the Mini Arcade but, as Smith Engineering shopped the idea around to developers, it evolved into a tabletop with nine-inch screen. The system was licensed to General Consumer Electronics in 1981. After a brief hardware and software development period, the Vectrex was unveiled on 7 June 1982 at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. It was publicly released in November at a retail price of US$199, just in time for the holidays. The launch sales were strong enough that Milton Bradley bought out General Consumer Electronics in early 1983. Milton Bradley's greater resources allowed the Vectrex to be released in parts of Europe by mid-1983 and, through a co-branding agreement with Bandai, in Japan as well. However, the video game crash of 1983 turned Milton Bradley's support of the Vectrex into a costly mistake, even despite reducing its price by 25% and then later 50% in desperation to sell units. In February 1984, after losing $31.6 million on the Vectrex, Milton Bradley announced the discontinuation of the console and cancelled development of new games. The company's entire inventory of consoles and accessories was sold off to mass-market discount houses, where they were liquidated at a fraction of the console's introductory price. By May 1984, Milton Bradley merged with Hasbro and after-market support ended. Prior to the Vectrex's discontinuation, a successor console with a color screen had been planned. After the rights reverted to Smith Engineering, the company made plans to revive the Vectrex as a handheld, but the imminent arrival of Nintendo's Game Boy put an end to those plans. In the mid-1990s, Jay Smith, then head of Smith Engineering, allowed new hardware and software development on a fee- and royalty-free basis. Smith has also allowed duplication of the original Vectrex software on a not-for-profit basis to allow Vectrex owners to obtain the original titles at low cost or for free. Technical specifications Circuit board CPU: Motorola 68A09 @ 1.5 MHz RAM: 1 KB (two 4-bit 2114 chips) ROM: 8 KB (one 8-bit 2363 chip) Cartridge ROM: 32 KB MOS 6522 Versatile Interface Adapter (VIA) Sound Sound: General Instrument AY-3-8912 MCU controlled sound 3-inch electrodynamic paper cone speaker Design The computer and vector generator were designed by Gerry Karr. The computer runs the game's computer code, watches the user's inputs, runs the sound generator, and controls the vector generator to make the screen drawings. The vector generator is an