PONG Themed Game Console - Dismantled for reference and curiosity
Manufactured in Hong Kong and released to the Australian market by Sheen in 1977 is the Sheen 104 Video Sport. It's another game console in the swollen ranks of PONG and PONG-like clones and they really don't get more basic than this.
The Sheen 104 is a small box with a non-detachable RF cable and two detachable paddle controllers. It can be powered by either an external 9 Volt DC power supply or internally from six AA batteries.
The console has four built in PONG-like games (Hockey, Squash, Tennis and Hand Ball) that are selected with a slide switch. Players can also choose from two speed and two bat size settings as well as change the angle of bounce between twenty and forty degrees.
The only other control is a reset button and that's a shame as it desperately needs a volume control so you can turn down the very quickly grating audio from the internal 8 ohm speaker.
Curiously enough the sticker on the casing shows people playing Tennis, Hand Ball, Jai alai (squash) and Soccer instead of Hockey. Even the choice of Jai alai is odd because the Sheen 104 was marketed to Australia where next to no one would have heard of the sport in 1979 and where squash is played with a thin, tennis-like racket.
A year earlier Sheen released the 'Sheen 100 Video Sport' that's essentially the same bar then inclusion of a light gun and additional in-built games for use with it. It has a port to connect the light gun to the left of the reset button and if you look at the 104's motherboard you can see there's a legacy marking for a 'DIN Socket' where that port would have been soldered. The Reset switch is marked 'Start' on the PCB while 'Reset' is shown on the console overlay sticker on both the 100, 104 and 106C.
All that said, it does the job and no doubt a lot of people had a good time with it!
