Acetronic MPU-1000

The MPU-1000 was one face of a console that wore many. The hardware itself was designed by Radofin, a Hong Kong outfit that licensed it out wholesale, so the same machine surfaced across Europe and beyond under a bewildering array of brand names. Trace the silicon, though, and a bigger name appears: the brains were a pair of chips from Signetics, by then owned by Philips. And Philips already had a console of its own, the Videopac. Which has long fuelled a suspicion among collectors: that Philips was perfectly happy to let its chip division quietly arm everyone else's budget machines, so long as none of them wore the Philips badge and undercut the Videopac directly.

The companies that licenced the platform were not, shall we say, luminaries of the electronics or games industry. Acetronic, Prinztronic, Voltmace, Audiosonic, to name a few - names hardly anyone had ever heard of, even back then. Alongside the plethora of machines came the same suite of clunky games, often released under different names in a different box, sometimes even in a different shape cartridge because different vendors used different cartridge slot configurations even though the underlying hardware was identical.

Many of these consoles were sold to parents who had them pitched to them as "just as good but cheaper". So these were the machines that broke kids' hearts on Christmas Day when they unwrapped the box expecting to see the Atari Fuji logo and saw Acetronic instead. And Ace it was not! The graphics were blocky even by the standards of the day, the library was thin, and the experience fell some way short of the systems it was undercutting. It is remembered now mostly by dedicated collectors, as a snapshot of just how crowded and chaotic the late-1970s console market really was.