Well, in the 80s there was a kind of struggle. The cost of making micro processors was very high compared to today because they couldn't be made very quickly. In fact the new google chrome that costs less than £50 would be considered a super computer at the time I was born. The common processor in the 80s was a z80, it was an 8 bit processor. 8 bit processors dominated the 80s and had a presence in the early 90s in all the hand held games consoles.
There was one device that caught my attention recently, the Vectrex. The smiths electronic company wanted to make a table top games consol that had its own screen but still be affordable and have decent graphics, for a very short time they pulled it off. The Vectrex had a black and white screen but the games came with translucent overlays, the overlays would have coloured tints and graphics printed on it so you would put it on the screen, it would make the games on it appear to be multicoloured. If they did have a true coloured screen they would need to make sacrifices on other parts of the system like the size of the screen would need to be smaller to allow the processor to keep up, or maybe the sounds would be less detailed.
To cut a long story short, I would say it was a failure because they didn't sell enough of them to make a significant profit and they gave up. What had happened is many people in the 80s were buying their own TVs so they didn't need a game system with its own screen so the system appeared overpriced and screen was black and white. Naming one of your computer games "Rip off" didn't help. I just wonder what would happen if they kept going, if they made the Vectrex 2 and they remained in the home gaming market to this day? What would Vectrex gaming system look like today and what would it be like to play it? Perhaps there would be a Vectrex 12 or something like that.
