This Console Would have Changed Gaming Forever | Nostalgia Nerd

friends you thought it never existed you thought it never materialized but here in the flesh is a conics multisystem the legendary yet bizarre looking console from the 80s that promised to be so much to so many but failed to ever materialize but before we look closer at this device we need to dive deep into the history of this remarkable console [Music] conics a welsh company which 80s uk computer owners will almost certainly be familiar with mainly because they made incredible joysticks who can forget handheld delights such as the conic speed king and conics navigator these chunky appendaged items might seem clunky today but when all you had was this one of these could really enhance your gaming experience especially if he didn't have a table to balance a joystick on but conics didn't want to be known as an accessory manufacturer forever they had grander ambitions and it was this drive combined with their existing technical knowledge that led them to create one of the greatest game consoles that ever could have been look at this place looks bleak doesn't it corrugated metal brick concrete you could almost be forgiven for thinking this was soviet russia but here on the 3rd of march 1986 in cherry hinton just outside cambridge and underneath that sheet metal is where the heart of conic's new console began to be precise this is where flare technology began made up of three ex-sinclair employees martin brennan ben cheese and john matheson flair technology was to be their vessel for a project they strive to create at sinclair research and which would have become the spectrum 128 k's successor but was eaten up by amstrad's acquisition of the sinclair brand and ip the project was called loki and these design sketches by rick dickinson show a design that looks almost like a ps3 fused with an industrial warehouse outlandish to say the least but amstrad wasn't the place for early outlandish ideas and nor was it the place for most of sinclair's ex-employees so this then would be their place taking the basis of their idea with them and that idea remained simple combine the best components available to create the greatest entertainment orientated computer that could exist at the time for under 200 pounds just now without any of the rom ip now owned by amstrad [Music] of course being a new company flair would have to create an income stream before embarking on such a colossal project and so calling on their existing knowledge worked with ram electronics to create the ram music machine for the zx spectrum and amstrad cpc released in 1986 this is a hardware accessory that could place samples drum patterns and even connect to synthesizers via midi at 50 pounds it actually turned the spectrum into a viable music creation system flair also created a zlx spectrum clone for a spanish company which annoyed ellen sugar but actually also led to them creating a fax machine and hard disk controllers for sugar's pc1512 range all of this got flare off to a great start allowing them to now shift focus back to their computer project documents show that the plan for this machine was originally to be msx2 like but now with a bit more added flair if you will this of course meant full color graphics a floppy drive midi capability and to be based around a powerful set of processors this included an 8-bit blitter processor for rapid data shifting and a 6 megahertz digital signal processor that would do algorithmic processing both taking load off the 7 megahertz z80 cpu it was ben cheese and john matheson who designed the chipset and in an unpublished retro gamer interview with the prolific craig vaughn he stated the key to the technology was twofold a blitter that could move pixels around being limited only by how fast the memory ran and a dsp to generate synthesized sounds of previously unheard quality the blitz idea was not new but ours was far more flexible and game orientated than early obliters so in line with other computer manufacturer conventions the name for this machine was to be the flare one and through simplified engineering it was intended to if not beat at least go head-to-head with the amiga at less than half the cost outlandish was apparently still flavour of the day by the first quarter of 1988 flair had completed their hardware prototypes the only problem was they weren't geared up for production just like earlier projects their business was in designing hardware not shipping it so they decided to talk to the press and it was ace magazine who picked up their story with the most interest a magazine that liked to focus on hardware much more than their rivals ace issue 10 published in june 1988 ran a two-page article entitled play power giving us a tantalizing glimpse of this new hardware the flair one is a one megabyte machine with 128k of rom 128k video ram and 768k of system ram if it reaches the marketplace it will certainly give both the amiga and st a run for their money the flare draws its power from four custom chips designed by the company with the specific intention of providing some very powerful graphics now before this point it would have been incredibly expensive for a company to create these custom chips but a new electron gun pattern cutting technique pioneered by cambridge firm kudos meant each design cost ten percent of its usual price just two thousand pounds this process was so impressive that the department of trade and industry got involved like they did to encourage more manufacturers to use custom silicon as a way of increasing efficiency and as it happens here i've got those very chips in fact i've got what's known as the flare avp chipset which is a spin-off of the prototype board you can see in that issue of ace magazine you can see flair weren't stupid they still needed cash flow and had actually tied up a deal with bell fruit manufacturers of arcade machines to integrate this hardware with their cabinets you can see the four custom chips here they're actually texas instruments asics in an 84 pin plcc package and all controlled by a z80 processor over there now if that kind of setup sounds familiar to you you'll understand why later but one of the machines you'd find this avp hardware in was question of sport a gambling machine where players answer questions based on visual and audible cues now i don't have an entire machine they're pretty big but i do have an engineer's manual for one this was important because this was brand new hardware running a brand new game and it needed to be brand new because the graphics and sound on these machines were impressive designed to pull in the punter and therefore an early indication of how potent this hardware could be but flair still needed to realize their dream of a standalone system and therefore it was handy that the ace magazine feature also mentioned the following the company has spent two years developing flair one and they're now ready to go into production but there's just one problem so far no major company has signed on the dotted line despite keen interest from at least two major players in the home computer market [Music] those two major players were atari and amstrad although a deal was anything but firm but it was this very article which caught the eye of a certain win holloway the founder and chairman of conics in an interview with mark from conic's multisystem dot co dot uk he said i read ace magazine and the flare one was in it and i thought hmm i always believed if you had a clever enough brain and a good enough engineer you could design specific chips for graphics you know make the game better and when i saw the flare one i was pretty impressed i thought that's good and italia was going to use their technology for the next machine so i got in touch with him he came down we were talking he loved the idea of the chair so we then sat down and decided on a flare too we designed the next generation wait chair what chair this is a chair well actually it's this chair but we'll come back to that in a second because before the chair came a controller and before a controller came sponsor really now magazines are referenced a lot in this video and that's because they're an essential part of our history they hold stories and information that could otherwise be lost to time and that's exactly why i love readley reedly allows you to browse and read hundreds of titles from newspapers to international titles to subjects you just might have a passing interest in and of course your favorite magazines and i have quite a few of those retro gamer for example is an essential source of stories from the past and through really you can access years of back issues too and even special editions just look at all those consoles and hardware how could you resist that you and your family can each set up bookmarks or favorite lists to include all the titles you want to regularly read and then access them from anywhere through your tablet phone or through your pc's browser even without wi-fi and the quality is absolutely sensational both in the content and well one click and you can zoom in and it's pixel perfect imagine doing that with a magazine it would it would just be blurry setting up an account with really is easy and by clicking the link in the description box today you'll receive a month for free and then it's only 7 pounds 99 a month for all this content plus you can cancel whenever you wish [Music] at the time all the joysticks up until then were just stuck on the table nobody had any tactile feedback it was just a there it is get on with it type of thing do you know what i mean it was the same with light guns they were just rubbish they expected the player to use their imagination too much i felt that any peripheral should stimulate the imagination and that's where the whole idea came from wynn envisaged a controller that could start out as a steering wheel but easily convert into bike handlebars and even a flight yoke so he began mocking something up through conyx's r d branch creative devices research limited the same creative devices research who had helped hasbro with their doomed control vision console but this was conics's strength peripherals and wynn had concluded that the next logical accessory for a home computer should be a simulator set up which kind of made sense he had read an article stating that arcade simulators such as driving or flying were now accounting for sixty percent of the market which sounds highly possible it was around this time when cabinets like hard driving afterburner and outrun were dominating arcades so why not make a home version so that's what they did these are the initial concepts by level 6 designers later called product partners of the then called slipstream controller you can tell they've taken the lead from sci-fi films such as aliens star wars even star trek these all look pretty cool and futuristic but were clearly deemed to be a step too far to manufacture and so this original patent is the design they settled upon and here it is in the flesh this is the slipstream controller and it's actually a pretty nifty device you start off with this steering wheel configuration with everything locked in place but using this clutch release knob you can unlock the center column pop the steering wheel off like so and suddenly transform into flight yoke mode then if you lock it down in the down position and twist these handlebars around oh which is a bit of a pain in the ass yeah you've got a handlebar for motorbike games there was even supposed to be another accessory which sat on top giving you helicopter style controls we've got built-in fire triggers start and select buttons and even a gear or throttle stick to the side plus this stick has a built-in judder to provide tactile feedback pretty much every eventuality is catered for of course we also get pedals as well which change in function depending on what you're playing but it's this versatility to switch between control types that was deemed revolutionary and really the foundations for the conics arcade system and it was while sitting at his desk messing around with this controller but wynn realized the chair he was sitting in a bog standard office chair was taking up about three feet square and thought you can get a chair to operate in that space i could get roll pitch and yaw you look at the swivel chair and it's pivoted on a one-inch bar no matter what the weight was they know at what point they can move in the seat to get it to tilt back on them it's all around the pivot point and so began developing an accompanying chair as well alongside creative devices engineer robert kent wynn once again began development in his garage but this was eventually assisted by designers steve galachan and paul neal who were contracted in again from level 6 design consultants this is actual footage of its build instead of advanced hydraulics you'll find in the arcade the core original components here were electric motors from bosch electric drills facilitating a cheap and cheerful version of the full simulator experience in initial testing they put a 5 degree tilt on it but this was enough to apparently terrify people feeling like they were about to be flung from their chair so it was lowered to three degrees with plans to incorporate a seat belt for safety and a control pad to tweak its settings it was also discussed as a means for allowing more advanced simulation inputs a bit like the jaguar pad at this point we're clearly talking about a product that's somewhat difficult to ship as just a peripheral i mean pitching a revolutionary controller is a hard sell let alone an entire chair especially without a bespoke game library to back them up can you imagine pitching back to a school kid who uses his pocket money to buy budget pound 99 games plus we're talking multiple systems meaning bespoke connections and integrations for each it just wasn't gonna happen no this needed to be its own platform and it needed to have its own customer base and having had an initial phone call we returned to our conversation between wynn and flair technologies our first meeting with wynn holloway of conics was at sheraton skyline in heathrow during the august of 1988. he wanted our technology to go into a project he'd nicknamed slipstream the famous games controller that looked revolutionary the plan was to launch it in january of 1989. we had to combine the four simple asics of flare one into one lsi logic chip change from an 8 bit z80 cpu to 18 to 16 bit 8088 and have all this ready to ship in five months the excitement was tremendous wind said that he would pay us a royalty of about a pound on every unit sold and talked about sales in the tens of millions he would pay us cash up front to start development and could not wait to get started wynn is a great salesman and had us sold on the whole idea his credibility was strong conex had a great name in the joystick business and it seemed like they could pull it off we put our heads down and got to work comics were determined to enter the market strong with a system that could challenge anything that was about to arrive and even though ace issue 11 promisingly reported the flair 1 is an 8-bit micro yes it can move sprites and vlog graphics faster than an st and in 256 colors at that true it can draw lines three times faster than an amiga sure enough it can handle the maths of 3d structures faster even than the ultra speedy archimedes can comics wanted to move away from the stigma of an 8-bit processor so had asked flair to replace the z80 with a 16-bit processor after all bits were the buzzword back then so with ex-icl engineer chris green managing the integration between conics and flair an initial prototype model was produced with an intel 8088 but would be swapped out for a faster six megahertz 8086 before production the flare 1 design was tweaked a little based on our experience and some data paths widened to 16 bits by december we had working silicon but it wasn't fast enough we did another spin to move up to a full 16 bit 8086 and integrate a floppy disk controller by using a custom disk format we even managed to get 880k on a normal 720k floppy disk january 1989 had arrived but as yet no final production model was in sight but that certainly didn't stop the press from getting excited published in early february this is march 1989's edition of advanced computer entertainment and as you can see it's on the front cover what looks better than an amiga costs less than an st and has more rock and roll than afterburner the conex arcade system of course now branded as the somewhat less exciting conics multi system but at its heart it was still a machine designed for fun here was a system that wasn't built in any way for business applications it couldn't even manage an 80 column text screen in fact it was trimmed down in other ways too the midi ports were gone the ram was reduced but it could still belt out 10 channel stereo sound with fm synthesis it could display 256 on-screen colors at 256 by 200 with a maximum resolution of 512 by 200 and from a palette of 4096 colors it could chuck sprites about two and it could certainly draw vectors far quicker than even the acorn archimedes and throw them about two this was thanks to the upgraded 12 megahertz risk based dsp which could multiply at 50 times faster than an amiga's 68 000 working in conjunction with the now 16-bit blitter which could shift data at five megabytes a second and even handle hardware collision detection it was that blitter combined with the one byte per pixel screen which meant two entire screens could be drawn at once in the 128k of video ram with the video chip drawing the first whilst viblita took care of the second allowing them to be rapidly swapped back and forth to create full screen fluid movement this was an absolute war horse and given the machine now had two separate 16-bit data paths it also led some overly keen types to argue it was now a 32-bit another story that might sound familiar to you either way this was a system built for gaming that was well ahead of the 3d curve but surely there's a problem if we compare the size of this board to the multi system how in the world of holy hell are we supposed to fit all this into that tiny plastic space well as john matherson mentioned earlier the solution was to integrate all these custom chips into one single asic unit using ultra large scale integration techniques to mesh them together software could then be loaded through an external three and a half inch disk drive plugged into the expansion port at the rear a video out would be placed on the right hand side and a din socket on the left hand side allowing peripherals such as this conic's navigator to be connected up for more traditional games as well as any extras the customer wanted including a light gun the mighty moving chair and even another multi system allowing for multiplayer scenarios this really was intended to be an all-in-one system just look at some of these light gun designs too straight out of captain kirk's accessory bag the physical prototype ended up being this blue affair which is really quite nice and even featured real recoil action just like operation wolf and the arcades there are even a few images of it in use with the 200 pounds chair accessory including this one with llamasoft founder and superlative game developer jeff minter can you imagine the health and safety implications of that tv stand it's gonna fall at some point isn't it but this system needed games from virgo not just peripherals by march 89 comics promised the freebie game that comes as part of the package is a major license and had reportedly agreed deals with 35 software houses including big names like gremlin ocean and u.s gold not only that but apparently orders were flooding in for their multi system already rushware in germany had apparently already put an order in for a hundred thousand units and a revised launch date of august 1989 had been set even lucas arts were interested and tried to cut a deal to sell the multisystem in america with star wars branding however because they declined to put any money up front wynn backed out of the deal in fact it's claimed there were several potential investors and partners who simply wanted to take away too much from the company but wim was determined that this would be a british success story comics needed to show something to the public and it was down to project manager john dean to make that happen he decided to bring on board a new software house attention to detail and they had created the software development kit for the programmers development systems apparently they were the right team for the job because they also created some pretty impressive demos including a 17 frames per second rotating cube which had text and games running on each side but the sdk ensured there was also a raft of new software in the works including the much anticipated logotron's star ray and last ninja 2 by system 3. but were these titles and indeed the system going to be a victim of their own hype in amongst the my little ponies and cuddly toys of the earl's court toy fair conics unveiled their multi-system console the occasion was also the first public showing of the rock and roll arcade chair that will be available as an add-on obviously it was not the final production version but a rather noisy prototype that drew the crowds to the conic stand in late january 1989 among eager crowds and captivated children the connex multisystem made its first public appearance at the british toy and hobby fair in london the same one that the lion safety mark was promoted at heavily the problem was the hardware was nowhere near ready and the chair was somewhat dangerous fred gill co-founder of attention to detail reported in issue 8 of retro gamer magazine the hardware wasn't ready in fact we didn't have any to create demos with finally at 6 pm the day before the show a small number of hand-built systems appeared in london we spent until 4am integrating them with the code and then we spent another two hours hiding the flair one units away in cupboards so nobody could move them and discover they weren't the real final hardware what's worse is that five minutes into a demonstration sparks began flying out of the power chair and it had to be turned off the main attraction was now dead weight and nothing more than a fancy butt parking device one which wasn't going to be getting the line safety mark anytime soon however this apparently didn't dull expectations or excitement and game development continued chugging forward in fact in september 1989 comics announced their own software publishing division creative design software specifically to publish games for their new system including revenge of star glider by argonaut software and rotox by binary design this press release also announced the bundled game would be called bikers perhaps not the major licensed game we were promised but it still looked pretty neat [Music] in september's ace magazine chris walsh from argonauts said polygon based games like star guider 2 they're going to be easy to program the machines geared up to rotating masses of vertices at incredible rates it's as though the designers of the machine were obsessed with producing something that could shift polygons quickly star glider 2 would actually go on to be the foundation for star fox on the super nintendo nick speakman of binary design also commented there's no question that the custom chips are very powerful but they require a lot of programming talent to get anything out of them the screen handling isn't as fast as we anticipated it to be but then when something is hyped out of all proportion it never is as good as you expect it to be take batman for example well i'm not sure about his verdict on batman it's an exceptional movie but it does perhaps cast a foreboding shadow on the reality of the system where everything was managed in one single asic package sure the specs individually are incredible but working together perhaps the multi system would start to buckle under the strain there were also claims that its novel architecture was tricky to develop for or at least quite different to what programmers were used to at least comics were listening to those developers though and decided to ask flair to double the system ram cutting profit margins but giving software more room to flex and putting it closer to the original flare 1 specifications but with the video footage we have of the system combined with this demonstration of jeff minter's attack of the mutant camels 1989 one of the games poised to launch with the console you can see it could certainly handle itself this is actually running on an emulator created by savory snacks who worked backwards from game source code a remarkable feat but you can see we've actually got incredibly smooth motion and array of eye grabbing colors and that parallax scrolling is top notch in a computer and video games issue 94 preview they said onlookers gasped at the speed and abundance of the sprites and the riot of sound that was issuing from jeff's hi-fi speakers he nonchalantly commented that the machine was capable of much better the blitter is hardly sweating here these games whether from ropey vhs footage or emulation provide mouth-watering glimpses of what we could have expected in that same magazine ace announced the comics console is here is this the ultimate games machine we've all been waiting for well they certainly hoped so and they had a few screenshots to back up their opinions apparently the retail price was now going to be slightly over 200 pounds but for what you got surely this was still an absolute bargain the connex is british superbly designed and extremely powerful provided the software base shapes up we have no hesitation in recommending it the company expect demand to outstrip supply before christmas so if you see one on the shelf think twice before passing it by in the search for the definitive computer simulator game one name is clearly emerging comics system experience the reality [Music] get behind the wheel of the new codex multi system and you'll really appreciate that powerful 32-bit custom processor this is real state-of-the-art graphic performance and even at these speeds it handles beautifully and this is really a display of a lifetime perfect control over every maneuver and with over 4 000 different colors to choose from we're looking at a dazzling graphic display well have you ever seen anything quite like this what a powerful machine this is we're getting the ultimate high performance from its 16-bit microprocessor and just listen to that that's cd quality sound from the comics multisystem seeing and hearing the connex multisystem is one thing feeling it is another the control unit gives full tactile feedback so you can feel the tarmac as you drive feel the wings respond as you fall back on the controls sense the bite of the tyres as you corner hard into that sharp left-hander the conics multi-system it's a car it's a plane it's a bike in one system not only that but there's a gear shift mounted on the right of the control unit and unique dual foot pedals that are really responsive for maximum realism for other combat games there are fire buttons placed in just the right position we even include a free conics navigator joystick with every multi system and all games are on standard three and a half inch disk drive for real cost effectiveness experience the reality today the problem was no one was seeing it on any shelves in any stores in publishing this story ace had presumed that the slightly delayed launch at london's pcw show had gone without a hitch but conex's positive front was hiding somewhat serious issues all this refinement all this development it was bloody expensive and for the welsh peripheral manufacturer funds were getting pretty tight in august vermont for system was originally due to launch conics had distributed this paper to potential investors in an attempt to get more funding as quickly as possible it details how the multisystem is a revolution in gaming how a slew of peripherals will be available and how it could dominate for competition but investors weren't so sure win states when they don't want it they don't want it our bankers just all of a sudden said no we can't support you anymore even though we had letters of credit and guaranteed money toys r us in the uk wanted 50 000 units but what you've got to remember is that the japanese were very powerful one of the top banking groups were bought out by a large japanese company so they disappeared another backer was going to be ferranti we met and he said sorry win i'm going to have to withdraw we have too many japanese customers it seems that according to win the threat of the multi-system to japanese consoles such as the new mega drive and upcoming snes was simply too great and that in part was behind their funding drying up [Music] it's unclear how much validity resides here but what was clear is outside of the company no one was really aware of any problems and so both reporters and the public queued up outside the 1989 pcw show hoping to get a glimpse of the retail ready multi system however when they got inside conex's stand was empty rumors quickly circulated that they had been delayed by high winds on the seven bridge and that they would definitely be there the next day but the 28k manned again konix's stand was largely vacant by the 29th there was a glimmer of hope as comics arrived but still only occupying half of their stand this technology report from the swedish show bit by bit managed to get a glimpse when they arrived but it was clear there were issues instead having a keyboard inside it you have a all sorts of thrills which is this light yolk or a steering wheel or a handlebar so it's purely for playing games the guardian reported comics did show its innovative 8086 based console running several games hammerfist star ray and lamasof's mutant camels 89 the even more innovative powered chair was on display though not in use when i was around the trade and press launch is not now expected until the end of november john matheson recalls we were paid for our development work but conics ran out of money when they failed to turn up at the trade show they were supposed to be launching the system at we knew the project had died although matters fizzled on for a while nothing of substance ever happened very much a case of sonia and yet so far the number one christmas gift for 1989 was now just a fantasy promises of a console continued through the early 90s but sadly it never materialized look at the switch here and you pull this down you have a motorbike handlebar so this is very good for a motorbike or a jet ski type game and another flick of this switch [Music] and you pull this up and you have a flight yoke down left right then coming with the motor system are these pedals so if you're in a car you've got brake accelerator or if you're in an aircraft left or right uh brother and you can still use it with an ordinary boring old joystick if you want to yes you can use it with a boring ordinary joystick if you want to connex would shortly after sell their joystick range to spectra video and the once great peripheral company as we knew it ceased to exist so ben how did i end up with this i mean this is to all intents and purposes of a conex multi-system right it even says it on the steering wheel well yes and no it's the remnants of the multi system but it's not the console there's no flare one technology within this it's simply a controller for ibm pc compatibles and although it's quite rare in itself it's nowhere near as rare as a true multi-system prototype might be this then is the full circle evolution of a system that promised so much generated so much excitement and then disappeared almost without a trace the conex multisystem was so very close to launching so close but ended up just like it had started as a peripheral for other systems rather than an iconic system in its own right [Music] a company called multi-system china rose up specifically to rejig and sell off the multi-system shells as the super ms-200e mainly throughout america as you can see from this publicity shot of the packaging behind jeff minter not only is the controller the same they even used practically the same box design that had been intended for the multi system it even has the stamp european design to indicate its origins and it follows the same concepts as the original conics device but there are differences the most obvious is the change from light gray to black and with it a change to cheaper creaky plastic where there was once an edge connector at the rear and expansion ports there's now a blank board and some switches where the floppy drive would fit at the front a feature absent from original prototypes but incorporated into the final modes there are now rudder and trim controls the front also features a joystick pass through port rather than the expansion socket of the original but it's still literally cast from the same mould and it still shares the same design principles of the original multi system what it doesn't share is any of the joy the bundled game race car is like lotus turbo challenge after 19 pints and falling into the gutter absolutely unplayable you also get a setup utility on the disc and that's about it the included manual suggests some games you could play including doom apparently which is as god awful as you would imagine this incredible console simply ended up as a controller but didn't even have any worthy games developed for it which really was conic's original fear had they released it as a simple peripheral its adaptability is made useless impotent and a complete waste of an intriguing idea it's a bit of a sad fate really this could have been an incredible if slightly odd console produced out of britain which just ended up as a piece of gaming tat having raised funds with the sell-off of the shell wynn and the remainder of conics did actually try to continue the project through a new company called multisystem uk based around the single chip flare hardware this ended up in a machine owned by a taiwanese company called txc with a system known as the txe multi system which could play video cds games and run interactive programs such as karaoke but fell flat on its face especially in western regions however this did lead to some of the teams such as john matheson richard miller and jeff minter working on the nuon system an enhanced dvd game system which i hope to cover in the near future but my mind continually drifts back to a comment wind made in ace magazine issue 18. it's a new concept we're not even competing with sega and nintendo the concept goes right through to the peripherals the whole system is designed for fun and realism what we're trying to do is make a family machine that offers realistic simulations but has still got joystick ports so that you can load up standard arcade games if computer users are prepared to queue up for hours for a four minute go on a flight sim it doesn't take genius to work out that everyone would have a go on it if they only had to wait five minutes there's talk of a possible exercise bike or maybe other exercise based add-ons which could allow people to have fun working out this was the original nintendo wii just 16 years too early and without the financial backing that perhaps it deserved projects like the multisystem really reminds me what an innovative and exciting era this was but it wasn't the end of the tale and in fact the flare one which remained the property of flare technology would actually evolve into a console you may have heard of see atari's interest didn't stop when comics got involved and in fact flair helped atari work on and name their atari panther console before it was abandoned thanks in part to martin brennan's insistence that 3d was the future for a more capable console the atari jaguar it was this console the jaguar that is a descendant of the flare 1 hardware in fact it's technically the flare 2. if you noticed these similarities earlier with a z80 chip managing a host of custom chips and a dsp then you were 100 correct the flare 2 was schematically very similar to the flare 1 but clearly more powerful and with the z80 swapped out for a motorola 68 000. here was a machine with almost as much hype as the multi system it was also a machine docked with the same complaints of having a steep learning curve to develop for and the whole palava about whether it was truly 64 bits or not due to its split data paths [Music] we're not going to delve into that here of course but just think about that this hardware right here was close to the jaguar hardware but four years early this machine could have blown the 16-bit era out of the water before it even began all you have to do is squint at the tunnels of doom footage shown in this atd video to see its potential no wonder the japanese were scared of it even though it does look a bit like a fisher-price toy but it's worth noting that without the comics multi system without their investment in flair it's unlikely that the atari jaguar would have existed as we knew it at all and if that's not a legacy i don't know what is now come on it's actually a good console despite some of the games made for it that's better and its legacy doesn't stop there for example all you have to do is compare things like the sega action chair and the sega menacer two multi-system accessories and you might see some similarity interesting until next time i've been nostalgia nerd today [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Nostalgia Nerd

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Keywords: konix multisystem, unreleased consoles

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Length: 46min 3sec (2763 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 21 2021