Always liked the look of the MC-10 over the later CoCo models. A bit more like those really early British micros. Fantastic video! Still hoping to get some of these machines someday.
The interesting thing about CoCo sound is that it is 6-bit PCM. There's one register where you set a voltage level (0..63) on the speaker (and another register to select the TV speaker or cassette port for output). Using this, you could play digital audio, although with only 16K of RAM and an 800kHz clock, it won't be terribly high resolution. Not great compared to the audio in a first-generation Mac, but a whole lot better than the built-in speaker on a IBM PC or Apple II (both of which were 1-bit - only capable of fixed-amplitude square waves, relying on pulse-width modulation software tricks to produce anything more elaborate than beep sounds).
I salivated over one of these after seeing it in a shop back in the early 80s. In fact as an 11 year old I got excited by the thought of owning any system, even owning a ZX81 would have been great at the time. We ended up with a Commodore 64 family pack in Christmas 84. I think my father made the right choice.
The MC-10 was one of the greatest gifts I received as a child, to learn logical systematic problem solving and thinking. The monthly subscription magazines maintained interest and kept the skillset growing building on the example code available. Later a TRS-80 Model III kept me entertained until a Coco 2 was acquired mostly with my own paper-route money and then later replaced by a Coco 3. In 1985 I was near the top of junior elementary and was able to key and save my own programs in Qbasic myself on school computers. The teacher was intrigued and had to go somewhere to get a disk, amazed that a student would know something about something that the teacher had no idea of. Probably they kept the disk for a long time. By the time Bigpond was available I had an 80286 with Windows 3.1 and use Netscape Navigator even before Internet Explorer existed publicly. Go MC-10, my fond childhood memories of exploring logical thinking.
I had a CoCo2 but the family down the street had an MC-10. I liked fiddling around with it and was rooting for it; felt bad that the RadioShack catalogs almost immediately seemed to abandon it and the CoCo magazines I devoured gave it very little coverage. Looking back, my entire TRS-80 experience was low-key dreading inevitable doom because I came on board right after Tandy had already started selling MS-DOS machines.
I worked for Radio Shack back then and like playing around with the MC-10. I was big into the CoCo back then and they used the 6803 instead of the 6809 for cost reasons in the MC10, but it was within the same family, and it used the identical 6847 VDG (video display generator) as the CoCo, So if you were a CoCo expert (like I was back then), you could do quite a bit. The "later" versions of the MC6847 VDG had true lowercase (with descenders), and the CoCo had a couple of pokes you could do to activate the true lower case mode. All basic statements though had to be typed in uppercase to be recognized though like the CoCo. You're dead on that it was a direct response to, and quite an improvement over the ZX81/Timex Sinclair 1000 device. The ROMs were quite different between CoCo and MC10. They were functionally equivalent to Color Computers with Level I basic. Level II mainly added high resolution support and high resolution functions for graphics and sound that the MC-10 didn't have, but the MC-10 did have the same VDG, so via machine code, or basic pokes, so you could get the same high resolution graphics from the MC-10 as you could from the CoCo 1 and 2. You can get a peek at the high resolution mode by typing this in: POKE 49151,127 That will put it in a 2 color b&w mode, but you can get red and blue through artifacting for a total of 4 colors. the resolution is 256x192. Not particularly useful because max memory was 16k, so you couldn't really support the higher modes because the memory just wasn't there, but home brew hacks have been made to extend the memory to the full 64k the CPU can address It was a excellent attempt at making a $99 dollar version of the Color Computer, but with 16k Standard CoCo 2 priced at $159,and the MC-10 at $99 and $49 for the additional ram, that, for an additional $10 they could get the equivalent to the MC-10 with the option down the road to upgrade the ROM to 32k Extended, and the RAM to 64k vs the 16k limit on the MC-10, not to mention exponentially more software and support. The MC10 was awesome for the price, but as you pointed out, prices were still dropping on other systems like the CoCo, C64, etc. The industry was pretty young back then, and didn't have a full grasp on what consumers were willing to pay for various competing systems. It's also well emulated, so it's easy to get your hands on even without buying the hardware.
I got my first computer for Christmas. It was a Timex Sinclair 1000. After playing with it on Christmas day, I packed it up we took it back to the store the following day. We walked over to Radio Shack and picked this up in its place. That was a good decision as this was a great first computer. With the magazine Family Computing, I learned to program in basic as each month they offered fun programs for the family to enter this and similar other machines that had Basic.
I bought one of these at clearance price from an associate store in 1984 and eventually added he thermal, printer and memory expansion module. I later move up to a CoCo II and discovered some interesting differences between the two systems. The cassette tape format was compatible between the two - but only for binary programs. The BASIC language tape format on both systems stored programs in a tokenized form, but used different token codes, and the M
My first computer as well. I begged my parents for a Commodore 64, but they got me this for my birthday in November... then got me the 16k pack for Christmas after that. Mind blown!
Thanks for the demo! It brought back memories! I had one of these back in the day. I found $100 in a parking lot and after waiting 10 minutes to see if anyone came looking for it, I used it to buy a TRS-80 MC-10! The only thing I did with it was write some basic programs. I wish I had kept it...
Good to see reviews of old computers like this, some familiar, some not. I don't recall seeing this model in the UK, but I'll have to do some research on it. Thanks again.
The full-size Color Computer only had a 0.89 MHz CPU as well, but the Motorola 680x series were more efficient than a 6502 or Z80, so the actual speed was comparable to other 8-bit computers of the time. But yes, having only 4K RAM really was very limited by 1983 standards. Maybe if Tandy had given the MC-10 at least 16K as standard, it would've done better.
This is a great video, thanks for making it. Something about the part where you go through the sounds, and then list the individual colours is just fantastic.
I'm American. We say Z as Zee. The ZX81 was well known in America (everyone called it the Sinclair ZX81 anyway even though it was officially the Timex 1000 here) so I say it the say everyone said it here. Same thing with the Z80 CPU chip; we say "zee-80", while Brits say "zed-80", even though the Z80 was designed and manufactured in the USA.
I still have mine, and the 16k module, from back then. It is stored in the original box. Probably used it for less than a year before moving up to a CoCo 2 and then a CoCo III (which I also still have). After watching the video I want to get them all out. Didn't know about those wav files.
Radio Shack did sell some dot-matrix printers for the CoCo series, but the one they intended for use with the MC-10 was a thermal receipt printer (the TP-10), so it was pretty much silent. They also did have a real Breakout game for it too, which I'll show as part of a video about games for the MC-10.
Hello. I have the same model TRS-80 Radio Shack, just that I have not one recording cassettes unit to can record one basic program. So, I just keep that mini computer to my personal old computers museum. I like it. I got one Toshiba Satellite 100CS but have one Intel Pentium 75, no one Intel 386 or 486 processor. Ah, I like the old computers to remember that 80´s! Greetings from Mexico city. :D
Yes, in the 1980s there were several different floppy disk formats between 2 and 3 inches that were used on some computers, before the industry eventually standardized on the Sony 3.5 inch disk format.
The Commodore VIC-20 was sold first in Europe in 1980 then in the US in early 1981, for less than $100 - - and it was the first personal computer to sell over 1,000,000 units in its first 12 months of release.
What I like about these early computers is that you usually got a half way decent manual that would actually teach you about how computers work. Also, thee were magazines that you could learn from as well. In some ways, these machines are better than the crap we get today!!
The sound is through the TV. I'm sure it will run fine on 9 volts DC, as the power input goes straight into a bridge rectifier (which DC will pass through just fine) and then a 7805 voltage regulator. There are a few web sites which let you download the service manual, and it includes full schematics.
I have an MC10 in my drawer, along with a CTR81 cassette recorder that still works. I did have to clean the jacks due to crackles and squeaks. I got the MC10 from a friend who got it at a garage sale. My box is as beat up as yours. I also have a CCR82 cassette but it has a broken gear so I use the CTR82. A nice bit of fun and takes me back to the 80s when I had a CoCo 1 and later got the CoCo3. I had a lot of stuff too, shame I parted with it all when I went over to PC.
American ham radio operators say Z as Zed when announcing their call signs, because that reduces confusion between Z (zee) and C (cee). But otherwise you are correct.
Great video!. I still have the MC-10 I bought back in 1985 as it was being discontinued by Radio Shack, lil' bugger took me through some college courses no sweat. Recent developments for the MC-10 are a BASIC/RAM expansion (MX128) which greatly enhances the built in system and a Disk Drive/Joystick Interface board. The later can be seen on my YT channel. The MC-10 is alive and well :-)
The American version of the ZX Spectrum was the Timex-Sinclair 2068 (although it was incompatible with most Spectrum software unless a rare Spectrum ROM cartridge was used), which was released in November 1983, a few months after the MC-10, and was more expensive. The TS2068 did not sell well and very little software was made for it before Timex Computer Corporation went out of business in early 1984.
My friend had one w/ the 16K expansion and the cassette player/recorder. He got little use out of it. A little while after he got it, he upgraded to the atari 64K computer.
I have heard that, but never seen one. The BBC Micro was also briefly available in the USA, but they were so unsuccessful that they took the unsold American machines, converted them back to European standards (240V mains and PAL video), and resold them in the UK.
Brilliant but there was a ZILOG Z80A based machine made in the UK by a company called MEMOTECH called the MEMOTECH MTX512 which had 32KB 32768 BYTES of RAM and you could write basic programs with machine code which ran a lot faster than BASIC programs you also had add on RAM module which took the RAM up to 64KB 65536 BYTES and a a floppy drive the MTX FDX which allowed you to have two floppy discs inserted at the same time and run programs written for use with CP/M and would allow you to store larger programs on DISC, it also had the ability to connect to a dot matrix printer from MEMOTECH and could connect to the internet via a modem connected to it's serial port.
It was made in Korea. And I suppose they wanted to make it clear that the listed amount of memory (as small as it was!) was all RAM, unlike some other new computers in 1983 who were cheating by advertising their total memory as RAM + ROM combined, such as the "72K Onboard Memory" Timex-Sinclair 2068, which actually was 48K RAM + 24K ROM.
I just bought one of these! Found it nearly CiB except for the RF modulator... hoping to get it working as a terminal for BBS stuff, though that might take some doing.
Still have my original & in the box. The box is in great condition as is the computer. Pulled it out as soon as I saw this video. I used to do the color bars program all the time. ;)
Very nice. It's quite simple, but there's lots of interesting things you can do with it. I like this style of computer too; a keyboard with all the hardware built into it, like a laptop but without the screen. I wish they would bring that back. You can just hook it up to a monitor or a regular TV.
Being a huge Coco fan and collector, the MC-10 has always intrigued me. Very interesting little system. Dave4shmups sent me and I"ll sub to your channel :)
@vwestlife What kind of RF connector it uses? Couldn't see it when you plugged all the cables, and the connector didn't seem like a standard RF one (you know, the one used with coaxial cable)...
At $120 it seemed like a lot of bang for the buck back in the day but I never did buy one even when they were on clearance for around $10.00. It did bug me that this thing had a built in serial port while the RS232 board for my Model III set me back $100!
the MC-10 was my first computer as a kid in the 80s. I pretty much had to write everything I wanted to do with it myself. That and copy programs out of magazines. We DID have the 16K expansion module as well. ... Now my dad won't even let me hook it up to play with it again. LOL
I was just going to say that the 'engine' sound was like the tank sound in Atari VCS Combat. :) Aside from the issue of timing when it entered the market, the MC-10 looks to be a well-designed nice little machine, that fixes the shortcomings of the ZX81: reasonable keyboard, sound, and colour graphics, plus more RAM and an on-off switch. If Radio Shack had launched it 2 years earlier, I can imagine it selling well.
oh my god. how in the wold programmers could design something during that time XD thank of those guys that spend the time to optimize the computer to those things we have on this time
Wow.. I used to have one of those.. Ahh the memories... Going to the library and photo coping the games that were in the magazines.. Getting home and spending 2 - 3 hours programming the game into it.. Just to play it for an hour or two.. Only to lose all that work when I turned it off.. But that was ok.. I just redid it all again the next day :) lol
We often hear comparisons between the huge 50s mainframes and current computers. How would the Univac 1 compare to this computer? Would this computer still trump the Univac?
Not only that, they had internal competition, as by 1984, the Tandy CoCo2 16K could be had for as little as $150, ($190 for the 16K Extended) and for $259, you could get the new, 64K Extended CoCo 2. If I was Tandy, I would have lauched these in the UK, where they could have easily competed with the ZX Spectrum .
Yes, the ZX-81 was incredibly basic, not only that by 1983, Sinclair had already released the Spectrum, their own upgrade to the ZX-81 which I thought Timex released over there. I also noticed the MC-10 doesn't have joystick ports like the CoCo did (or indeed a cartridge port) Also, just as the MC-10 was rebadged in France, we had the Dragon 32 and 64 which were re-engineered versions of the CoCo
the coco and dragon were both based on the same motorola 'reference' design, but as the coco came out first, the dragon is thought of as a 'semi clone' of the coco (some differences to stop copyright problems)
@@andygozzo72 Yeah, I think the Dragon had different ROMs and came with more RAM. I think the Dragon always came with at least 32K of RAM and always had Extended BASIC and I'm pretty sure type-ins were compatible. I wonder what other software was cross-compatible? Tapes? Cartridges?
@@GeoNeilUK yes, there was no non extended basic version, ram for 32k machines could be several variations of ram chips, some 16x4116, with some on a daughterboard (it was originally designed as a 16k machine but hurriedly altered to 32k with the extra board), some 8x 32k 'double banked' 16k rams(had 2 sets of ras and cas lines) and i think some used 'half bad' 64k types, like the zx spectrum , 64k models used 4164s purely basic programs were compatible except if using keyboard scan codes, and the keyword code tokens were different , and also as long as you didnt want to use the serial port as in the coco , as was not present in 32k dragons
The hardware similarities to the CoCo end at the 6847, everything else is different. The 6803 is only partially source compatible with 6809 assembly, but it still supports 16 bits, and has a multiply instruction! Woo hoo! (no seriously, that makes a big difference) The 6803 seems to be pretty competitive with the 6502 and Z80 even at that slow clock speed. Here's a little comparison between the Acorn Atom, MC-10, and VZ200 doing roughly the same thing... printing 64 column text using the 6847 hi-res graphics. th-cam.com/video/cakVSWT1DHo/w-d-xo.html The BASIC is pretty much compatible with standard CoCo COLOR BASIC but not EXTENDED COLOR BASIC. It uses different keyword tokens... which was pretty stupid, but the workaround is supposedly to save programs from the CoCo in ASCII. For only using 8K, it was pretty good and similar in speed to Microsoft BASIC on 1MHz 6502s. The reset is a hard reset, but it's BASIC doesn't dump your program unless some things get corrupted. Cycle the power switch or type NEW to dump the code. The first Sinclairs don't even have power or reset switches on the computer. The Oric has a reset but it's on the bottom of the machine. I think a lot of people bought MC-10s when Tandy was closing them out. The cheapest closeout price I've heard was $10. They really should have included 8K inside. Hunt the Wumpus probably takes that much and that was needed for the hi-res modes on the 6847.
Thats a very nice collctors item you have there. I would like to check out this online library of cassette software for my COCOs. Where is it? Maybe Ill even tape record it
These disks were mostly used for Smith Corona's computer word procesors. You can look them up online as they begin with the PWP name. The drives were VERY unreliable overtime. If you buy them now thw drives are broken making saving things useless. The PWPs with 3.5 disks last until today and are far more durable and reliable. The radio SHACK mc-10 can be emmulated using VMC program. Search online for it. You can play with it on your home pc for free!
890khz sounds like a really poor operating speed, until you consider that a lot of things using the same architecture weren't much faster, maybe a little over 1mhz or upto 2mhz at most... System clock ticks are worth quite a bit more on a 6800 / 6502 type processor than a Z80, the internal instruction processing on a 3.5mhz Z80 isn't any faster than a 1-point-something mhz 6800/6502. Plus the ZX81 that it was competing against only ran at an effective 1mhz or so (thus far slower in reality than this machine's processor would have run) with the display turned on, because the processor wasn't merely locked out of memory access during the active video period... but entirely responsible for generating the output image, live, line by line and frame by frame, during which generation it couldn't do any other calculation. If you wanted to use the full screaming power of its 3.5mhz Z80 you had to _turn off the display_ (which is what the ZX80 did by default, so you only got a display whilst it was idling...), something which was only finally fixed in the Spectrum (reducing the slowdown to rather less troublesome alternate-cycle contention) with its separate ULA for video generation. And of course, any kind of colour, sound, or graphics character (beyond simple quarter-space blocks) is way in advance of what the ZX81 / TS1000 could produce. It's much closer overall to the Spectrum in fact, though the limited memory is a bit of a problem.
Man, those specs are pretty sad, even by early 80s standards, but I guess you get what you pay for :) Nice overview though. I like the retro blocky graphics too!
Yea. I bought a trs-80 color in its original box for $80 off some hippie at a flea market. I later sold it on ebay for $120. Had a great time using it though (i would buy another sometime) .
Do you have a dot matrix printer to use with that? I love the sound of those things! That game is a little more like breakout only you catch the things instead of breaking blocks
I just got my MC-10 Computer a couple of days ago ... sadly it's 110V @ 60hz, and i live in Europe, so im waiting for a frequency converter to arrive before i can play with it :D
The MC-10 runs on 8 to 9 volts AC at 1.5 amps, so any power supply which puts out that kind of voltage can be used -- you don't necessarily need to use the original one it came with.
Have you encountered the Dragon 32 or 64? I think they were briefly marketed in the US, but like most British micro companies, Dragon Data didn't have much success. The Dragon was practically identical to the CoCo in hardware terms.
Always liked the look of the MC-10 over the later CoCo models. A bit more like those really early British micros. Fantastic video! Still hoping to get some of these machines someday.
This how I know LGR is a real one. VWestlife Appreciator.
Nice to see my Sound Demonstration program in use, which I wrote mid 80's in machine language!
Gary Furr
The interesting thing about CoCo sound is that it is 6-bit PCM. There's one register where you set a voltage level (0..63) on the speaker (and another register to select the TV speaker or cassette port for output).
Using this, you could play digital audio, although with only 16K of RAM and an 800kHz clock, it won't be terribly high resolution. Not great compared to the audio in a first-generation Mac, but a whole lot better than the built-in speaker on a IBM PC or Apple II (both of which were 1-bit - only capable of fixed-amplitude square waves, relying on pulse-width modulation software tricks to produce anything more elaborate than beep sounds).
I salivated over one of these after seeing it in a shop back in the early 80s. In fact as an 11 year old I got excited by the thought of owning any system, even owning a ZX81 would have been great at the time. We ended up with a Commodore 64 family pack in Christmas 84. I think my father made the right choice.
The MC-10 was one of the greatest gifts I received as a child, to learn logical systematic problem solving and thinking. The monthly subscription magazines maintained interest and kept the skillset growing building on the example code available. Later a TRS-80 Model III kept me entertained until a Coco 2 was acquired mostly with my own paper-route money and then later replaced by a Coco 3. In 1985 I was near the top of junior elementary and was able to key and save my own programs in Qbasic myself on school computers. The teacher was intrigued and had to go somewhere to get a disk, amazed that a student would know something about something that the teacher had no idea of. Probably they kept the disk for a long time. By the time Bigpond was available I had an 80286 with Windows 3.1 and use Netscape Navigator even before Internet Explorer existed publicly. Go MC-10, my fond childhood memories of exploring logical thinking.
I had a CoCo2 but the family down the street had an MC-10. I liked fiddling around with it and was rooting for it; felt bad that the RadioShack catalogs almost immediately seemed to abandon it and the CoCo magazines I devoured gave it very little coverage. Looking back, my entire TRS-80 experience was low-key dreading inevitable doom because I came on board right after Tandy had already started selling MS-DOS machines.
I worked for Radio Shack back then and like playing around with the MC-10. I was big into the CoCo back then and they used the 6803 instead of the 6809 for cost reasons in the MC10, but it was within the same family, and it used the identical 6847 VDG (video display generator) as the CoCo, So if you were a CoCo expert (like I was back then), you could do quite a bit. The "later" versions of the MC6847 VDG had true lowercase (with descenders), and the CoCo had a couple of pokes you could do to activate the true lower case mode. All basic statements though had to be typed in uppercase to be recognized though like the CoCo. You're dead on that it was a direct response to, and quite an improvement over the ZX81/Timex Sinclair 1000 device.
The ROMs were quite different between CoCo and MC10. They were functionally equivalent to Color Computers with Level I basic. Level II mainly added high resolution support and high resolution functions for graphics and sound that the MC-10 didn't have, but the MC-10 did have the same VDG, so via machine code, or basic pokes, so you could get the same high resolution graphics from the MC-10 as you could from the CoCo 1 and 2.
You can get a peek at the high resolution mode by typing this in:
POKE 49151,127
That will put it in a 2 color b&w mode, but you can get red and blue through artifacting for a total of 4 colors. the resolution is 256x192.
Not particularly useful because max memory was 16k, so you couldn't really support the higher modes because the memory just wasn't there, but home brew hacks have been made to extend the memory to the full 64k the CPU can address
It was a excellent attempt at making a $99 dollar version of the Color Computer, but with 16k Standard CoCo 2 priced at $159,and the MC-10 at $99 and $49 for the additional ram, that, for an additional $10 they could get the equivalent to the MC-10 with the option down the road to upgrade the ROM to 32k Extended, and the RAM to 64k vs the 16k limit on the MC-10, not to mention exponentially more software and support. The MC10 was awesome for the price, but as you pointed out, prices were still dropping on other systems like the CoCo, C64, etc. The industry was pretty young back then, and didn't have a full grasp on what consumers were willing to pay for various competing systems. It's also well emulated, so it's easy to get your hands on even without buying the hardware.
I got my first computer for Christmas. It was a Timex Sinclair 1000. After playing with it on Christmas day, I packed it up we took it back to the store the following day. We walked over to Radio Shack and picked this up in its place. That was a good decision as this was a great first computer. With the magazine Family Computing, I learned to program in basic as each month they offered fun programs for the family to enter this and similar other machines that had Basic.
I bought one of these at clearance price from an associate store in 1984 and eventually added he thermal, printer and memory expansion module. I later move up to a CoCo II and discovered some interesting differences between the two systems.
The cassette tape format was compatible between the two - but only for binary programs. The BASIC language tape format on both systems stored programs in a tokenized form, but used different token codes, and the M
This was my first computer back in 83-84
I had the 16k expanded memory aswell
I had a lot of fun on this machine back in the day.
How cool was that! Love to see the old technology that led us to todays tech
Same here. I also owned the Timex Sinclair. My mom got it for free when opening up a savings account.
My first computer as well. I begged my parents for a Commodore 64, but they got me this for my birthday in November... then got me the 16k pack for Christmas after that. Mind blown!
Thanks for the demo! It brought back memories! I had one of these back in the day. I found $100 in a parking lot and after waiting 10 minutes to see if anyone came looking for it, I used it to buy a TRS-80 MC-10! The only thing I did with it was write some basic programs. I wish I had kept it...
My first computer, thanks for the memories. :)
My first computer back in 6th grade! Thanks for the memories!
I learned a ton about computers by playing around with an MC 10 when I was a kid. Such fun!
Good to see reviews of old computers like this, some familiar, some not. I don't recall seeing this model in the UK, but I'll have to do some research on it. Thanks again.
The full-size Color Computer only had a 0.89 MHz CPU as well, but the Motorola 680x series were more efficient than a 6502 or Z80, so the actual speed was comparable to other 8-bit computers of the time. But yes, having only 4K RAM really was very limited by 1983 standards. Maybe if Tandy had given the MC-10 at least 16K as standard, it would've done better.
This is a great video, thanks for making it. Something about the part where you go through the sounds, and then list the individual colours is just fantastic.
Also, the last program in the book "Kaleidoscope" had an error.
I enjoy your reviews of the older consoles and personal computers ! Keep it up!
I'm American. We say Z as Zee. The ZX81 was well known in America (everyone called it the Sinclair ZX81 anyway even though it was officially the Timex 1000 here) so I say it the say everyone said it here. Same thing with the Z80 CPU chip; we say "zee-80", while Brits say "zed-80", even though the Z80 was designed and manufactured in the USA.
That was my first computer !
I still have mine, and the 16k module, from back then. It is stored in the original box. Probably used it for less than a year before moving up to a CoCo 2 and then a CoCo III (which I also still have). After watching the video I want to get them all out. Didn't know about those wav files.
Radio Shack did sell some dot-matrix printers for the CoCo series, but the one they intended for use with the MC-10 was a thermal receipt printer (the TP-10), so it was pretty much silent. They also did have a real Breakout game for it too, which I'll show as part of a video about games for the MC-10.
Hello.
I have the same model TRS-80 Radio Shack, just that I have not one recording cassettes unit to can record one basic program.
So, I just keep that mini computer to my personal old computers museum. I like it.
I got one Toshiba Satellite 100CS but have one Intel Pentium 75, no one Intel 386 or 486 processor.
Ah, I like the old computers to remember that 80´s! Greetings from Mexico city. :D
Yes, in the 1980s there were several different floppy disk formats between 2 and 3 inches that were used on some computers, before the industry eventually standardized on the Sony 3.5 inch disk format.
The Commodore VIC-20 was sold first in Europe in 1980 then in the US in early 1981, for less than $100 - - and it was the first personal computer to sell over 1,000,000 units in its first 12 months of release.
What I like about these early computers is that you usually got a half way decent manual that would actually teach you about how computers work. Also, thee were magazines that you could learn from as well. In some ways, these machines are better than the crap we get today!!
Your videos are just amazing..I could and do watch them all night..
Same here! It is impossible to hate on vwestlife!
The sound is through the TV. I'm sure it will run fine on 9 volts DC, as the power input goes straight into a bridge rectifier (which DC will pass through just fine) and then a 7805 voltage regulator. There are a few web sites which let you download the service manual, and it includes full schematics.
Thanks for this look into the first computer I ever used! Nostalgia!!
I have an MC10 in my drawer, along with a CTR81 cassette recorder that still works. I did have to clean the jacks due to crackles and squeaks. I got the MC10 from a friend who got it at a garage sale. My box is as beat up as yours. I also have a CCR82 cassette but it has a broken gear so I use the CTR82. A nice bit of fun and takes me back to the 80s when I had a CoCo 1 and later got the CoCo3. I had a lot of stuff too, shame I parted with it all when I went over to PC.
American ham radio operators say Z as Zed when announcing their call signs, because that reduces confusion between Z (zee) and C (cee). But otherwise you are correct.
Great video!. I still have the MC-10 I bought back in 1985 as it was being discontinued by Radio Shack, lil' bugger took me through some college courses no sweat. Recent developments for the MC-10 are a BASIC/RAM expansion (MX128) which greatly enhances the built in system and a Disk Drive/Joystick Interface board. The later can be seen on my YT channel. The MC-10 is alive and well :-)
The American version of the ZX Spectrum was the Timex-Sinclair 2068 (although it was incompatible with most Spectrum software unless a rare Spectrum ROM cartridge was used), which was released in November 1983, a few months after the MC-10, and was more expensive. The TS2068 did not sell well and very little software was made for it before Timex Computer Corporation went out of business in early 1984.
My friend had one w/ the 16K expansion and the cassette player/recorder. He got little use out of it. A little while after he got it, he upgraded to the atari 64K computer.
I have heard that, but never seen one. The BBC Micro was also briefly available in the USA, but they were so unsuccessful that they took the unsold American machines, converted them back to European standards (240V mains and PAL video), and resold them in the UK.
Aah! The old Trash-80.
was my first pc, in the very early 80's, still have it!
Not always, but I guess back in the '80s, people were more likely to save the original box than they are now.
Brilliant but there was a ZILOG Z80A based machine made in the UK by a company called MEMOTECH called the MEMOTECH MTX512 which had 32KB 32768 BYTES of RAM and you could write basic programs with machine code which ran a lot faster than BASIC programs you also had add on RAM module which took the RAM up to 64KB 65536 BYTES and a a floppy drive the MTX FDX which allowed you to have two floppy discs inserted at the same time and run programs written for use with CP/M and would allow you to store larger programs on DISC, it also had the ability to connect to a dot matrix printer from MEMOTECH and could connect to the internet via a modem connected to it's serial port.
This brings back memories!
It was made in Korea. And I suppose they wanted to make it clear that the listed amount of memory (as small as it was!) was all RAM, unlike some other new computers in 1983 who were cheating by advertising their total memory as RAM + ROM combined, such as the "72K Onboard Memory" Timex-Sinclair 2068, which actually was 48K RAM + 24K ROM.
Nice review. I've never seen one of these things in action before. I didn't realise they gave the same black on green text as the CoCo.
my first computer!
I find it hilarious that a C “hello world” program uses about 32K and 80s computers had an entire interpreter in 8K!
I just bought one of these! Found it nearly CiB except for the RF modulator... hoping to get it working as a terminal for BBS stuff, though that might take some doing.
Cool. I never even knew this model existed! I just thought it was the "big ones" and then the CoCos.
Still have my original & in the box. The box is in great condition as is the computer. Pulled it out as soon as I saw this video. I used to do the color bars program all the time. ;)
Very nice. It's quite simple, but there's lots of interesting things you can do with it. I like this style of computer too; a keyboard with all the hardware built into it, like a laptop but without the screen. I wish they would bring that back. You can just hook it up to a monitor or a regular TV.
Being a huge Coco fan and collector, the MC-10 has always intrigued me. Very interesting little system. Dave4shmups sent me and I"ll sub to your channel :)
Thanks for the video. This was my first computer when I was 14 years old. Wish I would have kept it.
@vwestlife What kind of RF connector it uses? Couldn't see it when you plugged all the cables, and the connector didn't seem like a standard RF one (you know, the one used with coaxial cable)...
At $120 it seemed like a lot of bang for the buck back in the day but I never did buy one even when they were on clearance for around $10.00.
It did bug me that this thing had a built in serial port while the RS232 board for my Model III set me back $100!
the MC-10 was my first computer as a kid in the 80s. I pretty much had to write everything I wanted to do with it myself. That and copy programs out of magazines. We DID have the 16K expansion module as well. ... Now my dad won't even let me hook it up to play with it again. LOL
Any kind of tape recorder with microphone, earphone, and remote jacks.
My 1st computer. It's where earned how to program.
And this was state of the art at the time!
I have one too with a good box , i love the old radio shacks !!
Oldie but goodie... :).
Not all Canadians do; mostly older generations say "zed". Younger Canadians grow up watching U.S. TV shows and thus are more likely to say "zee".
There are several different web sites, some dedicated to the MC-10, others to the main CoCo family. A Google search will reveal them.
i had this computer when i was a kid i love it
That's pretty awesome. I used to have one of the coco's that Radio Shack re released back in 1993.
You can use it with a TV tuner card in your PC, but of course just using a real television set is much easier.
I was just going to say that the 'engine' sound was like the tank sound in Atari VCS Combat. :) Aside from the issue of timing when it entered the market, the MC-10 looks to be a well-designed nice little machine, that fixes the shortcomings of the ZX81: reasonable keyboard, sound, and colour graphics, plus more RAM and an on-off switch. If Radio Shack had launched it 2 years earlier, I can imagine it selling well.
You really do live in the Aladins Cave of Retro.
oh my god. how in the wold programmers could design something during that time XD thank of those guys that spend the time to optimize the computer to those things we have on this time
i got the eu version of this one . is sell in a red suit case and called alice 32. and the computer is red of course and look adorable.
I remember selling those to students learning to use a pc.
Wow.. I used to have one of those.. Ahh the memories... Going to the library and photo coping the games that were in the magazines.. Getting home and spending 2 - 3 hours programming the game into it.. Just to play it for an hour or two.. Only to lose all that work when I turned it off.. But that was ok.. I just redid it all again the next day :) lol
The Telephone sound would make a great ringtone :)
Excellent video! What type of physical cassette tape recorder would be compatible with this computer?
woo this was my first machine
We often hear comparisons between the huge 50s mainframes and current computers. How would the Univac 1 compare to this computer? Would this computer still trump the Univac?
Nice review, not really seen one before :)
It's an RCA jack.
I saved this to my "je je je je" playlist. Je je je je. I love Susanna with two nn's.
Not only that, they had internal competition, as by 1984, the Tandy CoCo2 16K could be had for as little as $150, ($190 for the 16K Extended) and for $259, you could get the new, 64K Extended CoCo 2. If I was Tandy, I would have lauched these in the UK, where they could have easily competed with the ZX Spectrum .
Yes, the ZX-81 was incredibly basic, not only that by 1983, Sinclair had already released the Spectrum, their own upgrade to the ZX-81 which I thought Timex released over there.
I also noticed the MC-10 doesn't have joystick ports like the CoCo did (or indeed a cartridge port)
Also, just as the MC-10 was rebadged in France, we had the Dragon 32 and 64 which were re-engineered versions of the CoCo
the coco and dragon were both based on the same motorola 'reference' design, but as the coco came out first, the dragon is thought of as a 'semi clone' of the coco (some differences to stop copyright problems)
@@andygozzo72 Yeah, I think the Dragon had different ROMs and came with more RAM. I think the Dragon always came with at least 32K of RAM and always had Extended BASIC and I'm pretty sure type-ins were compatible.
I wonder what other software was cross-compatible? Tapes? Cartridges?
@@GeoNeilUK yes, there was no non extended basic version, ram for 32k machines could be several variations of ram chips, some 16x4116, with some on a daughterboard (it was originally designed as a 16k machine but hurriedly altered to 32k with the extra board), some 8x 32k 'double banked' 16k rams(had 2 sets of ras and cas lines) and i think some used 'half bad' 64k types, like the zx spectrum , 64k models used 4164s purely basic programs were compatible except if using keyboard scan codes, and the keyword code tokens were different , and also as long as you didnt want to use the serial port as in the coco , as was not present in 32k dragons
The hardware similarities to the CoCo end at the 6847, everything else is different. The 6803 is only partially source compatible with 6809 assembly, but it still supports 16 bits, and has a multiply instruction! Woo hoo! (no seriously, that makes a big difference)
The 6803 seems to be pretty competitive with the 6502 and Z80 even at that slow clock speed.
Here's a little comparison between the Acorn Atom, MC-10, and VZ200 doing roughly the same thing... printing 64 column text using the 6847 hi-res graphics.
th-cam.com/video/cakVSWT1DHo/w-d-xo.html
The BASIC is pretty much compatible with standard CoCo COLOR BASIC but not EXTENDED COLOR BASIC. It uses different keyword tokens... which was pretty stupid, but the workaround is supposedly to save programs from the CoCo in ASCII. For only using 8K, it was pretty good and similar in speed to Microsoft BASIC on 1MHz 6502s.
The reset is a hard reset, but it's BASIC doesn't dump your program unless some things get corrupted. Cycle the power switch or type NEW to dump the code. The first Sinclairs don't even have power or reset switches on the computer. The Oric has a reset but it's on the bottom of the machine.
I think a lot of people bought MC-10s when Tandy was closing them out. The cheapest closeout price I've heard was $10.
They really should have included 8K inside. Hunt the Wumpus probably takes that much and that was needed for the hi-res modes on the 6847.
Great video 4k ram of memory=all your base are belong to us
Yeah, it's pretty garish. There is a way to switch it to black text on an orange background, but that's even worse!
That was pretty funny at the end. "It lives up to its name for being a 'micro color computer.' Anyone need a 2.8 inch floppy disk?"
Thats a very nice collctors item you have there. I would like to check out this online library of cassette software for my COCOs. Where is it? Maybe Ill even tape record it
MicroCoCo! Has a nice ring to it.
These disks were mostly used for Smith Corona's computer word procesors. You can look them up online as they begin with the PWP name. The drives were VERY unreliable overtime. If you buy them now thw drives are broken making saving things useless. The PWPs with 3.5 disks last until today and are far more durable and reliable. The radio SHACK mc-10 can be emmulated using VMC program. Search online for it. You can play with it on your home pc for free!
cool, never heard of it before.
Great review.
890khz sounds like a really poor operating speed, until you consider that a lot of things using the same architecture weren't much faster, maybe a little over 1mhz or upto 2mhz at most... System clock ticks are worth quite a bit more on a 6800 / 6502 type processor than a Z80, the internal instruction processing on a 3.5mhz Z80 isn't any faster than a 1-point-something mhz 6800/6502. Plus the ZX81 that it was competing against only ran at an effective 1mhz or so (thus far slower in reality than this machine's processor would have run) with the display turned on, because the processor wasn't merely locked out of memory access during the active video period... but entirely responsible for generating the output image, live, line by line and frame by frame, during which generation it couldn't do any other calculation. If you wanted to use the full screaming power of its 3.5mhz Z80 you had to _turn off the display_ (which is what the ZX80 did by default, so you only got a display whilst it was idling...), something which was only finally fixed in the Spectrum (reducing the slowdown to rather less troublesome alternate-cycle contention) with its separate ULA for video generation.
And of course, any kind of colour, sound, or graphics character (beyond simple quarter-space blocks) is way in advance of what the ZX81 / TS1000 could produce. It's much closer overall to the Spectrum in fact, though the limited memory is a bit of a problem.
a lot of simple electronic devices run at ~32768 hz and below
Man, those specs are pretty sad, even by early 80s standards, but I guess you get what you pay for :) Nice overview though. I like the retro blocky graphics too!
Yea. I bought a trs-80 color in its original box for $80 off some hippie at a flea market. I later sold it on ebay for $120. Had a great time using it though (i would buy another sometime) .
There is an emulator of MC-10 called Virtual MC-10. I downloaded it years ago.
This sounds like a fun computer to make an emulator for...
Where do you find all of your cool retro items? I like retro items/electronics but the prices on ebay can be kind of a rip off sometimes.
Do you have a dot matrix printer to use with that? I love the sound of those things! That game is a little more like breakout only you catch the things instead of breaking blocks
Yes.
I just got my MC-10 Computer a couple of days ago ... sadly it's 110V @ 60hz, and i live in Europe, so im waiting for a frequency converter to arrive before i can play with it :D
The MC-10 runs on 8 to 9 volts AC at 1.5 amps, so any power supply which puts out that kind of voltage can be used -- you don't necessarily need to use the original one it came with.
@@vwestlife But the AC Frequency still needs to be correct, which it wont be without a frequency converter :)
No it doesn't, because it's all being converted to DC inside the computer anyway. So it doesn't matter whether it's 60 Hz or 50 Hz.
@@vwestlife Are you sure? I thought the AC signal was used for the NTSC modulation?
No. NTSC actually runs at 59.94 Hz, and has not been synched to the power line frequency since at least the 1940s.
It looks like a very decent computer. If only people cared for the working things over the fast things.......
WHOOOA! NEVER EVEN SEEN THIS!
Another reason why these didn't sell well was because base level COCO2 was only $60 more so most people opted to buy it instead.
Have you encountered the Dragon 32 or 64? I think they were briefly marketed in the US, but like most British micro companies, Dragon Data didn't have much success. The Dragon was practically identical to the CoCo in hardware terms.
got one of orth Radio Shack surplus store in 1987thoe at the Ft W