I picked up a Tomy Pyuta mkII on Mercari recently. This is a follow-up to the original Pyuta, similar to how the Commodore 64C followed the Commodore 64. Except while the Commodore 64C was a cost-saving implementation of the Commodore 64, this one looked like it provided a minor upgrade. From the outside, at a glance, it looks like they just swapped out the keyboard, offering a short-travel plastic keyboard, which was much more usable than the rubber chiclet keyboard that the original sported.

And while that was true, this change was a bit of a double-edged sword. The original keyboard was unpleasant to use, to be sure, but it had some purple accents, and purple is my favorite color. If I were picking a modern keyboard and my choices were a mushy dome keyboard with purple accents or a plain, decent quality mechanical keyboard, of course I'd give up on the purple accents with no thought, but this is going from a cheap keyboard with charm to a slightly better keyboard without charm, and I will rarely use it anyway, so I kinda dug the original keyboard.

But the surprise is, that was not the only change. There were two more subtle external changes that I discovered. One, wisely, Tomy ditched the Controller 1/Controller 2 stickers for building recessed characters into the mold. This prevents rubbing and fading that you often see on Pyuta controllers these days. Good job there.

In addition to the recessed characters, the joystick controller connector contains a small amount of tension so you have to press in on the connector in order to release it from the joystick port. I am guessing that since the computer was geared toward children, they were not necessarily gentle and caused it the controller to become dislodged during gaming.

The other change is that they ditched audio/video output ports and reverted to RF only. Huh. Not a fan of that. I have an AV switcher with a dedicated powered port for converting RF signal, and it's being displayed to an X68000 TV monitor, which was pretty high quality. So the final output is relatively clean, to my eye, but this is a big step back in convenience and I imagine a step back in clarity for home users at the time, connecting to a standard TV.

Anyway, that sums up the differences observable from the outside. But there were a couple of surprises awaiting me post power-up. Actually, I thought it was not working correctly when I got it. The menu changed between the original Pyuta and the mkII. G-BASIC was replaced with BASIC, and BASIC didn't load. If I loaded BASIC, it would reset. If I had a cartridge inserted and chose BASIC, it would generally react differently, but it never gave me a stable BASIC operating environment. Finally, I found a stray piece of paper with exactly this information written on it, and the computer was, in fact, behaving as expected.

And a YouTube video pointed me in a more fruitful direction. G-BASIC was moved off the menu and was a sub-function of the graphic utility. You have to press MOD three times, MON, and then type GBAS and press enter. It gave you the below screen, which allows you to type in G-BASIC code. It only shows you two lines at a time, which is annoying, but perhaps there is a command to open up the rest of the screen. In any event, two lines was enough to test the keyboard well.

But this, too, was another big change. Like, massive. They stripped out all of the katakana function! In retrospect, I could have guessed as much by the lack of katakana on the keyboard. Although the tokenization is undoubtedly compatible, one of the truly unique things about the original Pyuta was that the BASIC was all katakana based, using Japanese equivalent words and often (but not always) changing the word order to match Japanese grammatical order. In the mkII, we're given the far more typical English-based BASIC, and it was a separate purchase.

And on that note, what of the games that were made with the built-in katakana support? They display in meaningless English. If you look back at the photo with Frogger running, you'll see that スコア1 (score 1) and ハイスコア (high score) have been replaced with "mja1" and "zbmja". The bottom left displays "Ah(???)a00", which originally was Aクリア00, an indicator that you had chosen "Amateur" mode and had so far cleared 0 stages. It seems unlikely that there were any game-stopper issues resulting from this, though, as the startup sequence for every Pyuta game was to press 1 or 2 (number of players, if supported), and left or right button (for amateur or pro). I don't think any game required reading as part of the gameplay.

I believe the system was complete, although I failed to take a photo with all components visible (actually, now writing this thing, I wish I had taken a couple more photos of the opening graphic and menu). It contained the system and box, of course, and was rounded off by the controllers, user manual, tape recorder cable (CMT cable), RF switch and cable, and a flyer showcasing the Pyuta lineup and software library. Only thing I am currently unsure of is whether this is the only manual. The original Pyuta contained a nice thick manual explaining all of the G-BASIC commands, while this one has more of a thin user guide to the computer overall, with little mention of G-BASIC commands. It is possible that since they started selling BASIC separately, they didn't feel the need for a bigger manual to be included with the system. Or possibly mine was just missing a G-BASIC manual.