History of video games/Platforms/Unisonic Champion 2711

Development
The system was developed and manufactured in Japan beginning near the end of 1977. However Unisonic Products Corporation itself was headquartered in New York City in the United States of America.

The system was marketed with a simple endorsement from sports commentator Jimmy the Greek, real name Jimmy Snyder.

Launch
The system was released in the United States of America in 1978.

The system saw a Japanese release in February of 1979 under the new name of Casino TV Games.

Legacy
It is estimated that only around 500 Champion 2711 consoles were produced, with some collectors only being able to confirm the existence of 13 consoles. The system is remembered today for it's particular quirks which lead to low quality games. The system represents a transitional time in the development of video game consoles, and shows the struggles of attempting to transition from production of dedicated consoles to early cartridge based consoles.

Despite it's obscurity emulation support for the system was eventually added to MESS 0.167. Associated project MAME 0.167 was released on October 28th, 2015.

Technology
The Unisonic Champion was powered by the capable 16-bit CP1610 CPU clocked at 3.58 megahertz. The system also had 256 bytes of RAM through twin TMS4043NL chips, containing 256 4-bit nibbles of RAM each. However the system was limited by it's unorthodox GPU, the General Instrument AY-3-8800-1. This chip controls CPU access to the RAM, and effectively shuts the CP1610 down for 75% of the time while it draws the video display. It also means the Unisonic Champion 2711 was uniquely limited to text and playing card graphics. The video output has a nominal resolution of 153 pixels by 96 pixels with a palette of 4 colors (white, black, green, and red). The AY-3-8800-1 splits the screen into two regions. The left side of the screen is a 36x96 pixel region that can only display white characters on a green background in a 6x12 character grid. Each character is selected from a fixed 5x7 font of 64 upper-case characters drawn in 6x8 pixel blocks. Only 58 of the characters are unique as the J, Q, K, A, 0 and space characters are duplicated within the font. The right region of the screen is 117x96 pixels and can display a grid of 13x6 characters, each 9x16 pixels in size. The characters shown on the right of the screen are one of: a white 5x7 character from the standard 64 character font shown at the bottom of the 9x16 block, a white 9x16 playing card symbol shown on a red or black background of the appropriate suit color, or a solid white 9x16 character. Therefore, the foreground color is always white, and the background color is defined by the character being shown at a particular location (e.g. a red background must, and can only, be used for Diamonds and Hearts card symbols shown on the right side of the screen). Sound was also generated by the AY-3-8800-1, which could produce 3 simple simple audio tones of 500Hz, 1KHz and 2KHz.

The system is contained on a densely packed green PCB.

The Unisonic takes DC power in at 15 volts and 1 amp.