A weird and rare french system, built by Stellar Electronique from Grasse, France. The games are two variation of the classic Tank Battle.
Everything on this system have been designed in order to reduce the costs. No joysticks or paddles, just some buttons built-in the console. The case is made of two thermoformed plastic sheets, just stuck with hot glue. The board itself is hot-glued on the lower half of the case ! No screw or bolt were used to built this cheap console, and all the wires and components are hand soldered, suggesting that only a small number of units were built. 1978 is an estimated year of production, as the chip itself was released in 1978.
We need more info about this console ! If you designed, used, or have more info about this system,
please send us pictures or anything you might find useful.
Please consider donating your old computer / videogame system to Old-Computers.com or one of our partners from anywhere in the world (Europe, America, Asia, etc.).
Just pick up one of the numerous General Instruments-based systems and get the appropriate version of Tank Battle for it if you would like to play the game and see how it looks on your tv. Some of the more obscure GI systems are quite rare but most are dirt cheap. They were very popular in Europe as Atari did not release the 2600 there for a little while. The craze caught on, but without the original article lots of companies started churning out simple GI-based consoles to satisfy the demand.
Saturday 4th February 2006
Alex Martin (Seattle, WA)
As this system is based on a GI AY-3-8710 chip which is very similar to the GI AY-3-8700 that you can find in the Coleco Combat!, just look at the Combat! screenshot to see what the game looks like. Playing is very simple : each player has 4 control buttons (forward/reverse for each side of the tank) an a fire button.
