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View Full Version : CreatiVision website update, new emulator, stuff from South Africa, etc.



MADrigal
11-09-2009, 07:28 AM
Here we are with a new "big" site update.

I've been recently contacted by my long-time South African friend, Paul Rahme, who now lives in London. He sent me a lot of pictures of his South African CreatiVision, peripherals and games, all branded by Telefunken MicroTEK. I made a deep search on those pictures, got a few additional informations, and came to know that the console apparently sold in South Africa *before* than in Europe!

Of course you can download pictures of the console, the cassette tape player (with box), and six game manuals from the usual Releases/hardware and Releases/software pages.
Oddity: the tape player is named "Cassette interface module" instead of "Cassette storage module".

As a nice addition, Paul also sent me a copy of a wonderful 4-pages flyer from South Africa, showing the console, peripherals, and games, even having a brief introduction to almost all of the commands of the BASIC interpreter! Grab the flyer as a PDF file from the Flyers database.

Time to do some reading. Two Italian friends, Mario Verdi and Mauro Spadazzi, sent me a few scans from Italian magazines and books. Mario sent scans from the "Dizionario dei VideoGame" book - that's a pocket encyclopedia of videogames, where CreatiVision is also mentioned. Mauro sent scans from articles appearing on issues 2 and 3 of Italian magazine "Computer Games".

And it's now time for emulators! Nineteen months after the release of FunnyMu 0.48 Unofficial, I'm now releasing FunnyMu 0.49 Unofficial with a top-wanted feature: fullscreen mode. Here's what's new:


Changelog
=========
0.49 unofficial
* added fullscreen mode (select fullscreen/windowed option on funnymu.ini config file)
* minor fixes here and there, and cleanings to source code

Executable is available for Windows, and source code is available for Linux users. The new CreatiVe-UI 1.08 graphics interface helps Windows users to configure and launch emulator. All files available for download on the Emulators page.


Link: http://www.madrigaldesign.it/creativemu/

Enjoy! :-D

rbudrick
11-12-2009, 07:03 PM
Very cool. Thanks, MADrigal! South Africa? Who would've guessed!?

-Rob

slapdash
11-14-2009, 07:46 PM
Funny... I had a contact from South Africa YEARS ago (like 1995 maybe), and knew about the Creativision being available down there for a long time. But I didn't realize it was available SOONER than in Europe. Wow.

MADrigal
11-15-2009, 06:14 AM
Funny... I had a contact from South Africa YEARS ago (like 1995 maybe), and knew about the Creativision being available down there for a long time. But I didn't realize it was available SOONER than in Europe. Wow.

I "studied" carefully the "internal-use codes" printed on the tape player cardboard box, and noticed that the South African version has lower number than the Australian version (Australia was supposed to be the very first market where the cassette tape player sold).

Also in game manuals, "internal-use codes" (printed on last page, bottom right corner) are lower than German versions (Germany/Austria was supposed to be the very first markets where console and games were sold).

Also, the South African flyer shows 7 games only, and later released games as Deep Sea Adventure (late 1982) are not even mentioned. BASIC was "forthcoming". Crazy Chicky is not mentioned, since it probably was not yet released in place of the (retired from market) Crazy Pucker.

So, CV was definately released in S.Africa before Europe and Australia :)

vintagegamecrazy
11-15-2009, 10:32 AM
Very cool site, don't own a Cv but I will bookmark that site so I can read up on it and maybe buy one sometime.