With the release of the Nintendo Famicom in 1983, Japan was embarking in a new era of home electronics. From there the company was always looking for new ways to make the correspondence courses more interactive and the advent of videogames was the perfect solution. Although the company started with publishing educational materials and student pocketbooks for junior high school students, they quickly expanded to simulated exams for high school (1962) and then correspondence courses for senior high school students (1969). In was founded on Januby Tetsuhiko Fukutake, as a publisher of educational materials. All classes were supposedly made for 3rd year elementary, but I would be wrong on that one.Ĭassettes are one sided, so no flip side.Fukutake Shoten (later known as Benesse Corporation) is a Japanese company which focuses on correspondence education and publishing. Science 'classes' which were another 12 tapes and finally Math 'classes' English+ 'classes' which was another 5 or so tapes. Studybox 1000 up for sale any where, so I believe they were released in limited quantities.Īs for the software, a set of English 'classes' which included a total of 12 tapes.

It appears that the Studybox 1000 was pretty similar to the Famicom Disk System, it was using the same RAM adapter mold and had an external tape device. Given some answers to choose from, and that's where my studybox adventure ended.Īpparently there is more than one version of the Studybox, mine is the SBX-01 which supposedly is the third version, while the first version was called Studybox 1000. The start button on the joypad then activates loading of the selected chapter.Īs my japanese is extremely rusty I havn't been able to make much sense of the one tape I have available to me, but some sweet speech sequences are run and once chapter 3 is reached you, in this specific game, is Once the chapter selection screen appears the Famicom controller is used to select chapter. The device is powered with a tape inside, it will automaticly start reading the tape and present you with a chapter selection screen. As said, games are read off cassette tapes but the Studybox has no play, rewind or any other buttons. The Studybox requires its own power source and the 10V adapter from my SegaCD worked flawlessly. The device sits on top of the Famicom unit and is pretty much just aĬassette tape player, meaning it reads the Famicom games off cassette tapes, kinda like the Commodore64. The company responsible for the device was Fukutake Publishing, later known as Benesse Corporation, a company that specialized in educational material for schools and such.

Little information about the Studybox, such as what it was used for - it doesn't seem like a consumer product. So here we are a few years later and I've decided to dig up a

My curiosity persuaded my wallet into purchasing the device. Well fast forward to March 2007, I discovered that a Studybox was being auctioned off on ebay, priced $100. But as he had no tape for the system he had no way of testing it.

The story gets even better now, cause I can't even remember how he obtained it Way back in 1997 I received a few images of something called a Famicom Studybox found by someone I unfortunately have forgotten all about.

Fukutake studybox