Difference between revisions of "First and second generations of video game consoles"

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Revision as of 17:02, 4 March 2016

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the video game market experienced an explosion of products hoping to capitalize on the success of the Odyssey and Atari. From the nigh-infinite Pong clones, to the suspiciously similar consoles, consumers had far more options than they do today. This is a list of those first and second generation machines. Not all of them can be emulated. See also Strange Console emulators, a similar page for 90s and 2000s.

Pong Consoles

It's Pong. You can play it anywhere. Emulating first generation systems like these can be tricky, as the games were heavily tied to their hardware, and most were just variations of Pong.

  • Colorsport VIII
  • Radio Shack TV Scoreboard
  • Wonder Wizard
  • Sears Tele-Games
  • Ricochet
  • TV4 Four Way Video Game

Coleco Telstar Arcade

Only 4 cartridges were released for this triangular abomination, but the console's design means that they can't be dumped and "emulated." They're more like activation discs for data already in the console. No known emulators.

Cartridge Consoles

Name MESS support No-intro collection Description
APF Imagination Machine/MP1000 Good A PC with a game console mounted on top of it 32X-style (take that, master race!) Only 15 games were released, one being built-in. ROMs are here.
Arcadia 2001 Decent
Bally Astrocade Good ROMs are here
Bandai Super Vision 8000 Good Only 7 games. ROMs can be played on archive.org
Entex Adventure Vision Decent Like the Vectrex, this console had it's own screen and operated like a miniature arcade cabinet. Only four games were released for it.
Epoch Cassette Vision None Only 11 games exist for this console, and none have been dumped because of the cartridge design. Apparently the BIOS for the console is inside each cart. It's on MESS's to-do list.
Super Cassette Vision Decent 1984 successor to the original Cassette Vision. Much easier to emulate as the hardware is similar to some other obscure systems. The graphical quality is some where between the ColecoVision and NES. Was actually fairly successful in Japan until the Famicom came along and kicked it's ass. Then this happened.
Fairchild Channel F Good
Fairchild Channel F II Good NA An update to the Channel F, with no exclusive games.
Intellivision II Good NA An update to the Intellivision, with no exclusive games.
Magnavox Odyssey² Good
RCA Studio II Decent
VC 4000 Decent Has 40 games. ROMs are here
VTech CreatiVision Good

Handhelds

Name MESS support No intro collection Description
Game and Watch None Many of the 60 Game and Watch games can be played in the various Game and Watch collections. Just emulate those. If you do not mind playing online, many Game and Watch games, including some not found in the collections, can be played here. Another option would be running simulators through the gw-libretro core in Libretro.
Milton Bradley MicroVision Preliminary 12 games were made. They're dumped, but uploads are not available.