a trail that every game console follows today.

The Odyssey launched at $99.99 (nigh $548 in today's dollars) in Venerable 1972 and included 12 games. Buyers could purchase strange games separately, including an expansion set that included a realistic plaything rifle–the world's aurora gun.

Magnavox's console was built on applied science originally highly-developed by Ralph Baer, Bill Harrison, and Bill Rusch at Sanders Associates in the mid- to late 1960s. Baer's design, together with Atari's work during the same period, founded an industry.

To celebrate the 40th birthday of this pioneering machine, I decided to take my Odyssey apart and see what makes information technology tick. It was a overnice day outside, so I eschewed my trusty workbench for something a bit more rude. Anyone who has an averting to the color green should plow back now.

Meet the Odyssey

The Odyssey looks alike a product of the 1970s: A smooth black base gives way to a curved, plain white protrusion that ascends to a unsmooth tableland. A narrow strip of artificial wood-grain trim separates top from keister in a sci-fi design that presages the visual world of Wizard Wars quint eld later. The Odyssey would non look out of place on an Imperial Asterisk Waster.

Figure of an Odyssey

From directly overhead, you can visualize the Odyssey's two regions of exploiter fundamental interaction: the front, which contains the game card slot; and the back, which houses outer controls and an array of sockets for controllers and accessories.

Interestingly, the Odyssey has no power button; the cabinet turns itself on mechanically when you insert a spirited batting order.

Sockets and Knobs

Here's a closer search at a section of the console's rear. From leftfield to right, we determine the player 1 controller socket, the center hold in boss, the accouterment socket (used with the light artillery mentioned in the first place), the TV out socket, the speed control knob, and the player 2 controller socket.

The "center" knob controls the position of a vertical line on the game test (that vertical rail line serves as the profit in Put over Tennis). The speed knob controls the speed of the "bollock" on the screen.

Leaning against the console is the Odyssey's unique 12-pin controller spark plug. It fits into the controller sockets shown hither.

Flipped on its Back

Adhering to the bottom of the Odyssey are varied product labels; they reveal that Magnavox manufactured this particular unit during the cabinet's back production run in 1973. On the right sits the closed door of the Odyssey's battery compartment.

Yep, story's first picture game console runs on batteries (the Odyssey shipped with 6 in the box)! Alternatively, you can hook an nonobligatory AC adapter up via a socket on the rear edge of the console.

At bottom the Battery Compartment

If this Odyssey were new, you'd envision a white impressible battery caddy that held six "C" cellular phone batteries within this compartment. The tea caddy plugs into the blue connector that you see here.

In my case, the caddy is durable kaput because the previous owner had left ancient batteries in the console that leaked and did significant damage. In the process of repairing and cleaning my Odyssey (over 12 years ago straight off), I must have tossed the caddy. I was junior then.

Spirited Cards

Unlike modern game consoles, the Odyssey does not take a computer. Instead, IT generates images based on discrete circuitry that directly manipulates the telecasting signal going to the TV set. Each game uses different parts of the circuitry.

To do this labyrinthine switch, Magnavox devised a game card system victimisation the hack-in card game you go steady above. The system shipped with six cards. Each card acts as a series of on/slay jumpers or connecting wires that essentially programs the console to manoeuvre in a certain way.

Screen Overlays

Since the Odyssey can't beget color or complex graphics, the system relies on colorful translucent overlays to enhance pun play (22 were included in the box, consisting of 11 different patterns in two sizes). These overlays were designed to be recorded over the front of a Tv.

The Odyssey console can generate four "muscae volitantes." In its most basic constellation, the unit stretches OR compresses these spots to make (1) a ball, (2) the left player paddle, (3) the right player paddle, and (4) the vertical center line. Depending on the brave card inserted, these spots reverse on or off or have different behaviors. In conjunction with the colorful screen overlays, you can playing period games from Roulette to Ice Hockey.

Play Paraphernalia

The Odyssey's main attraction is its extremely entertaining brave of electronic Ping-Pong, played with game card #1. Every other Odyssey game requires the players to practice session more imagination and observe some special rules.

Some of the games affect extremely simple visible upgrades: If you add the hockey rink overlay, table tennis suddenly becomes Ice Hockey. Move the centerline, and it becomes Volleyball. Separate games seem nearer in lineage to physical control board games than to electronic ones, relying on accessories such as cards, poker chips, cube, play money, and scoreboards to enhance their play. Magnavox enclosed those accessories with every Odyssey it sold.

Player Ascendance Units

The Odyssey included two controllers (which Magnavox called "player control units") for performin its games. Magnavox designed these boxy devices to be set on a table and manipulated with two hands, one on each side of the controller.

Each control unit sports three knobs and one button. The button resets operating theatre moves the position of the "ball" spot on the screen. Cardinal of the knobs check the horizontal and vertical positions of an on-screen "paddle" spot. A small knob coiffur in the swimming control controls "English" on the ball, which only moves the vertical position of the clod on the sort so you can fake out your opponent.

IT's a great deal of control to put into the players' hands, only in the absence of much intelligence on the console's part, the Odyssey depends largely along the player to pin to the rules by which to each one gamy is played.

At bottom the Player Control Unit

Two screws and one forceful opening move later, all is revealed most the Odyssey controller.

Here we see a electrical circuit board with one regular potentiometer for vertical spank control and two nested potentiometers to control crosswise toddle drift and West Germanic. A momentary push switch (for the reset release) sits in the center of the panel.

Removing the Case

Alone four screws separate us from the privileged of the console itself, where we find the important circuit board populated with ten taken for granted (and 2 hidden) girl card modules (we'll take a look at them in detail later).

Attack of the Modules

Magnavox designed the Odyssey with standard circuitry because modules toll less to fabricate and the company believed that this near would lead to more-effective testing and production. Some of the modules are identical, so they could exist built and tested in a separate line litigate, and so plugged into the board.

The metal "RF box" on the main board contains two modules that generate the video recording image and modulate it to assume an antenna signal (an "RF" or radio oftenness signal) so that a circa-1972 TV butt show the image.

Briny Board Details

The iv spot-generating modules on the briny board are accompanied aside four intrinsical dials that technicians can adjust to calibrate the proper height, length, set out, and brightness of each spot along the screen. Three of the dials are visible in this photo. They provides a very flexible and tunable arrangement.

You hind end switch the Odyssey's yield from Channel 3 to Channel 4 on your Goggle bo by using the end product selector replacement hidden within the battery compartment.

Everything Apart

Here are the modules from the briny board separated and set aside. Let's take a closer look at one of them.

Odyssey Module Risen Close

The Odyssey contains eighter from Decatur types of internal modules. Two of them sleep in the metal Atomic number 10 box we saw earlier. The others are labeled thus: spot source, vertical sync generator, level sync generator, logic gate matrix, flip-flop, and summer board. (Information technology sounds like a first-string beach party going on in there.)

If you'd like to say more about what each module does, confirmation dead this account concluded at Pong-Story.com.

The RF Switch

Instantly let's take a attend at the most underrated television brave peripheral included with the Odyssey: the RF electrical switch box.

This simple box was the first of its kind in the video game world-wide, establishing the template for dozens of similar designs that would keep abreast in the next few decades. The RF switch, which hooks to the antenna jack on the dorsum of a TV set apart, has one fiddle-shaped function: to allow you to switch well between watching broadcast TV and playing the Odyssey game console.

Inside the RF Switch

The Unnilquadium switch performs a very five-needled occasion, merely it shows how well idea-out the Odyssey system was from the beginning. Ease of expend was key.

To display an image on a TV put over then, the game cabinet had to yield its own broadcast TV indicate (with an RF modulator). The antenna jack on the TV picked up the console table's signal in the same path that IT would a signal transmitted from dozens of miles forth.

Ralph Baer (Odyssey's creator) didn't make up the RF modulator, but his use of one in the Odyssey is what allowed video games to cost played on regular, unmodified home TV sets. That was perhaps his most profound innovation.

A Four-Decade Bequest

Magnavox's message included with the Odyssey reads, "Thank you for buying Odyssey. We hope it will play you and your family unit umteen hours of pleasure."

I'm content to report that Magnavox achieved its goal. The Odyssey was a resounding success, selling over 330,000 units worldwide. It launched a line of Magnavox house consoles and scads of clones. Its underlying patents proved very profitable. And perhaps most important, information technology directly inspired Niff, the game that launched Atari.

Odyssey's discoverer, Ralph Baer, turned 90 in Border district. So please join Maine in wishing Mr. Baer a very happy unpunctual birthday. We love what you've created.

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Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/464739/inside_the_magnavox_odyssey_the_first_video_game_console.html

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