MB OMNI Entertainment System - The 1980s 8-Track games machine.

in today's video I'm going to be doing something a little bit unusual you see I don't normally cover games but for this device I'll make an exception it's an electronic game from 1980 that uses 8-track cartridges and it's called the Omni entertainment system now I don't believe they ever sold this here in the UK I've imported this won´t from the US via eBay and recently I've also managed to get hold of some extra cartridges for it so let's take a good look at it at the time the Omni was released it cost $119 99 I've got a page out of the Sears catalog here you can also see on the right how much the additional cartridges cost $11 99 now if we look at the other things are in the catalog at the same time you can see the rest of the games are quite basic led-based electronic games a chess set there as well which cost a little bit more than the Omni but let's go back to that price again one hundred and $19 $99 up to the current date that's three hundred and seventy seven dollars and seventy cents the Omni was released on the milton bradley's mb electronics label that trademark was first applied for in 1978 and first used in 1979 and expired in 2000 but roundabout 1979 1980 Milton Bradley did introduce got a few different electronic devices to the market people around my age will remember the big track Simon and the Microvision but if you look on the Wikipedia page for MB and look under their electronic devices you'll see no mention made of the Omni it seems like this is one of those forgotten products so let's put that right in this video and I'll explain to you exactly what it is and how it works it's an electronic quiz machine that asks questions contained on 8-track cartridges it'll play the tape on the cartridge with the question on it and then one to four players can enter their answers on the keyboard in front of them and the Machine keeps a score of who answered the questions correctly who answered it first and displays it on a little LED screen inference of each player you can see on the back of the box here there's a number of different cartridges that are available for the machine at the time and they each work in a slightly different way to do with the scoring and various other things I'll show you that later on now recently I've been fortunate enough to acquire some additional cartridges for my machine but when I first got hold of it it just came with this one this is the cartridge that came inside the box when you first bought it is the variety programmed game cartridge it contains four different games which are really samplers in a way of the other cartridges in the range because I was wrong repeated out into full cartridges such as Vincent prices movie trivia where mr. price ask the questions jeopardy of course based on the u.s. game show as well as password plus another game show base cartridge and then I've got a couple of other ones that aren't really licensed I suppose we've got the music quiz which you must be sharp to win and words words words which has great unabridged fun so if you'd bought all these cartridges together with the machine itself back in 1980 that would have been some considerable investment I've got to say it wasn't particularly cheap nowadays especially when you add on those import duties but let's have a look at the machine in a little bit more detail so you can see we've got the keyboard each side for up to four players but you don't have to have four you can play with just one person if you want if you don't have any friends we've got the keyboard across the bottom here you can see we got numbers we got colors and we got letters across the top the games would use those in different ways it depends which game you're playing so some games would want you to type in the answer as a word some will want you to select from a multiple choice once a force and we'll say true or false which would be one or two you've also got a go key it one into the keyboard and an Enter key the other and I've imagined the Sesame Street cartridge would probably use those colors along the top in the middle of the Machine there's a speaker a volume control and a channel selector which goes from one to four that's how you choose the program that you want to play off the cartridge the packing cartridge remember has four different kinds of quiz on there so you choose which one you want to play by dialing that around to the appropriate number above each player is a two-digit LED display which has multiple functions it'll show the score that's just been obtained on the last question every day and then it'll show the total score for that player it will also provide prompts as to the fact that you need to end something on the keyboard before you can continue the machine uses normal 8-track cartridges there's nothing unusual at all about the cartridge it's more about what's contained on the tape in fact the machine can even play back normal music 8 tracks but if you don't know anything about an 8-track cartridge I managed to find an old video here which will explain them in a little bit more detail hello if you bought a new car recently it's more than likely it will have an 8-track cartridge player but what is an 8-track cartridge player and why is it called an 8-track I go to explain it to you now an 8-track cartridge is a continuous loop of tape if an album has 40 minutes on it it will have a 10 minute loop approximately which goes around and around well how does 10 minutes fit 40 minutes worth of music on it well they divide 2 into 4 programs now when the tape reaches their end there's a metallic counting on it which drops the play head down to continue on the next program and similarly all the way down to the end of the cartridge the tape head looks like this we've got a left and a right channel if we want to play the first program it goes to the top of the tape a place tracks 1 and 5 together to produce a stereo sound and then when it moves down to the next program it goes to tracks 2 and 6 next program track 3 and 7 and next 4 and 8 and that is how an 8-track cartridge works so here's how that works in practice you can see on this album we've got the four different programs on the back but if we look a little bit closer at the end of the first program who said I would there's only half of that it continues on programmed 2 and similarly on program 3 at the end of that one we've got inside out which has to be continued on program form that's because each loop is a set length now when it comes to the interactivity of listening to an 8-track music cartridge there's not an awful lot there you can just listen to it from beginning to end or by pressing the select button you can move between the four available programs one after the other in a sequential and that's the sum of it but this feature of the 8-track cartridge the ability to jump between for individual parallel programs running at the same time on a tape was used to great effect in one fondly remembered toy from the nineteen eighties the two excel from Mego and it achieved this by having an individual selector button for each of the four programs on the cartridge so rather than the sequential selection that you get on a normal 8-track music player with this machine you can jump to an individual track in an instance so the machine could ask a question on program one by pressing the answer buttons you're jumping the playhead down two programs two three or four on which would be contained the appropriate response to the answer that you've given now the reason I mention this is because you might think with the Omni also using 8-track cartridges it uses a similar kind of interactive system but it doesn't on this one it remains on the same channel throughout the channel selector is just used to pick the type of game that you want to play off the four available on the cartridge but then it remains on that channel throughout so there's something a little bit more complicated going on here to provide the interactivity and my best guess at this point is is it's something to do with the fact that device only has a mono speaker so therefore we've got a spare channel on the tape which could be loading program data into the omni to enable it to perform different functions to give you an idea of some of the programming that's required to be able to play the different games if we look in the manual here it explains different scoring systems for the packing games for example Pat Summerall sports quiz the first person to answer the question correctly gets four points and the other people who answer it correctly get three points whereas if you go to the reaction game the first person transferred correctly gets four points but then it goes down and the second one gets three next to next one but if we look at the music quiz that's a different scoring system again the first person to answer the question correctly gets two points then the other ones get one and then on top of this the answers to the questions are provided in a number of different ways on some of the games it's just a matter of pressing one of the keys and then other ones you have to type in the answer as a word however that'll just involve the Machine translating those keys into a number so cat for example would be one one seven but still quite a bit of sophistication going on in this machine let's have a listen to one of these cartridges to see if we can figure out where the data lies in relation to the questions this film featured an exciting chariot race which film was it one Spartacus to Quo Vadis three Ben Hur flora none of the above the film with the chariot race that was unforgettable was number three Ben Hur so you should have been able to hear that you got a burst of data before the question which by the way are muted down a lot because it was a lot louder than the speaking section and then you got the question but you also get some data on the other channel as well as well as some speaking so let's just listen to one channel at a time you do there even Oscar for winning myth game congratulation right so this channel just contains a burst of data a congratulatory message and then a big gap during which point the question will be being asked on the other channel which we can't hear at the moment and then there's a burst of data some more silence and then after a few seconds that's followed up by another burst of data and another congratulation type message you just won the game are you all ready for another look at the movies okay so let's have a listen to the other channel smokey in the band that grossed 34 million seven hundred and forty five thousand dollars in 1977 this puts it among the top 25 money makers since gone with the wind in 1939 true or false so at this point the players would select one or two or then when every player had made their selection a depressed answer the game would continue true this movie starring Burt Reynolds and Sally Field is one of the all-time big money makers okay so let's try this out on the table itself the cartridge slot is located on player ones side of the game by inserting the cartridge it turns the D on its plugged into a mains power supply and I've got a voltage converter on it I can feel the motor going but I've got a feeling this tape isn't advancing so I'll put a mark on the tape itself putting it back into the machine to see if the tape is moving at all so after a few seconds removed it and sure enough the dots still in the same place however I figured out that it was just a matter of locating the cartridge slightly differently inside the slot things must have moved around a little bit because if you push it in and then just pull it out ever so slightly I could feel the cartridge moving properly and after checking it I could see the tape was advancing but still we were getting no kind of action out of the machine itself at all no questions were being asked that it was showing on those LED displays so after playing around with it for an hour or so I decided it was time to open this one up I'm sure you'll be quite happy about this because people like to see what's inside these things as well so it's a good opportunity to locate it and hopefully we may have to get this thing up and running so there's eight screws in total in the bottom there it's held together with a couple of wires here I just had to remove those so I could separate the two halves as you can see the 8-track player is at the bottom and all the circuitry is at the top and it's just joined together by a couple of different cables now one of the advertised features of this device is that it's able to play normal music eight tracks as well as the games so I thought I'd test it out by playing an eight-track edit and as you can see here this was the issue I was having before you just have to move the 8-track out a little bit from where it first locates to be able to get the tape to move I also had to reconnect up those wires for the power and also this one is for the tape heads and after waiting around for about thirty seconds or so you hear a beep at which point you can press the Enter key and much to my relief this happened [Music] but whilst it was capable of playing 8-track music it still didn't want to interact with the data that was contained on the special game cartridges so I thought I'd take a closer look at the circuitry and see if I could find anything that was wrong that I was able to repair now I'm not an expert in electronics in fact I'm not an expert in any field whatsoever but what I'm looking for here is obviously bulging or leaky capacitors or anything that just looks a little bit out of place but unfortunately nothing stuck out as being obviously damaged however whilst I was in here I did write down the values of the different capacitors with the intention of getting replacements if I need them and whilst I'm in here it gives me the opportunity to give you a bit of a tour around so you can see here the two main chips that are on the circuit board both from Texas Instruments and if you look down towards the bottom left here it looks like it's gone through quite a few quality control steps and you'll have noticed that when I took it apart I had to unplug four of these connectors and these are the wires that go to their LED displays which show the scores for each player and the keyboards for those players are behind these panels here and they're all linked together by ribbon cables which go around the outside of the case I'll then join onto the circuit board at these two locations here now whilst I had access to the volume control it was a good opportunity to deoxidize it to get rid of the crackles and I also thought I might as well unplug both of those chips and just spray some contact cleaner in there I've had all computers in the past where socketed chips have become unresponsive so I thought it might be something worth trying and of course it's always a good idea to clean the tape head now you can do this without taking the cover off but with the cover removed it's a little bit easier to access it so I clean that with some isopropyl alcohol so I decided at this point before I order any components I'll just plug it all back together and we'll see if any of the things that I've done however minor they are if they've brought this thing back to life so let's put in a cartridge and find out now I don't know whether it was anything I've done and I severely doubt it was however I've now got the LED display flashing for each player and that's indicating that you have to sign in to start the game which is just a matter of pressing the enter key at the right of the keyboard then pressing go now I can hear the motor - trying to move the tape so the cartridge just needs a little bit of a wiggle to give it some encouragement haven't got a clue about the answer so I'll just type something random into moving out of it okay I should have got it on the second clue sir dad but this time I do know what it is it's Egypt so let's type that in on the keyboard there I've set this up for multiple players so I'll have to press ENTER for the other players as well now a lots of the interference on that last test was being picked up from my Wi-Fi route which is located only about a foot or so away from where I'm shooting so I've switched it off for this next test let's try a different cartridge now there's something not quite right here because I'm able to hear the data burst which should be muted and I can also hear some of the audio from other tracks the fact I can hear audio we shouldn't be coming through on the speaker gives me the indication is something wrong with the alignment of the head on the 8-track mechanism so let's have a look at it so here's the head the metal section which moves up and down and that's held within a plastic cradle and you can see on the edge of the cradle here there's a crack the actual plastic is snapped and separated which means of course the head will be out of alignment so I'm going to have to take this thing apart so I can get to that component and I'm going to glue it together with some epoxy resin so it requires quite a bit of delicate work just taking these components one after the other out of the mechanism and then I can remove the section which holds the head and I can also remove the head from that so I don't accidentally go in glue on it you can see there how it's cracked so just a matter now of mixing up some epoxy putting that onto the plastic mechanism and holding it together and letting it set overnight whilst we're waiting for that I'll just mentioned a couple of other things I got inside the box you've already seen the instruction booklet but notice it's a device for ages 10 to adult so the reason given for that is because it's a device which plugs into the wall power supply it's not powered by batteries and they don't want younger children messing around with that but also I think that a lot of children would have difficulty answering the questions on some of these cartridges that do seem to be aimed adults we've also got the Omni toll-free hotline number here which wouldn't ring up I doubt anyone had answer that now how we've got the Omni registration card and it amuses me that that card goes back to jean-louis Milton Bradley nowadays something like this would go back to the registration department but back then it was just Jean and everyone assumed that Jean would never retire from a job he reminds me of a name from an old advert in the UK eileen built and there'll be a few people that remember that one but anyway back to what was in the box I've also got a letter that was sent from MB presumably to the previous owner of this device I've got back in 1991 and they're writing to him to say that it's a discontinued device now I'm wondering if this was the chat writing to them to say my omni has broken do you offer repairs or replacement so they've written back to say no I'm afraid we no longer support it which might explain why my device is broken so hopefully over 25 years later my fix with epoxy resin will have resolved the issue that mr. Thomas was having back in 1991 so let's put this thing back together and see if this time I can properly demonstrate it to you without having the data track blast over the audio or the other track leaked through hopefully this time it's going to work properly the heads are going to line up with the audio let's try it first though with an eight-track tape just to see if the tracks are lined up with the head and after a little bit of adjustment everything seems to be working fine so I'll put the cover on and let's have a listen to have been some prices movie quiz one movie featured a song Pete Kelly blues was it one singing in the rain about - Kelly and me so I'm still hearing two tracks at once well I'm pretty sure the machine is fine now so it's got to be something wrong with the 8-track cartridge itself now prepared plenty of these over the years it's just a matter of figuring out how they open there's quite a few different ways with this one it's just some plastic CAPTCHAs which have to be moved out of the way so get the front open first the other two are located beneath the sticker on the back so just a matter of putting a screwdriver in there and leaving those until they open up and there you go we're inside so let's have a look at this sponge you can see here it's lost its elasticity and I'm guessing that that's putting the tracks out of alignment so let me try and replace that sponge just a matter of peeling it off the plastic backing and then I'm going to use the usual 8 track sponge replacement I normally use this comes from stock this tapes people have asked me about this before the model there TLD nine six two four I bought this at Klaus Olson in the UK but I think it's available in other places you just have to hunt it out but look this is like a dust excluder we've got self-adhesive on one side a shiny coating on the other perfect for 8-track tapes to slide over we've got the sponge in the middle which is about the same width as the original eight-track sponge so you just stick it on there and just cut off the edges so it's nice and neat but a notch in each end for this particular cartridge because that's how it's held in the back and they just slide it in between those two pegs and it's just a matter of putting the cartridge back together again now I'm going to come back to this cartridge in a moment but first let's try playing Words Words Words type in the word it completes this affinity assault and right so what could that be well remember this is a game playable by children of 10 years and older so let me put pepper in here a salt and pepper battery dat ter why assault and battery go okay I can't imagine them putting that in a game nowadays but anyway let's move on to the next question so I'll type water in on the keyboard rather the computer will read it eight one seven two six and as soon as I press Enter look at the score at the top it goes up by four API so now on this cartridge some of the answers you type in and then some a multiple-choice choose the word that means the same as lexicon le X I see Oh n number one M two left-handed three dictionary it's difficult to know what age group these cartridges are aimed at because questions like that water particularly easy a lexicon is a dictionary number three the study of word applications is lexicology okay now let's try the Jeopardy cartridge now this is licensed from the TV show in the US now the US viewers might be surprised to know that we don't have jeopardy on the screens here in the UK there were no instructions in this box if I don't got instructions for any of these cartridges so it took me a little while to figure out exactly how to play this game now at the start each player signs in by pressing the enter key so well sign in players one and two here by pressing enter notice each player gets ten points and for each question you've given a category and you have to decide in advance how many points you prepared to stake on it under the category famous name another of our daily bonus questions and at this point you decide how many of your points you're prepared to gamble on getting that question right with the maximum being four so player one is gambling two and player two is gambling three in 1960 he went an Olympic boxing title four years later he won the heavyweight championship number one Cassius Clay - Floyd Patterson three Sugar Ray Leonard so player one thinks the answer is number one so presses one and then answer and player 2 thinks the answer is number two and once the last person is answered the scores are updated oh yes Cassius Clay number one he is also known as Muhammad Ali now having very little knowledge of the Jeopardy game show and no access to the instruction booklet I wasn't too sure how many points you could stake on a particular category but luckily the machine will tell you if you select four or below it accepts it if you try and go above that number it won't accept it okay so let's just try one more question imagine it's Christmas Day 1980 all the family is saturated there new Omni game system let's see what question it asks the profession with the highest suicide rate number one accountants two writers three physicians oh good a nice jolly question well stake your bets who do you think is most likely to kill themselves accountants writers or physicians come on physicians you can do it where are position number three get in there now on this game every now and then it'll stop and say something like that shooting your in and flush the score of the current leader okay that's enough jeopardy for the moment so let's try a different cartridge well play the movie trivia one but unfortunately even though I repaired it earlier on I still haven't got it working perfectly depicted a famous gunfight which took place at the blank around type in the name of that around okay that's an easy one it can only really be one answer but I'll type it in okay on both of these keypads here and I'm going to press the enter keys at slightly different times you can see how the scoring system works okay we'll have a quick look at the music quiz now this is a favorite campfire song for young and old alike type in the first word in the title [Music] [Applause] [Music] notice how I can type the answer even whilst the music is still being played on top of old smokey is the title old smokey refers to a is he looking pink in the Blue Ridge Mountains right I'll let the machine do the talking there saw have edited out the pawls is it's going to ask you three questions see how well you do according to The Music Man there's going to be trouble in number one Ocean City to Lake City three River City or none of the above trouble in River City number three who made a hit recording of what a difference a day makes number one Dinah Washington to Natalie Cole three Carly Simon for none of the above Dinah Washington number one you are sharp today who wrote the soundtrack for the movie super fly number one Anthony newley to Curtis Mayfield three all Williams for none of the above super fly represents the best of orchestral soul music and a platinum record for number two Curtis Mayfield and finally I want to show you password plus because this one works a little bit differently to the other cartridges in the way it switches between the two available audio tracks extra bonus barrier VAR RI e R right so I'm going to enter my answer I think I'll put reef in as in the Great Barrier Reef so let me type that in it and see how we get on oh and play a - well he's just having a bit of a moment second clue great that still fits in with my original answer as in reef so let me type that it again maybe the keys weren't registering properly what do you think player - okay well chin up it might be right finally I get it now it's wall as in Berlin wall Great Wall of China own barrier wall what do you think play number two oh forget it you guessed it the best word is Wong wal L as far as what it does differently just listen to the next announcement each weekend again now if you're wondering why we have to wait 10 seconds well I've got a chap in my garage who could explain that to you right now this is a little bit complicated so it's going to be easier for me to explain it with another low-tech chart imagine this is your tape but we've got the left and right channels on it and remember that Omni can switch between the channels as on when it needs to so if we're playing password the idea of the game is it gives you three clues to the password and if you guess the password it will then move on to the next question the problem with this is if you guess it too early things get a little bit out of whack I'll explain you get blue one clue two and blue three now let's imagine we've just guessed it after clue three so we've got the third clue we've got know what it is type it in if you've got it right it's going to say congratulations you got it right you know you've got the answer right et cetera and then it's going to give us a bonus question at this point which is just one more question and if we guess that one right we'll get another congratulations you've got it right here now if we're not as good as that and we get to the third clue and we haven't figured it out we get it wrong we're going to fail message sorry you've got it wrong the answer is such-and-such now at this point it can't give us the bonus section so what it has to do is just play past it silently so it's got a message saying please wait 10 seconds probably at the end of here and it just plays past this section in silence until it can get back to the next question again now the problem lies if your answer it too early as well so you get clue number one and do you think I know it immediately and you answer it here well it's a long way away from this section here so when it has to do you've got clue to and clue three yet to play but it's not going to give you those keys you've already got it right so it jumps down to this one and plays you a little bit of a jingle just to fill in a bit of time and then music one days by the way and then he'll play another bit of a jingle here just fill in some more time just killing time until it can eventually get to the congratulations you've got the answer right message so you can see here on this particular game by having these two linear traps depending on where you answer the question you can sometimes find yourself answering a little bit too early for the game and it just has to play past the section after that so to give you an idea of what that sounds like here's what happens when you answer the question on the first guess can you get this extra bonus word the first clue is tumble tu mble right so let's type in the answer which is fall and see what happens okay so that was the first piece of music but all the time I'm talking to you the tape is still moving forwards [Applause] okay so that was a second stalling piece of music but now we're finally up to the section in the tape when it can say this now I think my chart was a little bit wrong because this was a bonus question so it's a little bit more elaborate than I was describing because then you get this please wait 20 seconds just like the next puzzle well I'm sure you get the idea and that just leaves one thing left to test I know somebody's going to ask me to do this if I don't so what happens if you put a two XL cartridge in the omni well obviously it's incompatible the objects just gonna play it as a normal 8-track cartridge which means playing it from the beginning to the end with no interactivity so I think you get the idea there it's just going to play through the whole time which of course you could do on any 8-track cartridge player perhaps I'll have a look at the two XL in a future video but now onto the wrap-up so there you go that's the omni from mb electronics now when you mention a quiz machine that uses 8-track tapes it sounds a little bit quaint but this thing really is a bit of a marvel of technology for the time the things they've done here are quite impressive you've got to remember this is 1980 so we're going back White's away and it's a programmable computer effectively it's reading data off the cartridges that enables it to run the different games in different ways before the questions come up it knows what the answers are because it's loaded in a bit of data but it's muted out that section a then unmute so you can hear the question depending on what your answer is it then tallies up the scores it can score one to four people it knows the winner it can flash the lights up it can jump to the other track to playback audio that's relevant to the input that's been put in there's there's a heck of a lot going on here it's an incredibly impressive device really and the thing is it's still fun I mean I had a lot of fun playing with this I'm sure if I add my nephew's over we could have a go game on this and it wouldn't feel like something that was 37 years old there aren't many games from that era that you can really play for more than a few moments if you look at the catalogs from the time from 1982 what electronic games were available it's things like Simon and stuff which I've got to be honest the novelty of those wears off a lot quicker than it does on this now of course at the time once you'd played through the cartridge you played through all four programs on it there'd be very little incentive to return but of course you can end by additional cartridges I think the main reason why this thing never really took off well there's probably a couple it's gigantic and it was expensive and a hundred odd dollars at the time I've got a catalogue that I've shown you earlier on where you can see the comparison between this and other devices that are available there won't be many households that would have wanted to purchase one of these and I'd imagine it's going to have been a very expensive thing for mb to put together the amount of engineering work that went into creating this is probably mind-boggling but anyway I hope you've enjoyed looking at this surviving Omni Entertainment System and that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 1,035,251

Rating: 4.9301915 out of 5

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, MB, Omni, Milton Bradley, Electronic, Game, 1980, MB Electronics, Toy, Quiz, 1980s, 8-track, 2-XL, games, early, interactive, quiz, vincent price, Retro, Retrogames, Vintage

Id: zyOKgLtUxto

Length: 36min 26sec (2186 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 06 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/sapphirebang]

I love Techmoan

[u/ZadocPaet]

A closer look...

[u/NtX_DC]

So many memories!

[u/[deleted]]

That is really some incredible engineering. Thanks for sharing this.

[u/camargoville]

Woah, must watch all later.