When I designed an adapter to use a 32k EEPROM in a C64. All electronics I needed sandwiched between two IC sockets.

Best thing about that game was the intro. We ran the GB song for ages while playing cards.

Gone are the days when a game delivered on seven floppy disks was considered “overblown”.

Unlikely. It is spelled “Colour” on the box, implying this would be for the UK market.

You’re welcome!

It basically tells you that you can basically tone the “colourness” (i.e. the brightness of the colours) up and down, which was a normal control (like brightness and contrast) back then. This is not about being able to make a red playing field green by some setting on the TV. You just had some potentiometers to play with the pre-amplification of the luminance and colour signals.

What could be in the instructions would an explanation of the games telling you that e.g. the playing field is green and the ball is red or somesuch, then they actually did a (rare) “colour implementation” of the circuit.

If you are interested, there is a number of interesting documentations on this pong chip on the net.

I wonder about the “Colour”. Did they actually use the different video outputs of the AY-3-8500 chip for controlling different colour signals instead just joining them as a luminance signal?

For those too young to know: The AY-3-8500 (or AY-3-8500-1 fo NTSC) chip is at the heart of almost all of those pong-type consoles. It has a number of different (but synchronized) video outputs for left player, right player, ball, numbers, and playing field, and most consoles just or’ed them together into luminance (Y) to make a simple B&W image. You could route some signals to the R-Y and/or the B-Y signal to give them some basic color, e.g. if you sent the “ball” signal both to the luminance and the red (R-Y) channel, you would get a red ball. All this needs are a handful of simple logic gates.

Probably. Even including the RAM on chip and the rest of the mainboard, too. Take a modern flash chip, and you can emulate a vintage sized HDD with it.

What is their intended market? I see no real use for such a box. Heck, even Linux will probably come to a crawl on that box. And you can probably build something ARM based for the same price with eight gigabytes of RAM and running circles around the 386.

Have fun with your half-brick or whatever you’ll get in the package.