Ahhhhhhhhh, yes.
A 1990s Index catalogue.
I'd often flick through these pages, spying all the treasures, just like a peasant staring
through the Windows of the King's castle, in wonder, awe, sometimes even disbelief.
Many products would of course receive a circle, maybe a tick to show both my respect and desire
for the said item.
But other products, never received a circle directly.
Instead, I'd look upon them with a sense of incredulous intrigue.
The Systema TV Boy II was one of those products.
I'm not sure if you pronounce that SystemA or System-a or Sys-tema to be honest, Systema
makes the most sense, but I have seen it written with a capital A at the end.
ANYWAY....What the hell was this?
There's me splashing out £30 odd quid for the latest Master System game like an absolute
sucker, when for the same price I could grab this thing, with 126 built in games!
But my instincts served me well.
Either this thing was lying, or those games were utter, utter dog turd.
Time went on, and I forgot about the TV Boy II.
Until I saw it again for a third of its original retail price on eBay and decided the buy the
bastard, just to see what was going on with it.
Look at that packaging.
It's wondrous.
Boasting that same claim of 126 Games on the front, along with some screen shots, which
don't look THAT bad, although they do look a little familiar.
The rear of the box lists each game for our perusal, and although most of these games
seem new, albeit somewhat familiar, there is the odd recognisable name among them.
The front of the box has a flap which can be lifted to unveil the glorious prize.
I mean, if not for anything else, this packaging was done right.
I would have snapped this up had I seen it in the wild.
Inside is a lead.
It's an RF lead, and it's quite long.
There's also an instruction book.
It tells us;
"TV Boy offers 126 exciting retro games in full colour graphics with multi-directional
control and action button.
The games vary in difficulty and offer anything from a battle with SPACE INVADERS to a round
of gold.
Individual game instructions are not provided, however the games are quite easy to understand
and play... with practice.
Please note Game 91 is a factory test game and will not operate correctly on a home TV."
Well, you can be sure that's the first game I'll be loading up then.
Let's have a look at some games and their descriptions.
See if you can work out what their real names are supposed to be.
So, Pacmania: Avoid the Ravenous Ghost and Devour the MAXIMUM Dots.
The Birds: When they Attack.
KILL THEM!
Pinball: Apparently that needs no description.
It's pretty strange some of these are in bold, whilst others aren't.
No idea why that is.
The Gardener: Fill up the Mole's Warren Before They Eat Your Vegetables!
Christ.
You can see whoever wrote this got bored as they went along.
Lost Ships: Space Journey Fly in the Sky: Avoid the Wind Turbines
The Flying Man: Catch the Bandits.
The unit itself is a chubby oval plastic thing.
It's got one fire button, a wobbly D-Pad an Select, Start and Reset switches.
On the top we've got a coaxial out, power switch and a 6V DC in.
Handily it can also run off batteries, so let's pop some Industrial standard JCB cells
into the rear.
The power light turns on, so all looks promising.
I'm going to run this thing through a modern LCD TV to start with, just to get an idea
of the picture quality.
As it's running through RF, I'll need to tune the TV in, which Blue Peter style, I've already
done.
Now, actually, the picture is pretty clear, and defined.
I'm impressed, especially for RF modulation.
You get the odd interference pattern if you move the cord about, but that's to be expected.
What I'm less impressed with is that music.
Good god.
It sounds like a Master System in horrendous pain.
Why won't it stop.
Oh, that's better.
So.
GAME 91.. and, it's actually Defender, otherwise known as Protection....
If you look at the original TV Boy, this is actually listed on the box and manual.
I'm not sure if the reason they decided to call it a "Test Game" was because it does
seem to ball up occasionally, or because they genuinely used this for testing.
Sometimes it'll play fine for a good few minutes, other times, you'll get reset back to the
start.
You can also cycle through something using the Select button, which changes the background
colours....Interesting.
Looks like a case of poor implementation, or perhaps, a dodgy hack.
Let's pair this thing with a more suitable visual output.
Now, aside from the music.
This menu system is arse.
You have to manually scroll through each digit to get the game you want.
There's no on screen indication of what the game is at all.
But lets try some other titles.
No doubt you've already twigged, but if not, it's clear that these are all Atari 2600 games.
Unlicensed ones at that, which seems strange given that this thing was sold in high street
retailers in various countries, including the UK.
You can see that whilst most of these titles are recognisable, they've removed the titles
and copyright messages where they could.
But yet it's strange how the better known ones still retain theirs, in all their glory.
I'm not sure if the creators assumed that because these games were so well known, copyright
didn't apply, or what?
I have absolutely no idea.
I tried to call the Systema Help Line in the manual to find out more, but unfortunately
the number no longer seems to be in service.
Systema of course, responsible for making many a cheap LCD type game in the 90s, but
very much a legitimate company.
It shows you just how much game copyright has changed since then, unless of course we're
talking AliExpress or Wish.com, then nothing has changed what-so-ever.
Anyway, let's run through a few titles;
The first game on the list is Desert Strike, and unfortunately, it's not THAT Desert Strike.
No, this is actually Chopper Command, released in 1982 by Activision.
It's perfectly playable.
Really, it's a lot like playing a 2600, but without wrist breakingly stiff joysticks,
which is refreshing.
Here's River Raid, otherwise known as....errr...
River Raid.
It boggles me whey they change some names but not others.
Pacman is now Pacmania... because, that's gonna fool them isn't it?
Use the name of a Pacman sequel.
Atari will be so confused, they won't know what's hit them.
But to be fair, the Atari Games division entity was at this point, mostly sitting dormant
under Time Warner, and they had bigger fish to fry than some "retro games" from 10 years
ago.
I mean, who gave a crap about that?!
No one else was interested in these ancient games back then; Retro gaming wasn't really
a significant market.
People were instead consumed by future possibilities, by the Mega Drive, the Super Nintendo and
whatever super consoles lay in wait.
Anyway, Pacman on the 2600 is notoriously shi*e.
Given there are 126 games on here, you're bound to find some you enjoy.
I mean, the 2600 games library had some absolute corkers.
It also had some absolute stinkers, but for £30, this wasn't actually too bad a deal
back in the early 90s.
It would have made a great entertainment device for the younger members of the household.
That long coaxial lead is also a nice touch.
It means this thing can be played comfortably on the softa, or even sitting on your bed,
with your 14" portable telly stuck over the other side of the room.
Pressing the reset button will take you back to the built in menu.
Start will start a new instance of the game you're currently playing and select will sometimes
pause proceedings.
The controls are responsive.
Overall, it's alright.
Other people must have agreed it was alright too, especially as this is the TV Boy 2, which
itself received two further sequels, in the form of the TV Boy III and the Super TV Boy.
Yep, we've got our own little lineage of 1990s knock off Atari 2600 consoles here.
The original TV Boy came out in 1992, and actually allowed simultaneous 2 player gaming
via.
2 standard 9 pin joystick ports.
It's almost an actual 2600, just without the ability to insert cartridges.
126 seems a good amount, but let's not forget the 2600 has a library of over 500 titles.
This variant, the TV Boy II, appeared in 1993, lacking the ability for 2 players, but wielding
a simplified board design to save costs.
We'll take a look at that in a second.
TV Boy 3 from 1994, featured a "MODERN" controller, which may not be to everyone's taste, and
the Super TV Boy, released in 1995, looked more like an actual console.
But really, other than aesthetic changes, these consoles all contain the same games,
bar the odd variation, and offer the same experience.
Some versions of the TV Boy II distributed in Europe also seem to have a composite out
instead of RF, and you could even get versions of the original with a plug in antenna, allowing
wireless broadcasting to your TV set.
Although you'd probably need an indoor aerial to pick up the weak signal - I doubt this
signal would extend to your average roof top aerial.
These consoles were all manufactured in China and distributed by NICS in North America,
SystemA in the UK and Akor for Europe.
There also appears to be a Japanese version, which looks very different, and even comes
with a plug-in cartridge.
Alright, let's open this bessie up and see what secrets she holds.
It's all a bit sparse really.
We've got the modulator to the top right there, and almost everything else is housed under
this shielding block, which is actually soldered to the board.
But under there you'll actually gind a MOS Technology 6507 CPU, a Stella chip - the same
responsible for the 2600s graphics and sound, a 512KB ROM and 128 bytes of RAM.
The games are simply then bank switched into RAM when necessary.
When you press the Reset button the memory is reset, the menu is loaded again from ROM
and we start again.
Pretty simple stuff, but as is often the case, simple works.
So there we have it.
The Systema TV Boy.
A piece of 1990s history, which is actually probably more relevant today than it was back
in the 90s.
It's strange how these things work out.
If you fancy grabbing one yourself, check out eBay, there's usually loads of the little
mites on there for about a tenner each.
Thanks for watching.