CreatiVEmu Forum

I was pointed to the below article many years ago.

The article is an interview with a Korean engineer who worked at Otron (misspelled Oltron) at some point around the end of 1970s. He claims that, during his stay at Otron, the company designed a game console under engagement from Coleco - but in this case it was 6502-based (as opposed to the Colecovision that is Z80-based).

The article may be the only reliable source of information on a console that could well be the CreatiVision. You will find the information spread across various parts of the article, however it is suggested that Coleco engaged Otron to design a console based on 6502 + the Texas Instruments video chip. The console was designed and a handful of games with it (developed internally). But then Coleco opted for something different and the design of the console remained with Otron.

I suspect that the design could then have attracted the attention of VTech and they made the CreatiVision out of it.

I have a journalist friend in the USA that is looking for more sources about this story.

https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Hong_Eu

My (totally unsourced) suspicion would be Texas Instruments made reference system board designs for connecting the VDP and PSG to several microprocessors(6502, Z80, TMS99xx series, maybe even 680x) and sold them around to sell those components, maybe there were resellers and that's how the Creativision(and maybe even Colecovision) were designed, based on those reference guidelines.

I am sure that TI was trying hard to sell their microprocessors and they had a very aggressive strategy to achieve this.
However the similarities between Colecovision and CreatiVision go way beyond what a general purpose VDP/PSG/CPU board would have. I am more inclined to trust that interview.

I believe the fact that TI released the TI-99/4A in June 1981, equipped with the new TMS9918A chip (NTSC) which supports bitmapped graphics and the computer having built-in composite video, marks a change in history. It would seem around then the TMS9919 PSG was renamed SN76489 and the two previously proprietary chips got second sourced (?) and over night offered to other manufacturers. It might have happened a bit earlier in 1981, but I don't know any other system except the original TI-99/4 that has the older 9918 chip, or for that matter a 9919 chip.