Description

The Hudson BP-0001 BeePack is an MSX cartridge to Hudson Bee Card adapter.

The Bee Card is roughly the size of a credit card, but thicker. They were designed and manufactured in collaboration with Mitsubishi Plastics Inc. (MPI). The Bee Card is effectively a ROM cartridge in a smaller form factor. To customers it was advertised as being more practical then regular cartridges as it required less physical space to store them.

The purpose of the Hudson Bee Card was to provide a lower cost solution then cartridge based software, while still providing the same ease of use and protection against piracy compared to tape or disk distributed software. The customer only needed a single BeePack Adapter, and could often get one bundled with a game.

Hudson Bee Cards were offered only in selected regions, mainly Japan but some games were also offered in Spain and the UK.

In Europe, the Astron SoftCard by Electric Software was a similar approach. The Astron Softcard is however not compatible with the Hudson BeeCard. The Hudson BeeCard has a single row of 32 connectors, while the Astron Softcard has two rows with a total of 38 connectors.

Relatively few games have been released on cards, and the medium vanished rather quickly.

Gallery

Hudson Bee Card adapter

Hudson Bee Card - PCB

Hudson Bee Card - PCB back

Hudson Bee Card boxed

Hudson Bee Card - PCB front without components

Hudson Bee Card collection

Bee Card software

Pinout

Hudson Bee Pack - PCB with added pin markings