The Tandy MC 10 (MC means Micro Color) was designed as an "initiation" computer to compete with the Timex Sinclair 1000, the american version of the Sinclair ZX-81. It was more expensive than the Sinclair machine, but outpassed it in every category. It had sound, color, more memory and even a better keyboard.
In fact, the MC-10 is basically a cut down version of the Tandy "Coco" computers, but didn't have as much success as its big brothers.
It is fully compatible with the first version of the Matra Alice (a French computer). Actually both are the same computer (except for the case color, the Alice is red and the Tandy is white).
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Richard Vermeulen adds:
The Tandy MC-10 micro color computer was not a commercial success. Tandy did
not support this machine. In Basic you could only use 8 color and a graphic
resolution of 64x32 dots. However, the MC-10 had much more
capabilities: 2 color 256x192 graphics, 4 color 128x192 graphics and the
sound-chip had synthesizer posibilities. If all these extra functions were
mentioned in the manual, I bet that these machine would have sold much more.
You couldn''t fully take advantage of the higher resolution graphics modes without internal modifications because some of the address lines on the 6847 weren''t attached and address decoding is a cheap design. As a result, the last 1/3 of the screen is a mirror of the first 1/3 in the highest resolution modes.
To make matters worse, the ROM interrupt vectors point to locations that are in the screen address range used by higher res modes.
Tuesday 14th February 2012
JamesD (USA)
You couldn''t fully take advantage of the higher resolution graphics modes without internal modifications because some of the address lines on the 6847 weren''t attached and address decoding is a cheap design. As a result, the last 1/3 of the screen is a mirror of the first 1/3 in the highest resolution modes.
To make matters worse, the ROM interrupt vectors point to locations that are in the screen address range used by higher res modes.
Tuesday 14th February 2012
JamesD (USA)
Jeff, you mentioned that you also have/had a floppy for the MC-10 ? Strange, because I never heard about a floppy based system for the MC-10. The only backup was a tape-recorder system.
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