From: jewest78@gmail.com   
      
   On Saturday, November 11, 1995 at 3:00:00 AM UTC-5, Frank Durda IV wrote:   
   > [0]Ice Breaker (Ice.B...@698.gigo.com) wrote:   
   > [0]I just inhereted (for free) a VIS system that was sold for about 3 days by   
   > [0]Radio Shack . It came with no manuals, but it did have a sampler disk,   
   > [0]Compton's Encyclopedia, and controller plus a save game card. Where can I   
   > [0]find software for this? Are there any hardware hacks or anything else   
   > [0]available for it?   
   > Check around the bargin bins in the Radio Shacks, or they may be able   
   > to special order something. There were 50 or so titles before the   
   > system died, and about five or six were respectable.    
   > You might also contact Tiger Software, who at one point a year or so ago   
   > was selling new VIS systems with 30 titles for $99. We figured if nothing   
   > else you were getting 30 jewel cases for CDs and a so-so CD-audio player    
   > for $99. (The VIS hardware cost over $400 to make.)   
   > It appears that Tandy sold all of the warehouse inventory to Tiger   
   > when they wrote VIS off. I am not sure whether the stores got the   
   > chance to return their stock or if they had to dispose of it themselves.   
   > Note: A CD-ROM *must* have the "VIS" logo on it to work in a VIS system.   
   > Some titles in 1993 were written in such a way that they would run on   
   > either a MPC system or a VIS (Tandy thought up this requirement in   
   > early 1993 as an attempt to keep the software companies from jumping    
   > ship), but that VIS logo has to be there.   
   > Zenith, who was the only other company who even got close to selling   
   > VIS never sold any, but I do have one a Zenith VIS hand controller.   
   > They didn't sell any titles either.   
   > If a technical reference was published for that system, I am not aware   
   > of it.    
   > Tandy lost somewhere between $50 and $75 million on the development,   
   > inventory and failed marketing of VIS. It was *the* product that caused   
   > them to get out of the computer business. The lousy sales of DCC that   
   > Christmas also helped make Tandy want to get out of the R&D business.   
   > The VIS system appeared in the stores the week before Thanksgiving 1992.   
   > On Jaunary 10th, 1993, all work on the VIS-II system was cancelled that day   
   > and VIS was dead. Five days later, R&D was spun-out into the newly-formed   
   > TE Electronics and 10% of the staff let go.    
   > Let's just say that the Thanksgiving to Christmas sales NATIONWIDE of VIS   
   > could be tabulated in an unsigned char. You would need an unsigned short   
   > to tabulate the number of VIS systems that were built before someone   
   > yelled STOP! and halted production. And you would need a *signed* char to   
   > track the VIS unit sales for January 1993. Got it? :-) That was at   
   > the original price of $699.    
   >    
   > VIS was based on the faulty logic that the reason the Philips CD-I system    
   > wasn't successful was that there weren't enough titles for it (the $699   
   > price had *nothing* to do with the sluggish CD-I sales they said), and the   
   > reason there weren't enough good titles was that CD-I was an "alien"   
   > architecture and required a lot of development to produce titles for it.   
   > So, logically, if you provided a platform that was close to the MPC-1   
   > platform and "standard" Windows/DOS tools could be used to develop for it   
   > you would have lots of titles, and if she weighs the same as a duck,   
   > she's made of wood. No wait, that's a different example of the problem   
   > bad logic. But both chains of logical thinking made about the same amount   
   > of sense.   
   > Anyway, the idea was bogus because there weren't that many MPC titles   
   > at that time, most were educational rather than entertaining, most   
   > ran slow even on faster systems with more memory, and none were written   
   > with the idea of dealing with interlaced video, NTSC color/resolution   
   > artifacts, or not having a mouse or keyboard present to run the application.   
   > Who cares if the hand controller API "looked" like a mouse or keyboard to   
   > the application? Some things just could not be used easily without the real   
   > thing.   
   > So most people ended up writing a custom port of each title anyway for VIS.   
   > That is why so many of the VIS titles are similar to one another.   
   > The software house ported the engine for their story-telling product,   
   > then churned out twenty or thirty different stories that used the same   
   > underlying engine. Boring.   
   >    
   > The cost to make the VIS system dictated a $549 or $599 retail price since   
   > they wanted to make the bulk of the money on software royalties (Sega is   
   > very similar, selling the hardware close to cost and then making it up on   
   > the games), but the Tandy computer marketing people (in particular the top   
   > marketing guy) claimed that people would not buy a product that cost   
   > either of those amounts, but WOULD buy the same system for $699 if Tandy   
   > added some software to the system.   
   > According the marketing brains, $699 was a "magic" price number, and $549,   
   > $599 or even $499 (briefly considered) were not "magic", and the   
   > "consumers would not buy at those prices". Huh?   
   > So roughly $5 worth of royalty per system for Comptons was added and $250   
   > of profit margin was added to the early systems. But they have to   
   > sell and stay sold to have profit...   
   > The method Tandy used to determine prices was always a mystery to me. :-)   
   >    
   > General specs of the VIS:   
   > o 80286-12 processor on a local bus (not ISA) running at 12MHz.   
   > 0-wait states. Equivalent PC performance somewhere around that of   
   > a 386SX-16 or 20. (ISA overhead is baaaaad)   
   > (There was about a $15 difference between using a 286 and 386SX.   
   > VIS-II was to use a 386SX.)   
   > o 1 Meg ROM containing minimal MS-DOS 3.x, a few drivers, and   
   > the fabled Modular Windows(TM). Modular Windows was a poor attempt   
   > to take a system that relied on large caches and fast disks and   
   > stick it into slow ROM with no cache and tight memory.    
   > All versions of Windows 3.x read the SYSTEM.INI file 75 separate   
   > times while starting, and that's before it is read n times by the   
   > application. You try that sometime from a CD-ROM without the   
   > SMARTDRIVE CD-ROM cache. Very nasty.   
   > (Microsoft publicly denied that Modular Windows was a product at   
   > one point in 1993, but they even produced a SDK before the end.)    
   > o One built-in application is an audio-CD player, written in Modular   
   > Windows (it reads the ROM-based SYSTEM.INI 75 times so its a bit   
   > faster). Just stick an audio CD in and it should start playing.   
   > o 1 Meg of RAM in a conventional PC layout 640K + 384K.   
      
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