There’s not a lot to say about the Ending-Man BS-500AS or as we called it, the Terminator TV gaming console. When the Western Europe got their hands on the PlayStation, Sega Mega Driev or the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, we were stuck with the previous generation consoles. In a time when computers were rare and expensive, even the Z80 based ones like the C64, Spectrum or one of it’s Romanian clones like the ICE Felix HC, the only home gaming entertainment source was this Famicom clone, basically a NES bootleg. Made in China, coming with two awful controllers with squishy membrane buttons that we kept opening and repairing over and over, and with its 999999999999999999999999999999999999 in 1 cartridge that you need to blow air in to make it work, with a light gun that magically worked, we’d play Super Mario Bros, Dr. Mario, Duck Hunt, or other games made for the NES or hacked bootlegs of them. It’s the console we all had as a kid and we’d trade cartridges or rent them from gaming places.

Having no battery on the cartridge, nor any kind of memory card, as soon as the console lost power or the “reset” button was pressed, everything reverted to the initial state saved on the ROM cartridges, losing all progress. Regardless, this provided us endless hours of playtime and beating a game, like Mario was a huge feat of strength, especially as back in the day we didn’t have walkthroughs or cheats (well, except for the Konami code in some games) and it would be so annoying to finish a game and have absolutely no proof to show that.

The cart

I have managed to find two units, one working, the other with some issues. While both units have both an RF video output (which seems to be tuned at 551.30MHz on the working unit) and composite video and audio output, it somehow worked for me on only one of the units. The other one seems to power up, as indicated by the lit LED, but shows no video output on either of the connectors. I did manage to play a bit some of the older games on the cartridges I have and it was pretty entertaining, despite the staticky noise on the display. I might try connecting this soon to my Pelco CRT Monitor and give it another spin.

Here’s a bit more about the Terminator 2 console: Eurogameer | Wikipedia.