Pippin

While only around 42,000 Pippins were sold, Bandai produced about 100,000. It is even rumored that at one point more accessories to the system existed then the Pippin itself due mostly to a lack of production. While the system was suppose to meld the console and computer systems into one, it just fell short. It required a specific internet navigator that cost $25 a month and could not run Netscape 2.0, the popular browser at the time. Bandai also did not take into fact the concept that almost 50% of Americans at the time were considered functionally illiterate. This led to the misunderstanding of the Pippin as a console or computer and cut the market in half for "gamers" that would want to surf the internet due to a common lack in desire to browse and read. It now has been tainted as a bust and failure in console history, being noted by "PC World Magazine" and "Screwattack.com" as one of the top worst tech bust of all time.

Article on the Pippin

The Bandai Pippin @World

E3 and Other Adventures in Electronic Entertainment

This column first appeared in the May 21, 1996 issue of PC Graphics Report

"Unfortunately, all Nintendo fed at the press conference was cheese and crackers, but I was determined to save my appetite for the Bandai Pippin @World announcement, being held that evening at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I wasn't disappointed by the spread, but I was somewhat disappointed by the Pippin, hailed by its manufacturers and designers as being the ultimate "Television Appliance" for surfing the Internet. Sheryl Crow performing live for a small group of us (1000 people) did make up for it (although I did lose out on a Sheryl Crow CD when I accidentally gave someone a free drink ticket which later turned out to actually be a CD redemption ticket).

The Pippin is an Apple developed technology, so it's no surprise that the guts of the Pippin are remarkably similar to those of a Macintosh. But not similar enough to allow straight Mac software to run as-is. After all, the Pippin (I call it a "MacJr") folks need to find a way to charge title developers a royalty to justify the low cost ($599) of the product, and they do this by licensing a custom Pippin API. So, the next question is why is Bandai introducing the Pippin, and not Apple. The answer appears to be two part:

1. Bandai's parent company's claim to fame is ownership of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and as such, the company has extensive experience with channels alternate to those of traditiona computing devices.

2. Bandai's Bandai Digital Entertainment group, which is marketing the Pippin, has received quite a chunk of funding to launch the Pippin, and my guess is that Apple is going to let them test the waters before shipping its own Pippin unit (which Apple committed to at its conference last week).

There are some features on the Pippin I think are good, like the fact it actually does enable consumer Web access via a television, has dual VGA and video output (NTSC or PAL), its keyboard/digitzer combo is pretty cool (the digitizer pad is above the keyboard, and the whole thing folds to make a thin black box), the "banana" controller appears pretty useful, they have some neat tools and games available for the unit, and they've kicked off a decent ad campaign in USA Today. For the latter, the first ad I saw had this simple message "Introducing a revolutionary new way to get at the Internet... It's called the television." With ads like this, they are helping promote the entire consumer Network Computer (NC) concept and not just their own device, which is a good thing for the industry, and probably not so good for Bandai.

Let's take a look at everything I don't like about the Bandai Pippin @World.

• First, because it uses a "lite" MacOS core, people will have great expectations of what the Pippin should be able to do since it's really a mini-PC. The Bandai folks have agreed that changing this mind set is a real challenge.

• Second, the Pippin's TV output, while surprisingly reasonable for Web pages, does a lousy job on regular OS text and Web browser menus because of the small fonts used there.

• Third, the price point of $599 for a fall shipment is too high. Especially when you consider the game console Internet connections.

• Fourth, the keyboard and controller currently require cables - no IR or RF cordless input devices are going to ship with Bandai's Pippin.

• Fifth, Pippin forces people to use a specific Internet provider, PSInet, for at least 6 months, with a $25/month minimum service fee, which forces consumers who are already net literate to have multiple ISPs, probably shutting them out entirely of wanting to buy a Pippin with that constraint. That obviously leaves the remaining unwashed masses as potential Pippin purchasers, still a large number.

• Sixth, the machine is currently incapable (due to not enough RAM) of running Netscape 2.0 or something comparable with Java and VRML support, putting its capabilities well behind the state of the art when it will ship in September.

• Seventh, the name for the device ("Pippin @World") is silly. Many non-computer literate people don't know what an "@" is.

• Eighth, (and most importantly) Bandai has not studied the extent to which Americans are functionally illiterate. According to a 1993 study by the U.S. Department of Education, approximately 46-51% of the adults resident in the U.S. are considered functionally illiterate. Astounding but true. What this all means is that while a Pippin could be used as an ultra-expensive (in relative terms) game console device by these folks, they aren't about to do any serious Internet surfing. When I brought this up to a Japanese executive with Bandai, he just could not understand that Americans might not be able to read. Talk about a cultural gap."

Hardware

Hardware

• 66MHz PowerPC 603 RISC Microprocessor

• Superscaler, 3 instructions per clock cycle

• 8 kByte data and 8 kByte instruction caches

• IEEE standard Single & Double Precision Floating Point Unit

• 6 MB combined System & Video Memory, advanced architecture

  • Easy memory expansion cards in 2, 4, 8, and 16MB increments.

  • 128K Flash Memory accessible storage space.

• 4X CDROM drive

• 64 kbyte SRAM Store/Restore Backup

  • Two high-speed serial ports, one of which is GeoPort ready, the other is LocalTalk

  • PCI-compatible expansion slot

  • Two “AppleJack” ruggedized ADB inputs

    • • Supports up to four simultaneous players over Apple Desktop Bus (ADB)

      • Supports standard ADB keyboards and mice with mechanical adapters

Video

• 8 bit and 16 bit video support

• Dual Frame Buffers for superior frame to frame animation

• Support for NTSC & PAL composite, S-Video and VGA (640x480) monitors

• Up to 16.7M colors

  • Horizontal and vertical video convolution

Audio

• Stereo 16 bit 44 kHz sampled output

• Stereo 16 bit 44 kHz sampled input

  • Headphone output jack with individual volume control

  • Audio CD player compatibility

Telephony

• GeoPort ready

Controllers

• Supports up to 4 simultaneous players over Apple Desktop Bus (ADB)

• Will support standard ADB keyboards and mice with connector adapters

• Consisted of a D-Pad, a track ball, four action buttons etc. in a boomerang shape

Data I/O

• 1 standard Serial Communications port

Aftermarket Expansion

• "PCI like" expansion for adding floppy drive, hard disk drive, graphics accelerators, codecs, etc. (Not available at introduction!)

ROMs

• 68k emulator

• Macintosh Tool Box intact

• Localized bit mapped fonts

• Reduced Macintosh System ROM footprint

CD Formats Supported

• Standard audio CD

• Other formats in market studies

Software

• Run time environment derived from MacOS

• Integrates QuickTime 2.0 and PPC native version of QuickDraw

• Reduced system memory footprint - (computer specific features removed)

• Disk resident system stamped on CD with title

• System boots off CD

• Pippin system software upgrades released through CD-ROM stamping operations

• Developers free to choose from menu of system software upgrades

The system upon release sold two different consoles, the ATMARK which was white and sold in Japan, and the @WORLD which was black and sold in the U.S. A few black systems were sold as ATMARK and are considered very rare. The two systems are exactly the same, marketing was the only difference. The Pippin was also considered to be one of the most expandable devices in its category, allowing the user to add system memory easily using plastic DRAM memory cards, mass storage devices, graphics accelerators, compression decoders etc. This allows the user to "retain their investment". A fun fact to know too is that the name Pippin derived from a type of apple, smaller than the McIntosh. The follows in line with Apple Computer Inc.'s trends in name.

Notable Titles

Game Title Publisher Country Released In

Only 18 titles total were ever released for the Pippin in the United States, with a handful more released in Japan. The list above sums up almost the total of all the Pippin games released in America. Take note that almost half of the games are released by Bandai themselves. All Pippin titles could be used on Macintosh computers, although you could not use any Macintosh software on the Pippin without certain modifications (as mentioned above). The Pippin could also play DOS / Windows games with heavy modifications.