The sweet spot for home turntable enthusiasts on a budget seems to be the $200 mark. This might be the best of the bunch.
One can only imagine the sake-fueled club hopping that led to the development of the Seiko Frequency drum machine watch.
Atari Cosmos: Holographic portable gaming
By James Grahame
Handheld LED games were all the rage in the early 1980s. Technology-hungry youngsters lapped up portable units that featured rudimentary grids of blinking LEDs and a handful of annoying sound effects. Atari was anxious to enter the market, but they didn't want to introduce a 'me too' product.
Atari's solution was the Cosmos, an intriguing tabletop LED game that used dual-image holographic backdrops to give the illusion of a 3 dimensional playing field. The unit was pre-programmed with 8 games that were enabled by special cartridges containing nothing more than a holographic backdrop and a series of openings to select the corresponding game in the unit. It was a brilliant approach that would have allowed Atari to offer add-on games for as little as $10 each.
The game play itself wasn't revolutionary: the device contained a simple 7 x 6 grid of red LEDs that could be programmed to play games such as Space Invaders, Superman, and Asteroids. Atari produced a short pre-production run of units and even printed advertising brochures and product boxes before pulling the plug because of a shortage of funds.
We'll never know whether this machine would have been a success, but the Cosmos is definitely one of the most collectible games in history -- only a couple of working units are known to exist. [Image from an Atari ad scanned by atarimuseum.com]
RetroMo: The Atari Cosmos [mojodomo.com]
Atari Cosmos Holoptic Tabletop Game System [atarimuseum.com]
