Hudson Soft Bee Pack, Bee Card Adapter for MSX

Summary

Modules for home computers and game consoles are nothing unusual, and Hudson Soft also defined a standard for memory cards, the Bee Card. From 1984/85 they were sold in Japan, manufactured by Mitsubishi Plastics. First, the cards were used as ROM cards for MSX games. But with a total of 9 titles, the offer is weak:

Since the MSX home computers were not equipped with a reader, Hudson Soft launched the Bee Pack, a Bee Card Adapter for MSX. The adapter is plugged into the cartridge port of an MSX computer. Although the cards offer optimal copy protection, they could not prevail over cassettes and floppy disks.

The Bee Card 1989 saw a second spring when the Atari Portfolio was launched. The removable media are called “CCM (Credit-Card Memory)” and are used as ROM cards (64 KiB and 128 KiB) or RAM cards (32, 64, 128 KiB). The RAM memory cards are also used for KORG synthesizers KORG M1 (M1R, M1 EX, M1R EX) and the KORG T series (“KORG memory card MCR-03”). But while the Bee Card became a niche product with the end of the portfolio, the successor, the HuCard, initiated by Hudson Soft and NEC Home Electronics, lives on in countless games for the PC Engine. The HuCard and Bee Card are similar in many properties and only details are different: about 32 pins in the Bee Card against 38 pins in the HuCard and the latter are slightly thicker. And since the Bee Card is usually plugged into the computer from above or behind, the font on the card label runs towards the pinbar while the HuCard is usually plugged into a game console from the front, so that the font runs downwards from the pinbar.