Overview
The Supervison featured many things similar to the first 1989 Game Boy models but was priced at a much lower cost of $49, lower or higher depending on sales and bundles. The included game was “CrystBall”, a clone of Breakout and the Game Boy’s Alleyway. In fact, many games were based on, or clones of, Game Boy or NES games.
The Supervision was given away as a prize on Nickelodeon's Legends of the Hidden Temple game show, as well as The Price Is Right as part of Watara's failed marketing pushes.
Hardware
The Supervision featured an 8-bit 65C02 CPU that ran at 4mhz; the same CPU in the Atari Lynx and Turbografx 16/Turbo Express at a much lower clock speed. This made porting Game Boy and Game Gear games to the Supervision more difficult, since both the Game Boy and Game Gear ran a version of the Zilog Z80 CPU. This did not help the Supervision get the 3rd party support it lacked. The Supervision’s low power CPU was able to dynamically clock down to save power or totally stop, thereby making it even more power conservative than the Game Boy. However, both end up with the same battery life and voltage requirements. The Supervision can even use the Game Boy's AC adaptors with seemingly no bad effects.
The Supervision's dot matrix LCD screen has an extreme amount of ghosting when fast moving games are played. Most are better off using a TV; like the new models of the PSP, it features a TV output for composite video. When it is plugged into the TV, a game can feature four colors or do full color NES-style games. The other link cable slot was a standard 2 player game link cable that connected two Supervisions together for 2 player gameplay.
Costs were saved by the Supervision being much larger than the Game Boy, simplifying the manufacturing process. It came in many versions; the first was the large tilted screen model, which was later followed by a version with a more cross-like D-pad. Then came smaller brick versions shaped like the Game Boy and most other portable consoles at the time. Another version featured the same brick layout but had another version of the D-pad. These also had colors, a tilt screen system and white, yellow and red highlights. These are smallest of all the Supervisions and have dramatically different designs.
Incomplete list of games for the Supervision.
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