The story
The MAX Machine was a low-cost games computer that Commodore put on sale in Japan in November 1982, where it was first shown in Tokyo under the name VICKIE. It was planned for North America as the Ultimax and for Germany as the VC-10, and was meant to sell for about US$200, close to the VIC-20, but it is not clear that it was ever sold outside Japan.
Inside, it shared much of its design with the Commodore 64 developed at the same time. It had a 6510 processor at about 1 MHz, the VIC-II graphics chip with its 320 by 200 display, sixteen colours and sprites, and the SID sound chip. Memory was very small: 2 KB of main RAM and half a kilobyte of colour RAM. The keyboard was a flat membrane, output went to a television, and there was no operating system or BASIC built in, so switching on without a cartridge produced only a blank screen. Software came on cartridges, mostly arcade conversions from Commodore Japan, HAL Laboratory and Midway, plus a MAX BASIC cartridge. A tape drive could be attached, but each cartridge had to supply its own tape routines, and there were no serial or user ports for disk drives, printers or modems.
The MAX sold poorly and was soon dropped. At a similar price, the VIC-20 offered a better keyboard, more expansion and a much larger library. Its memory lives on in the C64, which includes an Ultimax compatibility mode that runs MAX cartridges and was later used by freezer cartridges such as Action Replay.