We’re back. Last week’s Fuzzy Memory mysery was such an astounding success that we’ve received another request from someone seeking resolution of their distant childhood gaming memories. I’m not a fount of infinite knowledge, so like always, I need the adept VC&G readership to help solve the mystery.

Spirits of Ancient Egypt

Julia, from Australia, wrote me a few days ago regarding an electronic handheld game from her past:

G’day red

I’m hoping you can help me locate a game I played when I was a child. I live in South Australia. The game was a handheld game made around 1981 with a lcd screen. The name Tutankhamen comes to mind but it may have been called something else, but I’m pretty sure it had an Egyptian theme. I don’t remember how the game was played, I only remember what it looks like. It may have been red in colour, small between 10-20cm wide an I recall it had a little black stand attached to the bottom of it. I think it was modelled after the 2 player tabletop arcade games except a mini version.

Your help would be much appreciated!

Cheers

-Julia

So, here we pick up some key clues: (a) the game might have been called Tutankhamen, (b) it had an Egyptian theme, (c) it was probably manufactured around 1981; (d) it used an LCD for a display; (e) it was handheld (likely battery-powered); (f) it was red with a black stand, and (g) it was possibly modeled after a tabletop arcade game.

I don’t recall many LCD handheld games being made around 1981 — most used LEDs. So that detail (or the date) may very well be fuzzy. No offense to Julia, of course, but it’s also easy to confuse LCD with LED if you don’t quite know the difference. A 1981 LCD game is possible, though, so keep both options in mind.

It should also be noted that Julia lives in South Australia. That might factor heavily in your search.

The Search Begins

So what do you guys think? We need your help in identifying the game described above. If you have any ideas, please leave a comment on this post. Julia will be checking out your responses, so she might be able to clarify some details if needed. The game is afoot!

Update: 04/30/2008

That didn’t take long. VC&G reader and Fuzzy sleuth extraordinaire Layne found a 1980s handheld unit that seems to perfectly match Julia’s description on the Handheld Games Museum website. It’s called Tutankham and it was manufactured by Bandai. Here’s a picture:

So now we turn to Julia to see if, in fact, this is the correct unit. Keep an eye on the comments for the latest developments.

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Have a memory of a computer, video game, computer software, or electronic toy you need help identifying? Send me an email describing your memories in detail. Hopefully, the collective genius of the VC&G readership can help solve your mystery.

Often we yearn to reclaim fond memories from childhood, but those memories remain just out of reach. Sometimes the event or object we’re seeking happened so long ago that our recollections have become foggy or even distorted over time.

Well, in a way, that’s why I’m here. As a historian, I like to help people reconnect with and rediscover the past. I regularly receive emails from people looking for information on games, toys, or computers that they haven’t seen in years. Last week, I found another such email waiting in my inbox that left me stumped. That’s why I’m turning to you, my wonderful readers, for help in solving the mystery.

[ Continue reading [ Fuzzy Memory ] Seeking Childhood Computer Toy » ]

Yesterday afternoon, I made a trip to some local thrift stores that I hadn’t visited in eight years. I left with a 24-game N64 cartridge drawer, some books, an unopened copy of Bill Gates’ The Road Ahead on audio cassette, some neat board games, and the two devices you see above. It’s more junk, but it’s good junk.

The VTech Talking Whiz-Kid (1987, right) came with the box, manual, and cards. This educational toy reads paper “program cards” as you insert them into an optical reader slot. The cards don’t contain any software, but instead bear a simple bar code that tells the Whiz-Kid which built-in program to start. Highlights include Hangman, word scramble, and an extremely limited calculator.

I remember seeing the VTL Computron (1980, left) in J.C. Penney catalogs as a kid. It works too, although it’s missing the battery door. The LED-based Computron plays matching games based on which letter you select. Most of the games obviously went along with a printed guidebook that I don’t have.

Neither device does BASIC like the VTech Pre-Computer 1000, but they’re both highly collectible microprocessor-powered toys. Total cost for both? $10 (US).

Anybody else have one of these? Feel free to share your memories with us.

I found myself up in Boone, NC last week at a recently opened Goodwill store. Upon arriving, I quickly made my way back to the electronics section. The place was packed with an unusual surplus of wireless 802.11g network routers — something I’d never seen before in a thrift shop. Most of the items were overpriced, though.

Among the dozen TVs and broken stereos on the sagging back shelves, I found a few gems. In the end, I walked away with a new, in-box controller for the forgettable HyperScan video game system ($2), a shrinkwrapped copy of Microsoft’s Return of Arcade ($4), and my most interesting find, a VTech PreComputer 1000 ($4). Believe it or not, but I’ve actually wanted a VTech Precomputer for some time. A handful of different toy and electronics companies produced a whole class of “educational” or kids’ computers in the 1980s that I’d like to collect. Most of the more sophisticated models have some version of BASIC built in, and the VTech PC1000 is no exception.

Back in the day, the BASIC programming language (or even Logo — remember the turtle?) was considered the best way to teach kids how to use a computer. They called the push to teach ordinary people how to use these machines “computer literacy” like we do today, but the methods of obtaining that literacy were different. For a time in the late 1970s and early 80s, educators, politicians, technologists, and pundits in major publications around the U.S. worried that every citizen would have to know how to program a computer or they’d be left out of the computer revolution, and thus, the future. After all, if you want to tell a computer to do something, you have to program it, right? How else are you going to get it to do what you want? It seems strange to us now that they didn’t realize that we’d all be running other people’s programs instead (Microsoft did, of course). That popular perception began to shift after the release of the Macintosh in 1984, but the change didn’t fully get here until the mid-1990s. Now we teach people how to use Microsoft Word. By golly, if someone doesn’t know how to program complex and obtuse Word macros, how will they ever be able to create a competitive résumé? In a way, not much has changed.

Anyway, back to the PreComputer. I disassembled the unit today to see what makes it tick. As I suspected, the unit’s CPU is a Z-80 clone, the Toshiba TMPZ84C00AP. I also spotted the prominently marked Video Technology (VTech) ROM on the motherboard which contains built-in trivia games in subjects like history, geography, and science, calculator functionality, Hangman, and a typing course. One of the rubber-button options on the PC1000 is “Computer Drill,” which lets you look at nine built-in sample BASIC programs or program in “Pre-Basic 1.0″ yourself. Although the PC1000’s twenty-character, one line LCD display is quite limiting, it’s still a compelling feature that’s fun to play with. And heck, the thing has an impressive full-stroke QWERTY keyboard with insert and delete keys. It’s almost as if the PreComputer’s designers were begging for their creation to be used for more than meets the eye.

I don’t have the manual for the PreComputer, so I have no idea if it can save your programs temporarily in memory, or the extent to which its interpreter supports traditional BASIC commands. I’d particularly like to know how to print to the LCD screen without the automatic pause after each line, if that’s possible. If anyone has a copy of the manual for this and can scan it or type it up for me (especially the section on BASIC), I would be much obliged. Did anyone out there have one of these as a kid? I’d love to hear from you in the comments section.

[ Update: 07/30/2007 - Many generous thanks to Chris Ball for obtaining, scanning, and providing the BASIC section of the PreComputer 1000 instruction manual. You can download all the pages in high resolution JPEG format here (25 MB). Be warned, though: the file is big. Thanks again, Chris! ]