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Milton Bradley MBX Resources, Manuals, Materials, and History


pixelpedant

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On 2/7/2021 at 1:31 PM, TeddyBear89 said:

Just a "thank you" to all who contributed to this thread.  I came across Bigfoot today on Ebay, got intrigued, started wondering what in the hell a MBX was and finally found this thread.  Knowing that having a MBX is not a requirement to play this game was very helpful.

 

Cart will be on its way, manual is already printed and I do have a speech synthesizer .........

Just a "this game is freakin' sweet" comment.......This game is an example (of many) of how enjoyable this hobby of 1980's retro gaming can be.  The crow on level 3 is starting to piss me off but otherwise I am thoroughly enjoying this recent purchase.  And again, props for this very informative thread.  I initially thought that I could not play Bigfoot without the MBX set up.

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  • 2 years later...

Does anyone have any technical information on anything to do with the MBX, such as Joystick pinouts of the MBX controllers?  I'm repairing one and it's a little vexing that while the buttons work, I do not see any lines being brought out on the DB9 connector for the buttons - all I can buzz out with my meter is +5V, Common, XPOT, YPOT, ZPOT.  There's one that has no pin, so it's NC.  There are 4 pins leftover, perfect number for the buttons, but no lines for them.  Anyone have a clue how this works?

 

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I kind of doubt there's any surviving manufacturer documentation on the joystick interface, though someone may have worked it out by experimentation at some point.  However, otherwise of interest when it comes to documentation on the machine (as a computer per se), here's a product sheet for the GI SP1000 speech synth/recognition chip used by the MBX:

 

sp1000-sheet.pdf

 

Interfacing with the 6809 is addressed as an option there, and this is what is used on the MBX. 

 

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  • 3 months later...

Necroing this because i came across a cool post by Justin Forsell on Facebook whose dad was manager at a model shop at Milton Bradley's Advanced R&D department.  There's some really cool pictures I think you guys would like.

 

Quote
I guarantee nobody here has seen this before and hoping someone thinks it's interesting...the Milton Bradley Electronics Video Entertainment System, in prototype form.
I don't see any controllers, just carts, and I don't know how far they went with this. My guess is this is sometime before 1982 because it was taken at their small State St. facility in Springfield, MA before everything moved to Shaker Rd in East Longmeadow.
My father was a manager of the model shop at MB's advanced research & development dept. from the late 70s til early 90s. I found these photos a few years ago after a water heater in our cellar burst and I was cleaning things up (you can actually see the water on some of the photos here, and they were stuck together, sadly)

May be an image of controller, video games and textMay be an image of textMay be an image of ticket stub and textNo photo description available.May be an image of text

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Under careful examination of the pic, indeed it does look like “Meteor Belt”. Similar buttons to the MBX too, like Yes, No, Go. This is the VCS that was scrapped because MB believed there was too much competition. But then it was revived and reconfigured to work with the popular TI-99/4A! Sadly months later TI pulled out of the market. Amazing pictures!

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18 minutes ago, horizon2374 said:

Under careful examination of the pic, indeed it does look like “Meteor Belt”. Similar buttons to the MBX too, like Yes, No, Go. This is the VCS that was scrapped because MB believed there was too much competition. But then it was revived and reconfigured to work with the popular TI-99/4A! Sadly months later TI pulled out of the market. Amazing pictures!

That was the Gemini that was pictured earlier that became the MBX which was scrapped and became the MBX. This could have been an earlier version the Gemini possibly. The Gemini has some other titles that you might recognize, like Bigfoot, Turtle Maze, Baseball, etc. However, this could have been an even earlier incarnation of that. I also have to wonder if this could also be a toy and not an actual video game unit, but one made to look like one for kids to play with. I only say that since the unit seems very thin as do the carts (and there's not much room for electronics when you see it with the keyboard removed), and the carts store nicely inside and its made for 4 which seem like that would be the complete set.

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5 hours ago, pixelpedant said:

Now that I look at the image sources, it appears they're being directly served by Facebook.  So that makes sense now.  As I outright block Meta's cross-site content.  Though I don't know if Facebook allows cross-site image embedding regardless. 

I don't have them blocked, but I also only see the weird text descriptions when using Firefox (but not when using Edge). It may be a side effect of one of my Firefox extensions though, and I can live with that. . .

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1 hour ago, Ksarul said:

I don't have them blocked, but I also only see the weird text descriptions when using Firefox (but not when using Edge). It may be a side effect of one of my Firefox extensions though, and I can live with that. . .

Trying not to pull this off-topic too much, I suspect Facebook only allows a certain amount of off-site traffic.  BITD, and many services do this in a more complex manner, we used to block outside linkage by examining the http "Referer:" header.

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