This I think is going to be the first somewhat controversial placing on the list. The 7800 was a console designed by a company called General Computer Corporation. This company was known for creating a bootleg of Pac-Man that ended up becoming better known as Ms Pac-Man after it had become officially licensed by Atari. Atari also got ahold of this 7800 design and were originally planning to release it in 1984, but due to the video game crash that happened in the US in the mid 80s it ended up being indefinitely shelved. Finally in 1986 Atari changed their mind and the system got its proper launch.

Unfortunately you can actually kind of tell that this was the course of events just by looking at the early games for the system as they were all about 2 years behind what the competition of the time were doing. In fact the system's games were perpetually behind what was going on at the time, with some ports of popular titles not arriving until 4 years after NES owners got them!

Hardware wise it was a mixed bag, there were a few minor strengths against the Master System and NES in some areas but in others, such as the sound, it was shamefully behind.

So here we have the Emerson Arcadia, now this is actually just one of many versions of a hardware design that was originally developed by Philips. The system is pretty much the successor hardware to an earlier console called the VC4000, a machine that had gained some limited popularity in Germany a few years prior that we will get more into later.

Essentially in the late 70s Philips acquired a United States computer chip manufacturer called Signetics, they had wanted to show off their newly acquired Signetics computer chips and as such had designed a console around them, but given that they already had their own console on the market, the Odyssey 2, Philips chose to lease out this design to other companies who would then produce consoles under a range of different brand names, the VC4000 was one of these machines. After achieving some success with this, Philips upgraded the chips and designed a new console and decided to do the same thing again, resulting in this machine, the Emerson Arcadia.

The Arcadia I'd say is a bit of a step down from its predecessor, not enough about the hardware had been improved given the amount of progress the competition had made during the time frame and as a result the games were a bit dated looking for the time. Also, much like the case with the VC4000 the games, whilst decent in number and reasonably polished were very cookie-cutter and nothing really stood out against the competition.

And now the third attempt from Commodore at making a console! And... actually its a definite improvement! Still not quite up to contemporary standards though truth be told.

Again this is another consolised version of one of their computers but in this instance the computer design was only a year odd old, far less than was the case with the CDTV and C64GS which appeared 4 and 8 years after their Computer counterparts respectively.

The system had also been made to be more intuitive and easy to use for console gamers, with its software clearly marked and widespread, new, specially made console style joypad's with triggers, and a minor change or two made to the hardware itself too.

Unfortunately however, whilst this console did come out soon after its computer counterpart, the computer itself, the Amiga 1200 was actually a little disappointing at the time of release. Whilst the earlier Commodore machines, the Amiga 500 and C64 had really been leading the pack at release, this one was only a modest upgrade. This was the 90s and 3D gaming was the next big thing and whilst the Amiga 1200 wasn't completely useless for these types of games it did really struggle with both 3D graphics as well as the fake 3D method Doom and other first person shooters of the time used. Its games in this area were crude looking or had very low frame rates, with even the Atari Jaguar noticeably dominating it in this area. The system had been made to compete with the Mega CD but had ended up in over its head when the real competition turned up.

Where it comes to other games though surprisingly the software came thick and fast, with publishers rapidly converting their Amiga computer titles to CDs at a good pace, and though many of them were actually designed for the older Amiga 500 and not the latest model, there were still a good few 1200 games available too.

I debated on whether or not to include this one for a while, its almost exactly the same on the inside as the more famous Atari 5200 however it had a more traditional controller design and didn't support the same cartridges. Unfortunately I'm going to have to go over some Atari history here, which always includes a bunch of confusing numbered consoles and illogical business decisions so bear with me!

So basically, after releasing the popular 2600 console Atari had decided to release a new computer line, which ended up being somewhat successful and had some great games released for it (especially during the 1982-83 period when it was peaking in the US). Atari based their 5200 console on this computer hardware but changed the cartridge slot and controller ports so that the computer games and controllers were not compatible, limiting the software library and forcing users to use the specific, infamously terrible 5200 controllers. Suffice to say the 5200 died fast, it wasn't even released outside of America. Atari then released their new next gen console to compete with the NES, the 7800. Now this all brings us back around to this console, the XEGS. In 1987, 1 year after they'd released the 7800 Atari tried yet again with the same old 5200 hardware, but this time they released a console that was completely compatible with their computers... which is really what they should've done with the Atari 5200 to begin with! So not only did they release this system 5 years too late, but Atari had also created two products that were competing with each other for the same market share!

Anyway, where do I stand on all this? Well probably a little differently to most people to be honest. Generally this console's release is seen as completely unfathomable and pointless, with most being of the opinion that it distracted from the 7800 and split Atari's resources, but personally, while I can kind of see the logic, My feeling is that given that Atari's main problem was raising cash and attracting 3rd parties, I'd argue it was actually the 7800 that shouldn't have been released. This system, the XEGS was much lower risk and lower cost, it had a huge oven-ready library of games and continued software support and its hardware still had some tradeoffs with the 7800 anyway and still had a trick or two up its sleeve too. Homebrew titles like Crownland show it had a lot more potential that it never achieved.

I've already covered this console's successor, the 1990 Zemmix Super V, this one was the original released by Daewoo in South Korea in 1985.

As mentioned before its a consolised version of the original Japanese MSX computers, which themselves were based on the off-the-shelf Texas Instruments chipset (so essentially this is another Colecovision alike, except in this case with a better sound chip). The Colecovision had been out for 3 years by this stage so the hardware wasn't that great for the time (especially in regards to scrolling), and reportedly the original controllers kind of sucked too, however the hardware was still just about good enough to play the sorts of games that were popular at this stage and the controllers apparently did get better over time.

The original MSX was a reasonably popular computer so there was also tons of software available for it, though unfortunately compatibility was a bit lower here than with the Super V as there was no real expandability options, so really it just played the cartridge games. Fortunately the majority of the best MSX games had been on the cartridge format anyway, unfortunately however games were also rarely optimised for the Zemmix, meaning that sometimes the original MSX cartridges required now nonexistent keyboard functions to work properly on a Zemmix, rendering them largely unplayable.

Even so there are still a ton of MSX titles that work well on the system, including loads of classics from Konami such as original games in the Gradius series and the very first Parodius game. Koreans did make some of their own games here and there as well and even ported some arcade games, and given that copyright laws in Korea were in their infancy at the time you saw some really obvious knock-offs of Mario and such hit the console too.

This was SNK's attempt at entering into the more mainstream console market. Previously they had released the Neo Geo AES, which was a highly impressive, highly expensive cartridge machine aimed at the premium market. The Neo Geo CD was just a later update of this system which used much cheaper CD media. They'd replaced the cartridge slot with a laser, put a load of onboard ram into the system, and packed it with a joypad instead of an arcade stick.

Unfortunately these hardware changes had a detrimental effect on the games to an extent, as all that huge game data which was previously on a cartridge that could be loaded almost instantly now had to be read off the CD by a fairly slow drive and transferred to the console's RAM. The Neo Geo CD became notorious for long load times, with some games like Last Blade giving you 4 minutes of load times to get into the game. Later on this problem was alleviated when the CDZ model was released, which had a double speed CD rom drive, but this model was only released in Japan.

The load times were really not the only problem with the console though, whilst the change to CDs allowed the games to become much more competitively priced, the hardware itself was still not all that cheap and was more expensive than the PS1 at launch. Worse still, by the time this was released the hardware had lost a lot (though to be fair not all), of its impressiveness. Newer rivals like the Playstation and Saturn could not be dominated in the way that the Mega Drive and SNES had been, and whilst the Neo Geo was not lagging so much on 2D, with later titles such as the Last Blade, Metal Slug and later King of Fighters games still very much holding their own against the 2D offerings of the PS1 and Saturn, this was the era of 3D which the Neo Geo hardware could not really deal with at all.

With the release of the Mega Drive and the announcement of the Super Nintendo hardware, NEC, the maker of the Turbografx-16 started to get nervous about their own system's ability to compete. In the face of this new competition, they flinched, and rushed out this new console, the Supergrafx, merely 2 years after they'd launched their first system. This turned out to be a grave mistake, people were not yet ready to upgrade as it was far too early for a new console, and besides which the PC-Engine hardware was incredibly well designed and could handle itself against the competition admirably anyway!

Software support for the system was dropped... fast, with only an anemic 5 games being released in the entire library and it was quietly swept under the carpet as NEC went back to supporting the Turbografx-16 and its new CD add-on.

You may wonder how a console with only 5 games, only half of which were good, manages to get this high up the list, well it has one good point, the backwards compatibility with the original Turbografx. Now generally I'm not putting any stock into backwards compatibility in this list, but with the Supergrafx its a different matter as its backwards compatibility was with a system that was still up to date anyway and would be for years to come.

This was a first generation console dedicated to playing the arcade game Stunt Cycle, which was a fairly popular game at the time, plus a few variations.

You turn the console's handlebar to choose your speed and try to judge how much power was required to clear a series of buses, misjudge your speed and you crash out.

And here's another dedicated first generation console, Atari actually created a whole slew of these during this time, this one designed for Sears. The main draw for this was its racing game, which was one of the Speed Racer style games that were popular at the time where you just race up the screen dodging cars, though the machine could also play a few Pong variants too.

This was an interesting tabletop console that incorporated an odd screen that functioned by displaying a line of pixels onto a spinning mirror to create the display, a technique that would later make an appearance in Nintendo's ill-fated Virtual Boy handheld.