Dastari Creel

APF is one of those companies that have intrigued me in my investigations. I have a 401, but I'd really like to get my hands on a few of the others like the 500.

Every little bit helps, and I have to start somewhere. I'm hoping to find more service manuals. I have almost all of the Magnavox ones, and I've found a few Radio Shack TV scoreboard ones, but would like to compile as much of that data as possible for anyone who's looking to work on old systems.

Oh, I understand that I can probably figure it out given time. I'm just trying to collect all the manuals and service manuals that i can find to compile on my video game archive, in the hopes of creating a one-stop shop for this kind of information and to make it easier for people who ever do need to do repairs or mod projects. There's a lot of information out there, but people have to search for it, which is completely unnecessary IMHO.

As soon as The Video Game Archive, my new website, goes online it will be there and I'll post a link. The main URL will be vgarchive.com. I plan on trying to compile as much information about every game and system that I can find and placing it there. The idea is to have a one-stop shop for interviews, manuals, schematics, news articles, etc. I'm prioritizing the earliest consoles because that's where we have the greatest potential to lose knowledge with aging documents and aging personnel who worked on them. Now, the real question is if I can find any people who haven't been interviewed yet about the Odyssey. I'm starting to cast my net and we'll see what I pull in.

So out of curiosity for those of you who received this, what game card does it use?

I have an interview with Don Emry set up for tomorrow. He developed the four 1973 games for the original Magnavox Odyssey and was a tech writer for some of the game manuals. As far as I know he has only been interviewed one time back in 2004. You can find that interview here: http://www.digitpress.com/library/interviews/interview_don_emry.html I think that interview left out a lot of questions, but I wanted to throw things open to the community to see what questions all of you have, and I'll add them to my list.

Wanted: Odyssey2 The Voice. I'd like for it to be tested. My preference would be for it to come with the manual and even better if it had the box. I realize that's fairly rare, since these were meant to be permanent add-ons to the Odyssey2, but wanted to know if anyone had one to sell.

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.

Does anyone know if there's a resource for user's manuals or service manuals for the above? I'm looking for the service manual for the APF Model 401 and the User's Manual & Service manual for the Radio Shack 80-3056. I don't care about physical copies. Something digital would be fine.

I'll send you a PM, but what I consider CiB is that the console comes with the box, the instruction manual, and the rf switch. I also want them to be functional.

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.

No extra conversion is required to make the signals match? That's the easiest thing out there then.

Most of the systems of the 70's and early 80's used a type of banana lead plug to go to an RF switch. Then you'd just connect the RF switch to the TV by screwing in the dual-lead attachments. Now, there are baluns now that allow you to convert that dual lead attachment to standard coax, but is there any way to cut out the middle man and just convert straight from the banana lead to coax? I don't need a switchbox because there's nothing connected to the coax of my TV, so this would be better for me. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

The title says it all. If you have one of the above for sale let me know. Oh and if anyone has an original Odyssey 1TL200 (any version) that they're selling let me know that as well. That one does NOT have to be CiB. I already have one for my collection, but I want one for some mod projects that I'm working on. So I'd like functional, but doesn't need to have all or any game pieces or even all of the controllers with it.

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.

I'm not sure if I'm just incredibly dense, but how do I upload pictures to the site? I understand that I can provide a link to an offline source, but apparently there's a way to upload directly, and I want to know how to do that.

Done. Thanks!

I've been offline for a while and only just returned a month or so ago. I've tried to renew my subscription, but the page keeps telling me that there's an invoice that's expired and I can't purchase the subscription again. It also told me to contant an administrator. I sent an e-mail to the address it listed back on July 6, and I still haven't received a reply. Is there any way to fix this?

I understand that, but it's important if I'm going to write about these to try a large enough sample size, so that's what I'm going to do. The input from the people on the board should direct me to the best ones.

I'm interested in people's thoughts. First off, which of the many Pong variants is your favorite? Secondly, what is your favorite dedicated system of the 70's/80's overall? I've made it two different questions because not every dedicated system was a Pong variant. If the two questions have the same answer than only give it once, but if you have two different answers then I'd like to know. Because they survived into the 2nd generation, I'm definitely going to check out Magnavox's, Coleco's, Atari's, and APF's output but I'd like to know if there were any other interesting game systems out there that I should check out either because they were especially fun or had some unique feature that made them interesting. I appreciate the help.

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.

Ended up finding the 4305 schematic under T991-20-AA. I'm not sure where the 4305 number comes from, but this is apparently how Magnavox recorded its model. That's opposed to all the other T991 model TV's. I ended up getting two service manuals, one for all their other T991 models and one for the T991-20-AA. The second one was the one with the built-in Odyssey. Thank you Sly for tipping me off on the T991 model number. So now the Odyssey 4000 is the only one I'm missing (unless a 5000 prototype schematic exists), but I could really use a higher quality 300.

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.