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BANDAI AND APPLE DEBUT THE LONG AWAITED PIPPIN GAME
SYSTEM
It was only a matter of time before the first set
top box entertainment and information player came onto the market. The
first to debut such a product is the subsidiary of Tokyo-based Bandai
Co. LTD, Bandai Digital Entertainment of La Mirada, Calif. On March
22, the company will introduce in Japan the Pippin. It is the first
device of its kind to allow low cost access to the Internet and CD-ROMs
through the television. Bandai will bring Pippin to the U.S. in May.
Developed jointly with Apple Computer Inc., Bandai’s Pippin CD-ROM
player converts a television into a high-resolution, multimedia computer
that plays a wide variety of Macintosh compatible CD-ROM software. It
provides access to information and e-mail via the Internet and plays
music and games on CD ROMs.
The Pippin contains a modem that enables its users to explore the virtual
worlds of the Internet. It also comes with a built-in CD-ROM drive and
Mac OS subset. As Pippin gains market acceptance, hybrid and Mac-only
title producers will port their titles to Pippin as a regular step in
production.
Currently priced at $648 in Japan, the company forecasts that they will
sell 500,000 Pippin units worldwide in 1996. Bandai Digital Entertainment
has already made plans to quickly increase its manufacturing capacity
to fulfill demand for additional Units, should the consumer demand outpace
the product forecasts.
During an 11-day period beginning on January 21st, Bandai launched,
in Japan an advertising campaign that gave a free Pippin to the first
1,000 people who responded to the ad. More than 104,000 people contacted
Bandai during this promotion.
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WHAT’S A PIPPIN?
HARDWARE
66 MHz PowerPC 603 RISC microprocessor
Superscaler, 3 instructions per clock cycle
8 kbyte data and 8 kbyte instruction caches
IEEE standard Floating Point Unit
6 Mbyte system and video memory
2, 4 and 8 Mbyte memory expansion
128 kbyte Flash RAM store/restore backup
4X-speed CD-ROM drive
2 high-speed serial ports, one GeoPort ready
PCI-compatible expansion slot
Two ruggedized ADB inputs
Supports up to four simultaneous players over Apple Desktop Bus (ADB)
Standard ADB keyboards and mice with connector adapters
VIDEO
8-bit and 16-bit video support
Support for NTSC and PAL composite, S-Video and VGA (640x480) monitors
Horizontal and vertical video convolution
AUDIO
Stereo 16-bit 44 kHz sampled output
Stereo 16-bit 44 kHz sampled input
Headphone output jack
Audio CD player compatibility
SOFTWARE
Runtime environment derived from MacOS
PPC native version of QuickDraw
Reduced system memory footprint (computer specific features removed)
Disk-resident System Software on CD-ROM
System boots off CD-ROM
Enhanced Macintosh Toolbox
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