The Radofin Programmable Tele-sports III is a cartridge based game console. It was released in Europe by AudioSonic as the AudioSonic Tele-Sports III, which was the same machine.

The Tele-Sports III produced a color image and some of it's games were a definite break with the previous generation pong-style bat-and-ball games. The game "Grand Prix" was a great example of a game like that.

The cartridges contained a General Instruments AY-3-8xxx chip and the console itself only had the hardware to produce the tv-signal and connect the controllers. The term programmable needs to be taken with a grain of salt, what was meant was that the machine could play different games, based on the cartridge that was inserted.

The PC-50x family is a series of first generation home video game consoles produced between 1977 and 1982. These consoles were all produced in Asian countries for various different brands.

The consoles do not have a central processing unit (CPU), but rather the games themselves have game logic on them, based on the General Instrument AY-3-8xxx chipset. This chip-set started with the AY-3-8500, or the "Ball and Paddle" chip. The consoles varied in that some produced color output, while others produced black-and-white to reduce cost. All of the consoles in this series have 10 buttons on the console to choose between the different games that were on the cartridge. The cartridge contained one of the AY-3-8xxx chips, and the buttons chose a variation of the game that the chip could play. The first versions of these chips produced games like tennis, soccer and other ball and bat variants. Later the chips would produce racing and shooting games.

Some of the AY-3-8xxx chips and their games are listed below. The different consoles sometimes used a different cartridge format so not all of the cartridges could be exchanged between the systems, although technically there is no difference between the system itself.

• AY-3-8500

  Pong games (Original Paddle&Bat chip)

• AY-3-8603

  2 racing games

• AY-3-8605

  2 submarine games

• AY-3-8606

  10 pong/wipe-out style games

• AY-3-8607

  3 rifle games

• AY-3-8610

  8 pong games, 2 rifle games

• AY-3-8710

  2 tank games

• AY-3-8760

  4 race games

The AY-3-8500 "Ball & Paddle" integrated circuit was the first in a series of ICs from General Instrument designed for the consumer video game market.

In 1975 General Instruments developed the AY-3-8500 chip that would revolutionize home gaming. Initially there was no interest in the chip, General Instruments could not find interested buyers. At the same time Coleco had the desire to built a home console. Thanks to Ralph Baer, the brain behind the Magnavox Odyssey, Coleco and GI found each other and in 1976 Coleco Telstar was put on the market. It immediately became serious competition for the Magnavox Odyssey.

Ultimately the AY-3-8500 was used in more than 200 consoles, from the APF TV Fun, the Philips Tele-Spiel Las Vegas, the Sears Hockey Tennis game to the Tandy TV-Scoreboard and many, many more.

The AY-3-8500 was designed to output video to an RF modulator, which would then display the game on a domestic television set. The AY-3-8500 contained six built in games:

1. Tennis/Pong
2. Soccer/Hockey
3. Squash
4. Practice game
5. Shooting 1
6. Shooting 2

The AY-3-8500 was the 625-line PAL version and the AY-3-8500-1 was the 525-line NTSC version. It was introduced in 1976 with Coleco the first manufacturer to implement the chip in its Telstar console. Only a few external components were needed to build a complete system, which made this chip an attractive option to produce cheap pong machines.

The AY-3-8500 was the first iteration of the chip with black-and-white video output. It was possible to colorize the game by using an additional chip, such as the AY-3-8515.