From time to time I accidentally win things on eBay.  Several of the best deals I have gotten have been on items I had zero intention of actually winning.  The Memorex VIS is newest item I've added to the collection by accident.   The auction had a Buy it Now price of $125 USD and a Make an Offer option.  I offered $70 thinking that there's no way the seller would accept an offer of $55 less than the asking price.  Boy was I wrong.  A few hours later I got the confirmation email letting me know I was the proud new owner of a Memorex VIS.




A little less than a week later it arrived in the mail.  It was packed very welly and arrived in excellent condition.  I quickly set it up and fired up the included edutainment game Race the Clock.  Thanks to a little research I found out that the Memorex VIS could also use a wired controller that plugged into the AUX port on the back of the system.  It uses the same plug as a PS/2 Mouse or Keyboard because it actually can use those in lieu of the wired controller.  I'm not sure if you can use a mouse or keyboard with every game but you can certainly use a Mouse with Race the Clock.




I at first tried to use the Wireless controller which I found to be very laggy and painful to use.  So I looked around the house for an old mouse, most of the ones I have are optical USB mice, and fired the game up with the mouse plugged in.  The game controlled much faster and much more smoothly.  Race the Clock is a memory card flipping game where you match two cards and clear a board to reveal a picture.  The cards themselves reveal a small video clip of an action.  For example you click a card and it shows a girl brushing her hair and you hear the word "brush!"  Then you click around and match up pairs until you get some silly picture. 

There are a few difficulty levels the higher difficulty being a larger grid with more cards to flip.  The game is awful.  Each card takes about four seconds for the video to load and they are four painfully long seconds, perhaps the four longest seconds of your life.  I played the first game option which was a grid of 3 rows of 4 and the clock I was racing started at 8:59.  It didn't take very long to complete the puzzle and would have taken half the time if the load times for each card wasn't so unbearable.

The next thing I tested was it's CD playback capability.  Again the wireless controller was slow and laggy so I used the mouse which again made everything better.  It's a very bare bones CD player but back then anything that played CDs was pretty fancy and expensive.  I'd like to try the game and CD player out using a keyboard instead of the mouse and see how that goes.  Like I said I'm not sure if you can swap controllers like that or if it differs from game to game.  There really isn't a lot of information out there regarding the Memorex VIS beyond a few notes and tidbits.