The Magnavox Odyssey 2 came out in 1978 with something no other console had: a full keyboard under the screen. Philips sold it in Europe as the Videopac G7000, and gave it a sharper successor in 1983, the Videopac+ G7400. One emulator covers the whole family.
We have about 60 Odyssey 2 games and about 20 Videopac games on My Abandonware, among them K.C. Munchkin!, the maze game Atari took Philips to court over for looking too much like Pac-Man.
Emulators
MAME is the choice today: it runs the American Odyssey 2, the European Videopac and the Videopac+ G7400, and it is still updated. The O2EM core is the easier way in.
- O2EM: a core for RetroArch, on every system. It comes from O2EM, whose own last release is from 2007, but the core is still maintained and it is the simplest way to start.
- MAME (Windows, Mac, Linux) knows the three machines as
odyssey2(United States),videopac(Europe) andvideopacp(the G7400). It is also a core for RetroArch. Recommended. - BizHawk (Windows, Linux) runs them too, with a window and menus of its own.
Running the games
Every emulator wants the small BIOS of the console, o2rom.bin. Put it in the system folder, open the .bin file from our zip, and the game starts.
Our games are tiny, 2 to 10 KB inside the zip. There is nothing to install and no disk to swap: a cartridge was 2 or 4 KB, and the whole console had 192 bytes of memory.
Four BIOS files exist, one per machine: o2rom.bin for the Odyssey 2 and the Videopac G7000, c52.bin for the French Videopac, g7400.bin for the Videopac+ G7400 and jopac.bin for its French twin, the Jopac. You only need the first one to play almost everything. See our page about BIOS files to get it.
The keyboard, the controllers and The Voice
The keyboard is not decoration: several games ask you to type. Two more make you play on the second controller, and six of ours spoke, through an add-on called The Voice.
Games like The Great Wall Street Fortune Hunt and Conquest of the World are played on the 48 keys of the console. In RetroArch, the O2EM core draws the keyboard on screen: press Select to show it.
UFO! and P.T. Barnum's Acrobats! read player one from the second controller. If nothing answers, turn on Swap Gamepads in the core options.
The Voice was a speech box that sat between the console and the cartridge. Six of our games used it: Attack of the Timelord!, Killer Bees!, Turtles, Smithereens!, K.C.'s Krazy Chase! and P.T. Barnum's Acrobats!. The O2EM core plays the recorded samples if you drop them in the system/voice folder of RetroArch; without them the games run silent in those moments, and play fine.
Videopac+ G7400 games
The Videopac+ G7400 (1983) drew a second, sharper picture behind the old one, so a few games look much better on it. Their titles end with a plus sign.
We have three: Exojet +, Moto-Crash + and Le Trésor Englouti +. Everything else on our Videopac shelf is an ordinary G7000 game, and the two machines play each other's cartridges.
In MAME, choose the videopacp machine and the g7400.bin BIOS. The O2EM core reads o2rom.bin only, so the way around it is to copy g7400.bin over that name: the core then plays the plus games as it should.
I need help!
We do not provide support for running abandonware games. The Odyssey 2 has a small and long-lived crowd of collectors.
The Odyssey² Homepage holds reviews, scans and emulation notes, Videopac.nl is the European database of the machine, and the Odyssey 2 / Videopac forum of AtariAge is where questions get answered.
Checked in October 2026 against each emulator's own documentation and, where it exists, its source code. Game counts and file sizes come from our own catalogue. These guides were drafted with the help of an AI assistant and checked by hand before publishing. If something here is out of date, tell us.