5 Consoles That Could Be Upgraded Into Home Computers

In this short documentary I tell the stories behind 5 different consoles that could upgraded into existing home computers.

Video Links:

#colecovision #atari #amiga

[baroncalamityplus]

I had an Adam and it must have been one of the golden units. Had zero issues with it and it was a great computer for 3 years. Its printer was letter quality and it made all my school work look great. Better than those with dot matrix printers. As for gaming, thanks to the video game crash and Adam's failure, I was able to get many games and software for the price of lunch.

[tancar]

I had the XEGS. Got it for Christmas the year it came out and eventually got a disk drive for it. It was months before I realized missile command was built in. Became a huge fan of Microprose games especially F-15, Silent service, and Crusade in Europe. It was my computer until 1993 when I could afford a 486.

[Art-po]

I never had an Amiga CD32 but I had an A1200. It was truly a 16 bit machine with 32 bits

[paulmurgatroyd]

I love the design of the Atari XE game system... much more appealing than all the black boxes.

[klax]

my uncle gave me his coleco adam (the all in one unit) back in 1992 & it still works to this day. this was the first "retro" game system i ever got & it is what started me collecting retro systems. now i want to get an atari xegs

[davidmylchreest]

My family had a Daewoo Hi-fi back in the day. What a random memory this video has unlocked.

[chriskutz]

The Atari XEGS and the TRS-80 Color Computer were both Awesome.

[gstcomputing]

My parents bought the family an Adam computer for Christmas of 1985 because they were practically giving them away for $199.00 at Toys R Us due to their recent "orphaned" status. The Adam had its fair share of problems, but it kickstarted my career when I was just 11 years old.

[danehenry]

I had the pleasure of owning one of these in my childhood.. A christmas present my mom tried to hide, managed to get it in November. My mates had C64's and Speccy's. The XE had some games that were graphically superior (which they all would admit in the playground) but sadly let down by the limited library. My spectrum zx mates would get ripped into the most for those 7 blocky colours but his argument was he had the better games (which was undoubtedly true)...

Love this machine!!

[nicksmith]

Great content as usual, thanks for posting!

[super-gerald]

I remember the Adam. The power supply for the whole system was in the printer. The printer was also the first component in the system to fail.

[windfisch]

Looking at the German advert for the 130XE, I never knew that the in-store demo existed in German.

And add-ons that turned the CD32 into an A1200 actually were sold right at the start of the console in Germany. I saw them presented at World of Commodore 1993 in Cologne, and they were offered via mail order from Amiga magazines. A bit later there were even bundles of the CD32 with the SX32 module, a black keyboard and an external disk drive. That was before the remaining stock was sold.

But I can imagine that this was limited to Germany where the CD32 did have some success.

[martinbay]

I still want to own a Coleco Adam. I had a Colecovision-System back in time (and still have) and the Adam was my first choice. Until I heard about the price, 3.000 Deutschmark and some of the problems, the Hardware had. But I still like the system and idea behind it.

[Sarcophagus]

I would love to play around with one of those machines for the weekend.

[franklintang]

Good old Lori Loughlin in the Coleco Adam commercial. Haha😂 1:51

[JustWastedHoursHere]

It seems like a no-brainer of a good idea to have keyboard (and other add-ons) available to extend the usefulness of various consoles, but for some reason there have been few successes in this idea. I REALLY wanted the Adam add-on for the Colecovision but I couldn't talk my parents into it. Eventually they ended up severely discounted but by that time I had moved onto other computers, namely the Commodore 64. And no regrets.

[drno-xcyt]

The Atari XE is an interesting system. You have to give to Atari for taking what was in effect 10 year old hardware and making a modestly successful game system - it speaks to just how good and how far ahead of their time the Atari 8--bit computers were. That said, I wonder if there was a massive missed opportunity. Given that the Atari 5200 was little more than an Atari 8-bit computer in a big fancy shell, and given that there was a push to have game systems that could also be computers, I wonder if introducing the 5200 as an XE-like system would have been a success - take an Atari 800, strip it down to a game system, and let owners of the system add peripherals if they decided later that they wanted to upgrade the system to a proper computer.

[marccaselle]

I saw the Atari XEGS game system at a babysitter's house in the 80s when I was little.

I never saw it anywhere else. The pastel buttons were a nice touch and it looked like the Easter Bunny exploded lol.

[delscoville]

lol @ that XE ad... Better sound than a Commodore 64? No way. Even the Atari ST didn't have better sound. Although it was close, different waveforms, but lacjing filters. The XE had Pokey sound from 1979, only square waves. The reason why I moved from Atari 800 to the Commodore 64 is the SID chip.

[ChrisDreher]

0:55 The video says "Keyboard Component" but it shows the ECS. Those are 2 very different computer upgrades for the Intellivision. The KC had a full version of Microsoft's BASIC (similar to Apple and Commodore) and a software controlled tape drive for formatted tapes with sectors (not tapes for home cassette players) and added a 2nd CPU to the setup. The ECS, on the other hand, was a very stripped down computer add-on (no fancy tape drive, no 2nd CPU, had unusual BASIC, merely added 2KB RAM).