 Hopefully you are aware of the MB Microvision from 1979, the first handheld system with interchangeable games. But the game cartridges themselves held all the CPU gubbins, the console internally had no brain. The first home system to have programmable ROM cartridges, was the 1976 Fairchild Channel F. Where the first portable (not counting the Entex Adventurevision) to have this was the Japan only, Epoch Game Pocket Computer, released for ¥12,000 ~ £165 in 1984 money. Also known by the contraction Pokekon, not to be mistaken for those Pocket Monsters - Pokemon. Epoch had released their home console 3 years earlier, the 1981 Cassette Vision, which used a NEC uPD77xx chips as the CPU inside the carts, with an 8 colour, 54x62 pixel resolution. The handheld Pokekon, has an updated NEC uPD78c06 CPU @ 6MHz in the console itself, 2KB of RAM, and had a monochrome screen resolution of 75x64. This was 5 years before Nintendo would “portablise” the NES, as the GameBoy. Although the screen has a much lower resolution than the GameBoy, and can only show black or white pixels, no greyscale. It looks sharp with minimal LCD blur, on par with the later GameBoy Pocket screen. Comparatively the 1979 MB Microvison had a resolution of 16x16 pixels, the 1990 Hartung Game Master was 64x64 and the 2003 Timetop GameKing a paltry 48x32. So the 75x64 resolution does not seem so bad now, especially for 1984. The main body is a large angular rectangle you hold in landscape, roughly the height and thickness of a Nintendo GameBoy, with the width of a Sega GameGear. There is a usable circular looking, 8 way Directional Pad on the bottom left of the console face. With four action buttons in a square formation on the bottom right, and Select/Start buttons just above that. Sound is a single channel beeper, reminiscent of a ZX Spectrum, and can be silence by sliding a physical switch across. This is all powered by 4x AA batteries for 30hrs of gameplay, or via the DC power socket on the left side next to the display contrast dial. Turning the Epoch Game Pocket Computer on using the front slider switch, without a cartridge inserted, you access the two built in games. A 11 piece sliding puzzle game, and a graphics drawing application. There is a blank cart supplied to fill the empty space of the cart slot and game label window on the right of the console. Also great for keeping dust out. The cartridges are roughly the physical size of three GameBoy carts stacked upon each other. Five games were released on 8K or 16K carts: Pocket Computer Mahjong, an implementation of the Chinese tile game. Reversi, the strategy board game, of flipping white and black pieces. Sokoban - Store Keepers, the crate pushing-on-to-location-markers, in strangely shaped warehouses puzzle game. Block Maze, where you have to kick balls into place on a grid while also trying to avoid or crush marauding enemies with those balls. Finally there is Astro Bomber, a version of Konami’s hit - Scramble, which plays a beeper rendition of the Star Wars Force theme upon vanquishing a boss enemy. Sadly it failed, who knows why? Maybe it was physically just too big, to be a pocket gaming computer. Asobi Quang DX June 2020 Back |