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What Remains of the Konix Multisystem ?
Sadly, very little actual physical evidence of it's existance remains.
There are some devkits still around (possibly 20), although as far as I know, none have
found ther way into the hands of collectors, and as such the public can't see
what it was all about. It's an important point that as long as these machines
fester in the lofts or garages of developers, these machines can't be
properly archived and catalogued. It's as frustrating for us retro historians
as it must be for an archeologist to know that there are items of great
sigificance burried 10 feet in the ground from where they are standing and
they are not allowed to dig them up, record, clean and display them.
I appeal to any developer that I haven't alread talked to who has a
multisystem devkit tuckked away somewhere to allow us to record it for
posterity.
A Multisystem Dev kit (modeled by Jeff Minter)
It is not (currently) known where the Prototype consoles and Chairs ended up. I asked Wyn directly and you can read his interesting response in the interview. Some of the code written for the machine still exists, but is not available. Now that there is effectivly the beginings of a working flare one emulator, if only we could get some Konix code then we wouldn't be far off having a working Konix multisystem emulator - how great would that be? So again, I appeal to all of you developers who were involved with the project to look through your archives of floppies and see if you can find any konix code. maybe then we can finally preserve all your hard work that semmingly went to waste at the time. So, for now, savour the few screen shots of potentially interesting games like AMC '89. It would seem to me that a publisher would keep an archive of all the work being produced for their machine (even early builds submtted for approval or vetting) so I'm only speculating, but I'd assume that there was a box of floppies with all the games as they were out there somewhere.
Multisystem Inside
The slipstream ASIC on the other hand does live on in the form of the
Cobra PCB developed and used in certain BellFruit pub quiz machines. Flare
sold their technology to Bellfruit, and interestingly ATD were closely
invovled in producing code for the system and even went on to develop another
system for Bellfruit (which I assume was the Cobra 3?). Now in terms of
preserving the technology, the problem is, that these machines are very old
by fruit machine standards, and as such don't become available for purchase
very often. It is worth keeping an eye on Ebay and the like for these machine
turning up as they do occasionally. They are refered to as SWP (skill with
prizes) machines rather than fruit machines or the more generic 'quiz
machine'.
Click the arcade machine image to the right to find out more about the Flare Bellfruit connection ->
Interestingly, the Slipstrestream ASIC also found it's way into an internet set top box.
Arguably the first ever internet set top box? Manufactured by MSU the
company Wyn set up after Konix and developed partly by Martin Brennan of
flare, the MSU Slipstream set top box very definately found it's way into
production and was pretty sucessful. Maybe one of the American readers of
this website can help me hunt down a MSU slipstream STB. It must be said,
that although it used a later revision of the ASIC, it definately wasn't a
console. There were no thoughts about making it play games.
Multisystem in here too!
And quite famously, the Slipstream controller was sold to a Chinese company who called themselves Multi System China (MSC) for 1 Million pounds. This was then turned into a completely analog joystick with none of the refinements of the origional design like judder. Please don't buy one of these controllers (they come up on ebay every now and then) thinking you're getting an actual Konix Multisystem - there is no electronics worth speaking of in the unit, just a pcb for managing the potentiometers, buttons and interface to a PC joystick port. Certainly not even a hint of Konix Multisystem electronics in any way shape or from. However please feel free to buy one as a novelty or a conversation peice. But just remember it isn't made by Konix and it never was an actual Multisystem with the guts ripped out.
Finally, you can argue that the Konix lives on in the Jaguar, however my personal take is that the spirit and design methodologies are the only thing in common between the Slipstream and the Jaguar. You won't find the actual Slipstream ASIC, the processors are different, the memory is different, basically, it's like comparing the Michael Cane Italian job Mini to the Charlieze Theron italian job BMW mini. The jaguar was a Flare two. It was designed to further expand the ambitions that the Flare one designers had for their first project. There is no real association with the Multisystem, and there certainly would have been no backwards compatibility like modern console manufacturers strive to include in the evoloutions of their console designs.