English

In 1978, the Odyssey2 aka VideoPac was released to stand up to the Atari 2600. The Magnavox Odyssey², known in Europe as the Philips Videopac G7000, in Brazil as the Philips Odyssey, and also by many other names. The Odyssey² sold moderately well in the US. Even without third-party developers, eventually (by 1983) over a million Odyssey² units were sold in the US alone. The Odyssey² followed in the steps of the Fairchild Channel F and Atari 2600 by being designed to play programmable ROM game cartridges.

In Europe and Brazil, the Odyssey² did very well on the market. In Europe, the console was most widely known as the Philips Videopac G7000, or just the Videopac, although branded variants were released in some areas of Europe under the names Radiola Jet 25, Schneider 7000, and Siera G7000. Philips, as Magnavox's European parent company, used their own name rather than Magnavox's for European marketing. The Odyssey² was released in Japan in December 1982 by Kōton Trading Toitarii Enterprise (コートン・トレーディング・トイタリー・エンタープライズ, a division of DINGU company) under the name オデッセイ２ (odessei2). A rare model, the Philips Videopac G7200, was only released in Europe; it had a built-in black-and-white monitor.

One of its most visible features was the addition of a 48-key alphanumeric membrane keyboard which was to be used for educational games, selecting options, or programming. (Philips actually released a game cartridge with the intent of teaching simple computer programming.) List of Videopac Games at slider.com

The Odyssey² was one of the first home video game consoles to introduce what was to become the standard joystick design of the 1970s and 80s: a moderately sized black joystick unit, held in the left hand, with an eight-direction stick that was manipulated with the right hand. In the upper corner of the joystick was a single 'Action' button. 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.

Its internal parts were completely revamped with an 8-bit 8048 Intel CPU at the heart of it all. It was released in Europe by parent company Philips under the name Videopac G7000. Even though it could not beat the 2600 overall, it was successful and managed to sell over 1 million units in North America alone. The Odyssey2 retailed for $200.

Odyssey² / VideoPac G7000 Specifications

Cartridges: 2K address space, 2 bank select inputs for up to 8K bankswitched carts
Sound: Intel 8244 custom Audio/Video IC
24 bit shift register, clockable at 2 frequencies; noice generator
Graphics: Intel 8244 custom Audio/Video IC
Graphics RAM: 256 bytes of video control reigsters
Colors: 16 - Sprites: 4, 8x8 pixel, 1 color
Background Graphics: 9x8 grid of lines or blocks. Each segment individually controllable
28 Character objects from predefined internal character set

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Gallery

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Museums Collection

Our collection includes: Console with detachable external joysticks in Silver, manual (German), powersupply, modules

The console is tested, the controllers work reliable.

Any informations, inputs, contributions, descriptions or anything related to this Game system will be greatly appreciated! Please contact us.

PONG Console Priceguide

Related Links

Odyssey 2 Homepage (e)
wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnavox (e)
vidgame.net/MAGANAVOX (e)
Odyssey 2 Box Art Images (-)
soeren.informationstheater.de (e)
cyberiapc.com (e)
slider.com (e)