The VIS was Tandy's 1992 attempt at a CD player for the television that ran Windows inside. It sold badly enough that people called it Vaporware Information System, and MAME runs it today.
We have 21 VIS games on My Abandonware, a good part of the small library the machine ever had: Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, The Manhole, Links golf and a shelf of things to teach children.
Emulator
MAME is the only choice. It knows the machine as vis, and it works: the graphics and the sound are marked imperfect, and nothing else is.
mame vis -cdrom game.chd, or pick Video Information System MD-2500 from MAME's list and load the disc through the file manager. Our page about multi-platform emulators covers installing MAME.
Our downloads are disc images, from 1 MB to 280 MB. MAME prefers its own .chd format; it also reads a .cue with its .bin, and chdman converts one to the other.
Windows on a television
Inside the VIS was Modular Windows, a cut-down Windows 3.1 that Microsoft built for living rooms and then abandoned. It is why these discs look like early CD-ROM software, because that is what they are.
Several of our titles were sold for the PC as well, in almost the same form. Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective and The Manhole both had lives elsewhere, and if you want to play them rather than to see the VIS, the PC versions are the easier road — our page about DOS games and the one about Windows games cover those.
The remote
There was no keyboard and no mouse. The VIS came with a remote control, and every disc was written to be used with one, which is why they all move in steps and never point at anything.
MAME maps the remote to your keyboard. The direction keys move between the things on screen and Enter chooses; look at the input settings of the machine to see the rest. A disc that seems to ignore the mouse is behaving correctly.
I need help!
We do not provide support for running abandonware games. The VIS was a failure in its own time and has no community to speak of now.
The MAME documentation explains the command line, the disc formats and chdman. For the games that also came out for the PC, our Windows page is more use than anything written about the VIS.
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 If something here is out of date, tell us.