Odyssey 5000

[Dastari Creel]

So as I've gone about tracking my other White Whale, I happened to open my new book Phoenix IV by Leonard Herman. There on Page 58 I was confronted with this.

 

It looks like there wasn't only one picture of the Odyssey 5000 out there. Makes me wonder where Mr Herman found this one.

[rolenta]

I got it from an ad sheet that David Winter sent me. By the way, what do you think of the book? I haven't received the hardcover edition yet.

 

PS: It's actually on page 38

Edited July 19, 2017 by rolenta

[Dastari Creel]

I got it from an ad sheet that David Winter sent me. By the way, what do you think of the book? I haven't received the hardcover edition yet.

 

PS: It's actually on page 38

 

Yeah, that's a simple typo from writing this up so late at night. It's interesting because around these parts it was long thought that a single Odyssey 5000 image existed from a trade journal that Pboland dug up. It was black and white and fairly grainy. This is a pretty nice find.

 

I haven't read the book too deeply yet. I just flicked through the pages. It's beautifully illustrated.

 

I do have to say that your original version of Phoenix is what inspired me to start looking into video game history. You do such a fantastic overview of the whole subject, but there are so many rabbit holes to tunnel down and get really specific on the details of what happened and when.

 

Out of curiosity, do you know where the Magnavox Odyssey systems were manufactured? I'm my own attempts to look into the history of video gaming I'd love to find people who worked on the original Odyssey whether that was in manufacturing, engineering, marketing, sales, etc.

 

Anyway, appreciate the work that you do for the community.

[Dastari Creel]

Since I don't want to host that particular picture on my own website, I'm going to upload it here, so eventually the picture from my first post will disappear. Just look at this one instead.

[rolenta]

Sorry, can't help you with this one. David Winter may know.

 

Out of curiosity, do you know where the Magnavox Odyssey systems were manufactured? I'm my own attempts to look into the history of video gaming I'd love to find people who worked on the original Odyssey whether that was in manufacturing, engineering, marketing, sales, etc.

 

[Dastari Creel]

Well, everyone, thanks to Leonard Herman we now have an actual Odyssey 5000 flier to drool over. I really cannot express enough gratitude for this.

 

 

[BassGuitari]

Hot damn!

Never thought something like that would ever turn up!

[onmode-ky]

The Odyssey 5000 is outside the scope of my own plug-n-play games research, but this is a really remarkable find. There's a decent amount of info on the Internet about the rest of the Odyssey series, and there has been for some time, so it's kind of amazing that info on the 5000 has remained so deep in the underbrush, escaping the eyes of the Odyssey fan community for all these years. It's good to finally have a very solid look at what it was planned to be.

 

onmode-ky

[+pboland]

Well, everyone, thanks to Leonard Herman we now have an actual Odyssey 5000 flier to drool over. I really cannot express enough gratitude for this.

 

20270028_10159046467530203_41547530_n.jpg

 

20269804_10159046467905203_1938977985_n.jpg

 

WOW! That is a awesome find.

 

Now I want one more than ever.

[Dastari Creel]

The Odyssey 5000 is outside the scope of my own plug-n-play games research, but this is a really remarkable find. There's a decent amount of info on the Internet about the rest of the Odyssey series, and there has been for some time, so it's kind of amazing that info on the 5000 has remained so deep in the underbrush, escaping the eyes of the Odyssey fan community for all these years. It's good to finally have a very solid look at what it was planned to be.

 

onmode-ky

 

Except that, I don't think that there's really all that much information on the internet about the Odyssey series. There's a ton online about the original Odyssey, but the 100 - 5000 are fairly obscure. People have detailed their differences in playability, but their hardware specs, marketing history, or engineering history aren't well recorded. Even with the original Odyssey almost everything that we know comes from Ralph Baer, someone who was mostly shut out of the process once Magnavox got the license to design the system on their own. There is so very much left to learn about the history of this entire line.

[+pboland]

On 8/2/2017 at 10:45 PM, Dastari Creel said:

 

Except that, I don't think that there's really all that much information on the internet about the Odyssey series. There's a ton online about the original Odyssey, but the 100 - 5000 are fairly obscure. People have detailed their differences in playability, but their hardware specs, marketing history, or engineering history aren't well recorded. Even with the original Odyssey almost everything that we know comes from Ralph Baer, someone who was mostly shut out of the process once Magnavox got the license to design the system on their own. There is so very much left to learn about the history of this entire line.

I know I'm bumping an old topic, but I was looking at a book I have called "How to Repair Video Games" by Robert Goodman (from 1978). I was thinking of scanning it and decided to do a search to see if it has already been done. And it has. Here's the link: https://archive.org/details/how-to-repair-video-games-robert-goodman/mode/2up

 

I was trying to find out what was used as the game chip for the 5000. Unfortunately, this book stops at the 4000. I'm putting this link here because it has some really good technical info in it on many (not all) Odyssey units. Including the original Odyssey and 100-500 (I think) & the 4000.

[BassGuitari]

On 4/26/2024 at 2:31 PM, pboland said:

I was trying to find out what was used as the game chip for the 5000. Unfortunately, this book stops at the 4000. I'm putting this link here because it has some really good technical info in it on many (not all) Odyssey units. Including the original Odyssey and 100-500 (I think) & the 4000.

Doing some digging around on this, I found this post from our very own @slydc  from 2010 that you may find helpful:

 

As for the Odyssey 5000, here's what i know:

 

It had x2 dedicated chips inside, one made by National Semiconductors called the MM57106 and another

one by Signetics called the CR861 (aka MUGS-1). The MM57106 has 7 games in color which with variations,

gave a total of 23 games. This chip has never been released here in the U.S. but was released in Japan

and in Europe (called the MM57186). Philips used the MM57186 in their Odyssey 2100 (color display) and

Videojeu N30 (black & white display). As for the CR861, it only had two games (x1 helicopter game and

x1 tank game), which the tank game is featured in your picture you scanned from a unknown magazine

(would appreciate to know which magazine you've find the picture  ).

 

So the Odyssey 5000 had 9 games but with variations totaled 25 games all in color. Also, Ralph H. Baer

worked on the Odyssey 5000 between the 8 & 9th of September 1977. He was later informed (September 19th

1977) that Magnavox management finally decided to proceed with the Intel 8048 processor (the CPU of the

Odyssey 2) and scrap the Odyssey 5000.

 

For the helicopter game, you can see a screenshot in the book "Video Games" by Len Buckwalter (page 84 -

Fig. 8-3 "Battling Helicopters"). It is still unknown if the Signetics CR861 still exists somewhere but they

did manufactured a bunch of them. Oh and if you didn't know this, Signetics was brought by Philips in 1975

and Magnavox was owned by Philips. So here you have it, that's all the information i have regarding

the Magnavox Odyssey 5000.

 

P.S. What i would give to see the CR861 in action!! Sigh...

 

--- Sly DC ---

 

 

So the really juicy part of the Odyssey 5000--the Battlefield and Helicopter games--would have been the MUGS-1/CR861 chip, which unfortunately doesn't appear to have been used in any console that ever made it to market. Or in anything other than Odyssey 5000 at all, for that matter. Judging from the mockup screens, I'd surmise that the gameplay of the two games would have been essentially the same, with destructible barrier blocks (borrowed from the MM57106/86's Knockout game?), object shapes, background color, and possibly axes of movement (Y only vs. X+Y?) being the only differences. I also suspect that the tanks and helicopters would have simply been re-shaped paddle sprites and would respond to the analog joysticks accordingly, which would make for some unexpectedly nimble tanks! 😆 

 

What else is interesting, though, is that, based on screen mockups from the Odyssey 5000 brochure posted above, Odyssey 2100 and 5000 would have had some completely different ball-and-paddle games despite sharing the MM57106/86. Which suggests that the Odyssey 5000 screen mockups are either poor/underinformed representations of the MM57106/86 game series, or that the Odyssey 5000 would have actually used something else... 🤨 

 

Edited May 14 by BassGuitari