Datel
| Video game peripheral manufacturer | |
| Industry | Video games |
| Founded | 1980 (as Datel Electronics) |
| Headquarters | Staffordshire, England, U.K. |
|
Key people
|
Mike Connors |
| Products | Action Replay |
| Website | http://www.datel.co.uk |
Datel (previously Datel Electronics) is a UK-based electronics and game console peripherals manufacturer. The company is best known for producing a wide range of hardware and peripherals for home computers in the 1980s, for example replacement keyboards for the ZX Spectrum, the PlusD disk interface (originally designed and sold by Miles Gordon Technology) and the Action Replay series of video game cheating devices.
Datel was the brainchild of Mike Connors, who still runs the company and has been mentioned in The Sunday Times as one of the country's top thousand richest people.
Datel started off selling AM CB radio transceivers in the UK. These AM-band radios were made illegal in the UK and even the importing of them was deemed illegal. Datel then started to import the CB radios in component form and build them up.
The company started to manufacture products related to home computers that were popular in the 1980s such as the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum. Such devices included light pens and memory expansion. One of their first commercial successes was joystick interfaces for the ZX Spectrum.
The greatest commercial success of Datel was the Action Replay, first for the Commodore 64 and then the Commodore Amiga. The Commodore 64 version was designed by Richard Bond, with six versions ultimately developed in all. The Commodore Amiga version was authored by two German students, Olaf Boehm and Joerg Zanger, who had been inspired by the earlier Commodore 64 version.
The Commodore 64 and Amiga Action Replays included the ability to save the entire contents of a home computer's memory to floppy disk or compact audio cassette, and then to reload very quickly. This proved extremely popular with people, especially when the Commodore 64 could take 20 minutes to load a game from notoriously unreliable tape. It also did not escape people's attention that could use Action Replays to copy games. The name Action Replay referred to the fact that could instantly restart a game from the position that had saved it.
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