ClearTunes Sold Prisoners a See Through Handheld and Fifty Unlicensed Games

Eternal Electronics spent a while looking for a ClearTunes handheld before one finally reached the bench. Commissary sheets from the early 2010s listed it next to socks and typewriters, a small plastic game machine built for jails and prisons rather than a store shelf. ClearTunes already supplied those facilities with radios, alarm clocks, and flat televisions, every one of them sealed in a shell you can see straight through.

Officers wanted that shell for a very clear reason. A good-sized case can conceal nearly anything, from a sharpened toothbrush to a phone or a folded note. The clear plastic allows you to see all the way into the machine, as if the examination is taking place inside the unit. Some locations even wrote the inmate’s last name and ID on the back of these blocks, just like they would with shoes, to keep them from getting mixed up. According to 2012 forms from Indiana and Ohio, the thing cost between $35 and $53. Either the inmate might pay for it from their account, or a family member would send a box through one of the vendors, such as Union Supply Direct.

Three separate model numbers appear on those order sheets: HG-501, HG-502, and HG-503. When you hold one in your hand, the layout is very familiar and cheap-looking. You have a direction pad on the left and four face buttons on the right, two of which just repeat whatever you press. Pause and reset are immediately beside them. A small speaker, a volume wheel, and a headphone jack are all sound-related features. The power comes from AAA batteries, and the cord that wraps off one end allows you to hang it from your wrists. They utilized triangle drive screws instead of the standard cross head, thus trying to open it with a file-down pen will be difficult. Later versions even covered the battery-cover screw hole with plastic. They say there’s a video out, but the plug is an unusual size that you don’t see on many handhelds, so you’d need to have a proprietary cable laying around.

The device is pre-loaded with fifty games, although none of them are actual games. The menu only includes placeholder titles like Lightning Plan, Plumber, Smart Frog, and Buried Bone Treasure. several of the early HG-501 titles allowed you to blast aircraft and cycle through several very simplistic shooters. Then the HG-503 came along and replaced those with some simpler puzzles, rally stages, and dumb games like gathering flowers. This makes a lot of sense, because the people in control undoubtedly didn’t want violent video games on the screens inside the cells. Eternal Electronics even stated that the display on these devices appears to be far better than the price would indicate. When compared to the Lexibook edition of this object, the design is larger and cleaner, whereas the retail version is sometimes grainy and only includes roughly 20 games.

When you first switch it on, the JungleSoft logo flashes. That moniker is a pseudonym for JungleTac, the Chinese company that manufactures a number of low-cost multi-game devices. They even sold several Ferrari-branded Lexibooks to children. Teardowns reveal that inside there’s a Sunplus chip stuck under a large blob of epoxy, a 6 MHz crystal keeping time, and a small board soldered in the location where a cartridge would go (if they let you add one). However, there is no slot, no memory card, and no method to add new games.