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The Quest
Anyone mentions the holy grail, they get a sodding punch in the face alright? I'm sick to death of hearing that term used when trying to find rare or obscure items. You won't find Tom Hanks with a silly hair cut or any pretty French cryptographers here...
My quest is to fill the gap in my gaming experience that was left by the Konix Multisystem never getting to market. It may have turned out to be poorer than its competitors; it may have been the best thing ever. The whole point is I'll never know.
Unfortunately, I didn't manage to get to the shows that this thing was demonstrated at. If I did, I may have formed a different opinion first hand.
However now I'm an adult with some disposable income, I have made a hobby of collecting obscure and elusive games machines that weren't readily available to me as a child. I've always been a bit of a collector, but it probably all stems from this unobtainable machine taunting me from the pages of glossy magazines.
So thus, my mission in life (I have accepted it, and the tape's already self destructed) is to try to get as close to owning or being able to experience this machine as I can. I don't mind if I only find someone willing to sell me their dev kit (as long as it's got some real Konix code that I can experience first hand). I've accepted that I'll never get to sit on a power chair and zap baddies with the recoiling light gun, and I can sit all day at my MSC PC game controller, but if it's not controlling a real Konix game what's the point?
Of course the more noble cause is to make the materials available to everyone - this I'm attempting to do (at my own cost) by purchasing all the materials scanned and made available within these pages. I'm unsure if there's a real museum for games machines, but If I do ever track down any real tangible items that are worthy of display, then I'd gladly put them in a museum.
Missing In Action
Despite everything that's presented in this website - from magazines to technical spec documents and videos, there's still information out there that would help make the site and the general archive of Multisystem material more complete:
Items that may be obtainable
* Promotional material and items
* Pictures or videos of the games that haven't been mentioned so far
* Compiled binaries, art and music resources and source-code
* Multisystem Circuit diagrams
* Official Konix Price lists
* Examples of Multisystem Box art
* More Multisystem images from the era
* Articles from the rest of the world
* Information regarding the TXE computers
Items that may be a little bit tricky… ;)
* Prototype units (believed to be in the offices of a financial institute,
or maybe even in a major Japanese games machine manufacturers vaults?)
* Dev Kits
* All the peripherals, such as the Power chair, lightgun, number pad
Tasks
If you're able, in order to preserve the Multisystem for everyone, we need to do the following. I've made attempts on all fronts, but have fallen short - if you have the ability or resources, then please help. This especially goes out to developers involved at the time who may have some of these resources.
1) Find a dev kit and fully document it
2) Find Multisystem game or demo source code and archive it
3) Find compiled Multisystem game or demo binaries (makes writing an emulator
more achievable)
4) Write a Multisystem emulator
5) Find the KMS prototype (No, not the MSC controller - but a real one)
6) Find the KMS Power chair, Light gun and Number pad prototypes