DoctorSpuds Reviews Things

I suppose it depends a little how and which era you consider. The Odyssey^2 a.k.a. Videopac G7000 indeed was early with a keyboard in order to make it look more than a video games console. About 3-4 years later, VTech did the same with the CreatiVision which is usually referred to as a video game/computer hybrid. It has optional expansion for both tape recorder, better keyboard, various interfaces for serial/parallel port and its BASIC cartridge actually runs on the built-in hardware, as opposed to e.g. the Videopac BASIC which has its own Z80 CPU and RAM on the cartridge due to the original hardware wasn't powerful enough to implement a BASIC environment. There may be others in the borderland, though most of the others you needed to expand it with keyboard etc as you note.

I suppose it depends a little how and which era you consider. The Odyssey^2 a.k.a. Videopac G7000 indeed was early with a keyboard in order to make it look more than a video games console. About 3-4 years later, VTech did the same with the CreatiVision which is usually referred to as a video game/computer hybrid. It has optional expansion for both tape recorder, better keyboard, various interfaces for serial/parallel port and its BASIC cartridge actually runs on the built-in hardware, as opposed to e.g. the Videopac BASIC which has its own Z80 CPU and RAM on the cartridge due to the original hardware wasn't powerful enough to implement a BASIC environment. There may be others in the borderland, though most of the others you needed to expand it with keyboard etc as you note.

 

I get the feeling putting a Z80 cpu in every? cartridge + RAM wasn't very cost effective, and people these days think games are expensive (one quick google search later)... Hol' up Z80's could go up to 2.5 MHz wheres the C64's MOS 6510/8500 could only go up to 1.023 MHz, I guess RAM makes all the difference, unless the Z80's were used more like flash memory than an actual CPU. Hmmm I'm confusing myself.

The voice effects in this game are terrifying, lol.

Clock frequency is rather irrelevant when comparing two different architectures. The 6502B in the Atari 8-bits were clocked to 1.70 MHz or so, and there were variants up to 2 MHz as well. The Z80 could be anything from 2 to 4 MHz and later on even higher. As a rule of thumb, it is said that an 1 MHz 6502 gets as much computation done as a 3 MHz Z80, though it differs slightly depending on how the code is written.

 

I don't remember how expensive the BASIC cartridge for the G7000 (or was that even limited to the G7400 a.k.a. Videopac+ ?) but given it arrived late and in the middle of the home computer wars, it couldn't be overly expensive as existing customers would have considered getting a brand new computer instead of upgrading their console to become one.

 

Edit: Yup, it was only for the Videopac+ and released in 1983. http://www.cyberroach.com/vidpac/vidhard/new_vid_c7420.htm