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A Look Back: Magnavox Odyssey²

Posted December 27, 2006 6:50 AM

From TechEBlog:

Released in 1978, the Magnavox Odyssey² "followed in the steps of the Fairchild Channel F and Atari 2600 by being designed to play programmable ROM game cartridges." One of the strongest points of the system was its excellent speech synthesis unit, which was released as an add-on for speech, music, and sound effects enhancement. The area that the Odyssey² may be best remembered for was its pioneering fusion of board and video games. Unlike any other system at that time, the Odyssey² included a full alphanumeric membrane keyboard, which was to be used for educational games, selecting options, or programming

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Anonymous Poster
#1

Re: A Look Back: Magnavox Odyssey²

12/27/2006 11:11 PM

I still have a working Odyssey2. I always thought its games were much better than Atari, and when the voice module came out -- What an enhancement!!! It wasn't untill the PC started using sound cards for thier speech and sound that that little machine was even matched in sound and game quality! (Sorry C64 fans) There is sitll a web site deticated to the Odyssey2 www.odyssey2.classicgaming.gamespy.com/index.php. If there are any fans out there, I'd love to here from you marple.jl@lycos.com. Please put "Odyssey" for the subject or your mail may get deleted.

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#2

Re: A Look Back: Magnavox Odyssey²

12/28/2006 9:29 PM

Never had an Odyssey, but I still have an Atari 2600 out in the garage, and a Nintendo... Back in the late '70s one of the uP manufacturers proclaimed that the 6502 processor was the biggest selling processor of all. Know why?? Because each of the Atari's had one... and they were selling by the gazillions. But that was another time and another place. It is still amazing what those games could do.

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