I actually heard a story that Jack Tramiel was VERY interested in Konix and even made an offer to buy the system off them but they turned him down. When everything went sour and they ran out of money they went back to him and Jack, being the stubborn bastard that he was, basically said no way because you turned me down once before. But he was so impressed with Flare that he then hired Richard Miller from Flare to be the Vice President Of Research & Development at Atari and later hired Flare themselves to develop the Jaguar.

As a avid magazine reader back then, i honestly did'nt give too much thought to what the actual games looked like, the 'draw' of the Konix was the shher scope of the idea that not only was the console the controller, but you could mould it to suit the game you were playing!.I'd never seen such a groundbreaking concept being put forward-at that time i'd been used to consoles like the 2600 etc just being simple enough boxes you plugged into TV, plugged a joypad/stick in and off you went, graphics+sound improved with each new generation, but core concept remained set in stone.

Plus, this was a British concept and not something just drip feeding in from the USA or Japan, it honestly felt like we were at the dawn of something bloody amazing just itching to happen, a real arcade experience at home, no comprimises on controls.

I'd have thought the concept at least of some big US or Japanese company buying the Konix system and then putting it's custom electronics inside would have been far too good to turn down, hell a MD  chipset inside a Konix case just amazing potential for SEGA to deliver conversions of things like Space Harrier, Afterburner, Outrun etc, we could have seen the best of both worlds-British innovation with Japanese and US software support.

Maybe corporate pride played it's hand somewhere along the line, i don't know, but Konix always struck me as a real If Only....device.

Here is a 2-page feature on the Konix from Zero magazine:

TGM ran a news article, 'Was we Konned' reporting on the money issues effecting Konix and game development having hit point where everything had stalled until hardware was updated, but it claimed Konix was approached by likes of Ocean and George Lucas, looking to buy the console itself.Konix refused to confirm these rumours.

Zero was reporting that the Konix hardware was to under-go a redesign as the (then) present design had a flaw in the console control pillar-it just was'nt robust enough to take a serious hammering from real gamers :-), plus the chair was having issues getting approved as when the pitch had it moving close to the ground, it'd squash a family cat if it was unlucky enough to be sleeping there at the time.

Nintendo Ate My Hamster? NO! Konix Killed My Cat!

Also, ACE hints at Konix version of Last Ninja 2 having Konix only features, said the flickering, colour graduated energy bars on the bottom left of screen (status panel) could'nt be done on any other machine-Nice graphical effect i'm sure, but really enough to make Konix version stand out from other 16 Bit versions? i fear not....

I actually heard a story that Jack Tramiel was VERY interested in Konix and even made an offer to buy the system off them but they turned him down. When everything went sour and they ran out of money they went back to him and Jack, being the stubborn bastard that he was, basically said no way because you turned me down once before. But he was so impressed with Flare that he then hired Richard Miller from Flare to be the Vice President Of Research & Development at Atari and later hired Flare themselves to develop the Jaguar.

I'd not heard this, but it isn't surprising - Wyn wanted ALL the profit to himself (assuming the machine ever launched and started making money).

TGM ran a news article, 'Was we Konned' reporting on the money issues effecting Konix and game development having hit point where everything had stalled until hardware was updated, but it claimed Konix was approached by likes of Ocean and George Lucas, looking to buy the console itself.Konix refused to confirm these rumours.

From what I've heard (talking to people some 20 years after the event) Ocean weren't that enthused by the machine, so it's unlikely they were going to take a punt.  Lucas was true however and reported by a number of Konix employees and the press.

Zero was reporting that the Konix hardware was to under-go a redesign as the (then) present design had a flaw in the console control pillar-it just was'nt robust enough to take a serious hammering from real gamers :-), plus the chair was having issues getting approved as when the pitch had it moving close to the ground, it'd squash a family cat if it was unlucky enough to be sleeping there at the time.

Nintendo Ate My Hamster? NO! Konix Killed My Cat!

Also, ACE hints at Konix version of Last Ninja 2 having Konix only features, said the flickering, colour graduated energy bars on the bottom left of screen (status panel) could'nt be done on any other machine-Nice graphical effect i'm sure, but really enough to make Konix version stand out from other 16 Bit versions? i fear not....

I really don't see what was so special about that effect, but until we see a video of it running or find the software and emulate it, then we won't get a feel for how unique it was - I'm guessing it wasn't that special.

LOL (@cat attack!) - I guess there would have been CE regulations for safety that they would have had to have met. The biggest deal was getting a motor with enough tourqe to rock the chair without burning out, apparently this was on the way from China, but never got a chance to be used. It was still highly unrealistic that the chair would have been capable of being manufactured for the cost they claimed they were aiming to sell it for.

In terms of graphical performance, the Multisystem didn't as far as I understand have hardware sprites of any fixed size, so if you wanted to you could probably have had a sprite as big as the whole screen. The problem was memory (or lack of it).

You can see on the website that the AMC'89 game had larger sprites than the Amiga's Revenge of the Mutant camels so it was capable.
It's difficult and probably unfair to really compare the Konix against anything as it had such a small amount of games to compare against other machines. Programmers didn't get a chance to get their teeth into the machine to see what it could do.

Also, don't forget that this was designed to take on an unexpanded Amiga 500 - not a 1200.

Hopefully Lee can get back into emulator programming in a short while, there are more demos and a couple more "games" for him to finish. Once he has a more complete representation of the hardware capabilities then he can start writing some test programs to see how well it could really perform.

Excellent reply there, i'll take a look at the points:

1)Ocean-Yeah heard of mixed feelings of the hardware from OCEAN coders who worked on it, general feeling seems to be it was flexible enough, once you got your head around coding for it, but over-all, nothing really that special, kinda like an advanced A500.

2)Konix turning down Lucas-wonder if in hindsight they regret that? Know you've mentioned the money issue (Wyn wanting all the profit), but was there a question of pride? (UK based machine and all that) and do 'we' know what plans Lucas had for it?.

3)The Last Ninja 2 energy bar konix Only effects-Yeah, my personal thoughts are it amounted to little more than cosmetic 'window dressing' and to be blunt, it needed more Konix only effects in the game engine per say, rather than cosmetics on a status panel.From what i've seen, resolution looked worryingly low for a 16 Bit game.

4)The chair for that propsed price-could never see that happening unless they took a massive hit on each unit sold and in effect that'd surely meant putting price of games up beyond the £14.99 tag and then you'd loose a key point of the system.

5)Minter-Whilst i'd loved to have seen what he could squueze out of the Konix, espically given his coding approach (programming Jaguar chips backwards), i was sorely dissapointed by Defender 2000 on Jaguar, main sprite was too large, too powerful when powered up, game just felt unplayable as a result.

We really needed to see some original, 'generation 2' games from Konix to see just how it fared next to the A500 alone.The 256 colour Amiga ports just were'nt going to cut it, i feel in order to make it really stand out, gimmicks or not.It needed triple-A exclusives, but seems publisher approach was wait and see how it sells before fully committing, but if it did'nt have the games it really needed to sell units.....chicken/egg situation.

I'd be very interested to hear just how powerful it was in terms of 3D performance as we've been discussing on here, coders (via some very clever coding) coaxed some small wonders out of the MD, so wonder what Konix could of been capable of?.

Agree with all of the above. I think Wyn was insanely patriotic, so it really would have been about pride as well as cash but mostly it was an exercise to enlarge his ego and bank account.

In terms of the Konix and it's performance, it would be great to see if a good programmer who isn't trying to show off but who is working within the limits of the hardware could write a program for the konix which puts it through it's paces - E.G., how many sprites on screen at once, how large are they. Can they be mixed over 3D etc. Can it play 20+ channels of audio and do something game like at the same time.
The beauty of emulation is that you can throw more memory at that test too to see how it would look if it really had more memory (as an intellectual experiment of course).

The PCEngine did pretty well when it was given the extra memory of the Arcade Card.

The problem is, once you let a really clever programmer loose on hardware they do crazy things like the demo coders do getting a c64 to display nice 3D and all sorts of seemingly impossible tricks.

After time programmers learnt how to use advanced tricks like undocumented opcodes and such to squeeze what became standard extra performance from the 8bits like the c64 and speccy. Look at mayhem in Monster land VERY late in the C64's life once all the tricks had been learnt to squeeze additional performance.
2nd Gen games would probably have comfortably shown the performance capability of the Konix without trick, but with the benefit of lessons learnt and familiarity with the system.

Most of the konix games and demos WERE really dissapointing but basically because they were rushed out before a trade show and had Programmers doing the sound and graphics. Only when real development teams got their teeth into it would we have seen the true capability of the machine, and I think we would have seen the real character of it too. I think the Konix games would have looked and felt different to the other machines in it's own unique way and not just Amiga ports.

I will keep working tirelesly to find Konix software in ex-programmers collections that we can emulate and share. Don't worry, I've got several leads at the moment, and I never give up hope of something coming up.

Part of me still thinks it would have been bloody fantastic IF Konix had 'shook up ' the industry, fantastic as MD/SNES/PC Eng were, they were just more of the same-a slab, you plugged carts into, connected to TV with a variation of control pads attached to.

The concept of atransforming controller and console all in 1 was the kind of out-the-box thinking i long to see in todays hardware, yet we get..'revisions' of i-Devices and smart phones, PC in a box consoles, Company A copies Company B...whilst Compancy C say's we have something similar coming.It's all gotten so stagnant.

Konix felt like a tidal wave building up and the fact that this was a UK device? Even bloody better, so part of me can side with Wyn's pride whilst another part might be thinking 'greedy bast*rd' but unless we ever know what the Lucas deal consisted of, it's all speculation.

I'd love to see an honest to god, built for Konix from ground up game, no tech demo's or rolling demo's, but the real Mcoy-Just to see what the system was capable of and what comprimises had to be made.Looking at something like the Playstation 2 for a moment:On paper, it dwarfed competition like the Dreamcast and magazines talked about 75 Million Polys per second, Dolby 5.1 Sound etc etc, but like Konix, as soon as coders got development kits, moans started about how hard it was to code for and those claims? well Doly 5.1 could only play in cutscenes and your looking at 20 Million Polys a sec max at very best time you put in lighting effects, game logic etc etc and coders say the system was held back by limited Ram, but you look at a 1st gen PS2 game, say Timesplitters and then a end of cycle PS2 game, say God Of War II-worlds apart, i suspect Konix games would have been similar.

Actual game performance rather different to on paper claims, but noticable jump in performance as the best coders worked out how to squeeze every last trick out of it.

Brilliant work on your part so far my friend, very much appreciated.Do you have any idea what TGM meant when it talked of all Konix development having stalled until hardware was upgraded? are we talking more memory needed? better tools? more upto date dev.kits? or what?.

Also, given press habit of reviewing unfinished games, did TGM review a final copy version of Hammer Fist do you think? or was there some dodgy buisness here with TGM looking for that 'Exclusive!!!!' review?.