Entex Select-a-Game (1981, VFD, 4 C Batteries, Model# 6030-Z)

CPU: Space Invader 2 cartridge: Hitachi HD38800-A31

Manual for Console, Baseball 4, Pac-Man 2, Pinball and Space Invader 2 available, overlay scans available below.

Concept by Tony Clowes

Case designed by Ortega Orr / Ron Chesley

Electronics designed and programmed by Entex Tokyo

Entex's first cartridge based handheld/tabletop game system. Only 6 games were released for this system: Baseball 4, Basketball 3, Football 4, Pac-Man 2, Pinball, and Space Invader 2 (which came with the system). Two other games (Battleship and Turtles) are mentioned on some of the boxes and printed material, but they've never been seen (I'm not certain if they were ever finished, or even started...) Space Invader 2 is almost identical to their Space Invader handheld game and Pac Man 2 is identical to the Pac Man 2 handheld game in almost every way (with the added cool bonus of intermissions!), and I suspect that Football 4 is also similar to the Football 4 handheld (and the Baseball and Basketball cartridges are probably similar to their final handheld versions). Pac Man 2 is by far the rarest game for this system since Entex had to stop selling it after reaching a settlement with Coleco (the company that officially licensed the Pac Man game/name from Namco for handheld game use).

The game seems a lot like a VFD version of Milton Bradley's Microvision: it has a simple 7x16 grid of dots (or ovals) with every other row of 7 being a different color (top row is red, second is white, next is red, and so on). Also like Microvision, the CPU for each game is actually in the cartridge (the console itself is nothing more than the generic VFD display and it's power circuits). Each cartridge comes with a little overlay you put over the screen to make the playfield. They should have made overlays for the keyboard as well, but they didn't (though it's not all that hard to figure out, just a little trial and error, or read the manual...) Check out the Guts section to see the inside of this game.

The next generation of this machine, if it was ever produced, would have been the huge Table Top Game Machine with a 7" x 11" display.



Cartridge/boxes (Click on any to view/download a 300 DPI scan of the overlay for that

game. They are saved as IBM .TIFs using LZW compression and are about 1.5 meg each):





Do I have this? Yes, boxed with Space Invader 2, Baseball 4, Pac-Man 2 and Pinball boxed, Football 4 loose.

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