Note this seems to be unrelated to the BBC Micro, and came out some time after its era in 1995! That's after the DOOM (1994) launch. Surely there must have been other computer bridge options at that point?
I wonder how good the "AI" was. Contract bridge is less deterministic than chess, there will be times where you have to guess which of the two opponents has a particular card, even given all the information encoded in the bidding sequence.
I'm sure there were other computer bridge options then, but bridge people are different in the UK. These days it's a fun social game, but at times bridge clubs have been equivalent to masonic temples. It's a strange, complex parallel culture, it's an odd kind of high status (a sort of posh and not posh thing — educated but meritocratic), they would have tended to be older and to have a bit of money. (A town in my area has a very posh Georgian bridge club building and hundreds of members even now)
I suspect there would have been a glossy advertising campaign in the middle pages of the Radio Times that everyone saw, that bridge players would (at least then) have been very considerably approving of the BBC, and that word of mouth and "keeping up with the Joneses", along with bridge partner influence, did the rest.
I would bet that it sold OK and that for a few older Brits at the time, this or the chess companion (which I remember more clearly) would have been their first experience of a computer (aside from Teletext).
Pretty obscure piece of kit, nice find!
That said: 2KB RAM is tiiight even with application code in a ROM cartridge. No regular keyboard, nor a joystick port.. sound?
Not a great target to code anything for imho. Plenty of Z80+TMS9918A based contemporaries (MSX, ColecoVision, ...) to choose from.
Crazy that this single use console was more expensive than a fully-loaded PS5 at launch, factoring in inflation.
The hardware is great, could make some really nice 8-bit games for it.
Awesome, what an odd bit of history.
Has anyone written an emulator for this yet?
Edit: I'm tired and forgot I just read it was debugged in Mame, kind of mad something this obscure is there.
There's a MiSTer core: https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/BBCBridgeCompanion_MiSTer
nice series from same author:
https://www.leadedsolder.com/2020/02/16/colecovision-diy-par...
Note this seems to be unrelated to the BBC Micro, and came out some time after its era in 1995! That's after the DOOM (1994) launch. Surely there must have been other computer bridge options at that point?
I wonder how good the "AI" was. Contract bridge is less deterministic than chess, there will be times where you have to guess which of the two opponents has a particular card, even given all the information encoded in the bidding sequence.
It says 1985.
I'm sure there were other computer bridge options then, but bridge people are different in the UK. These days it's a fun social game, but at times bridge clubs have been equivalent to masonic temples. It's a strange, complex parallel culture, it's an odd kind of high status (a sort of posh and not posh thing — educated but meritocratic), they would have tended to be older and to have a bit of money. (A town in my area has a very posh Georgian bridge club building and hundreds of members even now)
I suspect there would have been a glossy advertising campaign in the middle pages of the Radio Times that everyone saw, that bridge players would (at least then) have been very considerably approving of the BBC, and that word of mouth and "keeping up with the Joneses", along with bridge partner influence, did the rest.
I would bet that it sold OK and that for a few older Brits at the time, this or the chess companion (which I remember more clearly) would have been their first experience of a computer (aside from Teletext).
It's quite Reithian in that sense.
It was interesting hearing the stories about Bill Gates bridge games and partners. Probably even more so now.
What a great project! Thanks for sharing
Unexpected Jeffrey Epstein extended universe crossover there.