Hungarian retrogeek here. Here's my solution to the mystery. The Hungarian Communist government was struggling with a school computer project since around 1980. Numerous attempts to build a simple 8-bit machine failed, mostly due to the unavailability of necessary parts and manufacturing capacity. The few models produced are very interesting from a collector's perspective: the Primo (a Sinclair ZX-80 clone), the HT-1080Z and its successors, the Aircomp 16, etc. Most of them were only built in relatively small numbers, despite the fact that Hungary had a fairly strong computer industry and produced state of the art, modern office computers. All of these proposed school computers had a Zilog Z80 CPU, or its East German copy, the U808. The other common thing about them was that nobody had ever seen one in their school. Only legends circulated about a few lucky kids whose parents worked at some high place and were somehow able to obtain one. Although even this wasn't that magical any more: by 1985 a lot of Hungarians could travel to Austria, and Commodore 64s bought in Austrian shopping centers started to become fairly common. Also by 1985 the government started to realize that they're pumping a lot of funds into a fairly hopeless project, and it would make more sense to purchase leftover stocks of failed Western products. This is how the Enterprise arrived to Hungary. Since it was a flop, the manufacturer was happy to sell them at production price. The Commodore 16 and Plus/4, also a failed product line, was highly popular in Hungary for the same reason. Ultimately many schools received Commodores, the 16s being the students', and the Plus/4 the teachers' machines. (The 16 was a simplified version of the Plus/4, thus they were compatible.) However, the government still hadn't given up their plans to introduce a domestically produced microcomputer, and in 1986 a final and definitive school computer, the Videoton TV Computer (TVC) appeared. It was actually a cheap copy of the Enterprise, without the custom chips, and in much poorer quality. It was also much larger. However, it had the advantage of being very cheap. By 1986 the Commodore 64, and even the Amiga 1000 were already available in some Hungarian stores, but the TVC only costed a fraction of what they did. In some schools the TVC was still in use in the early 1990s. When I went to technical school in 1991, we had two in the computer lab, along some thirty Atari 600XLs. Yes, the government really purchased anything they could get, as long as it could run BASIC. Despite all of its shortcomings and poor quality, the TVC was a popular computer. Even today, there's an enthusiastic TVC community in Hungary, doing all the things retro geeks do. I also have two TVCs, which are likely the only specimens on the North American continent. Their power supply, of course, didn't survive until 2021, and they were European too, so I gutted them and replaced their insides with a modern PSU, made in China. At least it still only contains parts made in a Communist country.
We used to stock these in a store I used to work in. IIRC, we never sold a single one. It never stood a chance against the Amstrad CPC, C64, & Speccy. Great to see one again. Always loved the physical appearance of it.
It looks like the Japanese computers i can't remember the name. I'd love to have one though I love these old micros I wanted one so bad a a kid the c64 but my grandparents who raised me thought they were a fad.
@@allanfulton8922 I wanted a NES in the early 90's but my Mum bought me a C64 GS instead. The other kids had Mario, I had Flimbo's Quest. Perhaps it is character building.
Nice one! I am a hungarian and I was 13 years old (at 1989) when I went to a computer camp where I have seen Enterprise 128 for the first time! It was in the media lab, I assume because of the graphics capabilities together with C16s ans Plus4s, on which we learned graphics programming in BASIC! The camp also had a LAN of 32 C64s, something that I have never seen before!
C16, Plus4, Enterprise 128, all that in 1989... It sounds like you got to buy up all the excess stock of machines that didn't sell in the rest of Europe.
@@stealthslide2723 It was a long time ago but I remember that it was a classroom setup, so the teacher could see anyone's monitor, also could do some stuff on our computers and also there was only one printer and floppy drive that all of them reached! So it was pretty cool thing.
@@Nibb31 Speccy(well, its clones) in USSR just began to appear around the same time, so... it's no wonder. Prior to that we had all kinds of clones produced domestically - 8080, 6502, even pdp-11 based micros (and mostly these latter ones) 🙂
Seems Hungary (my home country) somehow became a safe haven for computers which were absolute flops "in the west", including the Commodore 264 series (which was my first computing experience) and the Enterprise. And Intelligent Software might have connections to another (mostly) Hungarian micro, which was actually made in Hungary: the Videoton TV Computer, a.k.a. the TVC. These are all quite some stories to tell.
Interesting you mention it was a hit in Hungary. Well, I live in a relatively small town in Hungary and I knew someone who had one. The guy was really good programming it, he wrote quite a few, simplier games and demos on it and whenever we were at their place, we'd play a port of the Star Wars arcade game. As a matter of fact, that was my first encounter with that legendary game.
You can repair the box with PVA wood glue, it's very good for sticking expanded polystyrene, I did some sculpting and model making with it at college many years ago.
Great video as always and so good to see you back on fine form with a classic RMC video! I'd seen pictures of the Enterprise but knew absolutely nothing about them so it's fascinating to learn the story. It's amazing just how many weird and obscure British micros there were in the 80s, we really were punching above our weight during that era. Oh, and thanks for having me on of course - always happy to provide dessert-related content!
With about 80,000 units made and a quarter of them being sold in Hungary, there should still have been a userbase large enough for sales of games and other software. But shops weren't that interested in stocking software for "minority" computers. Was there ever a magazine or fanzine ? Much homebrew software in the UK ? Are there 60,000 Enterprises in landfill scattered across the UK with all the software published for it ?
Great video, bought a 128 back in 1985, bundled with monitor and 4 games. One of which was Nodes of Yesod, which you definitely should try out. Still have the original machine and monitor, and collected a few more in the early 90s plus software. Release was 12 to 18 months too late, and mid 1985 the Amiga 1000 was released. I have my original A1000 also. Love the CBM Pets btw!
Im glad we had so many choices in the early 1980s. I would hate the UK market to have been as boring as the US market in the same time period. Choice beats little choice.
@@Salfordian I started with a ZX81, then a Vic-20, then a C64. Then I had a very short lived Atari 400 which was replaced with an 800. Along side the 800 I had a Camputers Lynx. I loved them all! I now have over 200 retro computers!
@@doctorcrankyflaps1724 A few machines I don't have - that I either need to save for, or trade things I have for maybe such as an Amiga 1000. I bought a 1000 when they were brand new - and to be honest didn't last long with it because of lack of software and moved the ST for which I had plenty of access. There are a few other machines I need too. And a few I have far too many of!
I don't know if you're under the impression that the US market was nothing but IBM and Apple or something, but we had Commodores, Ataris, Tandys, Sinclairs, the TI-99/4A, and even the BBC Micro was sold briefly as the Acorn Electron. We even had a few also-rans of our own like the Coleco ADAM and the Exidy Sorceror, the latter of which had the distinction of using 8-track cartridge cases for its ROM cartridge format.
Another good video. Interesting machine technically, slightly more powerful than the Amstrad CPC and with a far larger colour palette, but it seems to lack the hardware sprites and scrolling of the C64. The sound chip is also unusual being a custom build and not an off the shelf component, there's also parallels with the later Sam Coupe computer. There's an interesting video of the machine running Jon Ritmans Batman on TH-cam and it's quite impressive :)
Never owned one but I think I remember my local computer shop stocking some, it was a independent computer shop that was around from the late 1970's to the early 2000's where my brother got his first computer the Commodore 16, then a year or two later he got his Commodore 128. The shop was small but always had interesting stock, it was called Computer's Plus based in the high street of Sittingbourne, Kent. Good memories.
The Enterprise 64 was my second computer (The first being a Sharp PC1245 pocket PC) I loved it and the community that was built up around it. I was a member of the Independent Enterprise User Group (IEUG) Ran by Tim Box of Boxsoft fame and the only other name I can remember from those days was nicknamed "Spider". We even had a group magazine. I had an article in it.... then it folded (co-incidence?) I loved the way it handled the screen graphic modes and sound. I loved the structured, but very slow BASIC (BBC was ten times faster - Mandelbrot program) I built and RGB interface to connect to my portable TV which had an analogue RGB input (So much better than RF) Those were the fun fun fun days.
Given its expandable potential and what it has under the hood, I'm flanbergasted 😉 it didn't do so well. I imagine if they were able to get it out early enough it would have competed nicely. Looking forward to part 2!
A real missed opportunity. And all down to price and timing. This always looked like an interesting machine to own to me. Alas the CPC464 came was released first and pretty much soaked up any potential market between the C64 and Speccy that the Elan could have captured.
I remember me and my best friend salivating over this back in the day (that headline 672x512 res seemed next gen!). We had C64s. Oh and the saga in Popular Computing Weekly re: name changes etc . I've never really seen it in action so super looking forward to part 2!
Having some wax paper or old floppy label backing around when removing old labels really helps with the process and gives you a place to safely store it whilst you service.
I got the same damage of the vent on my E64. Mine is same brand new old stock from eBay and the only problem I had was the keyboard membrane that I was able to fix it but I also bought the replacement. I really hope that you will cover this machine in your show more often.
I've got one of these in perfect nick. Wish I still had the cassette tapes of the programs I wrote at the time. I upgraded from a Vic20, then a BBC C, then this lovely machine and its beautiful PASCAL/BASIC hybrid. But ofc against the C64 and Ataris, it didn't stand a chance. It was so hard to find software for the Enterprise that I taught myself to write my own games. Bought my house through programming, so ... thank you very much, Enterprise. Funny thing is that I live in Hungary now, so I'm going to have a gander and see if there are any of these lying around! It was great to be reminded of all those old machines -- some had totally slipped my mind. The Dragon! Was it the Jupiter than was supposed to run FORTH?!
Awesome calendar! Although that Rock & Wrestle cassette made me feel nauseous!! How many time have I sat there with 2 pencils to wind one of those back in!! Great vid as always, Thankyou!!
Those red, blue and green keys have held their colour a lot better than my old 464. The font used on those keys looks really 80's too. I never saw one in the wild and will be curious to see and hear what it can do.
I picked a new old stock earlier this year and its box condition was almost identical to this one. I decided not to use the PSU and used a modern replacement instead. To my surprise however, the machine was in perfect working order and showed no signs of prior refurbishment. The only downside is the lack of software available to buy for it and even flash cart/card solutions weren't readily available when I looked. Most homebrew software is also 128k only and ther isn't currently an easy way to upgrade the 64k model. It's a nice collection piece if not a practical one.
In my opinion, the Enterprise should have been made as a BBC competitor / business machine, with better keyboard, proper expansion connectors, 128K Ram as standard and Z80B at 6 Mhz or Z80H at 8 Mhz. If they had made a simple 5 1/4 or 3.5" floppy drive, and with its 80 column mode, it would have allowed CPM, or other Graphic OS to be used. With it's Spectrum emulator, it would have also made an awesome upgrade for Spectrum owners as it was way more reliable than the Sam Coupe Spectrum emulation.
I remember thinking these looked fantastic and very futuristic at the time, think it was featured in a computer magazine I read in the 80's but I cant remember ever seeing one for sale in an actual shop
What a fun machine! I hoped that the joystick would have been a standalone stick with some internal wiring to a DB-9 pinout. What a nightmare to replace if you bought one and then it broke...
Your channel is so great. Here in the US we never saw some of the technology that existed across the pond. I really appreciate your channel and the way you present everything. Great stuff. 👍
Thanks for showing this computer on the channel. I recall seeing it advertised in many magazines in the 80s and it had great specs. Can't wait to see your next videos on it.
you can use polystyrene cement to repair the box. Architects use this for modelling, so easy to obtain. I was also very surprised to see the plug supplied and fitted, which is very unusual for this era.
😂 This must have been mentioned, and I just missed it… “Flan” is a cheap graphical change to “Elan”, removing the bottom horizontal line in E creating an F. A “safe” business move to avoid changing stock and molds, just “mutilating” them a bit. 🙈
Always loved the joystick with the ribbed base, colours, shape of the keys, font on the keys, ever since it was featured in Your Computer magazine. There should be a (rare) Spectrum emulator cartridge for it.
Kind of makes me wonder if some of the design team from Sinclair were involved in this. It has a lot of similarities with the Spectrum. Even the motherboard looks like it will fit inside the dktronics keyboard for the speccy.
I love the idea of the drives sitting on top of the machine. If they'd put them side by side that would have looked much more normal, kind of like the DuoDisk for the Apple IIe. And they could've made them modular to cut down on cost, so you could either plug one into the expansion bus, or two side by side. All they'd need was a U shaped connector to go from the expansion port to the drives above the unit. Also, I must congratulate you on that flan party pun. That was excellent in every way. Don't get me wrong, the other flan-based puns were pretty good, but the flan party was really a cut above the rest.
I was terribly excited when this was announced. Exchanged many letters with the company. Waited. WAITED. Finally it was released and a friend got one and... it was horrifically slow. The flood fill was glacial. So disappointing. Years later I got to work with Dave Woodfield on a project. Lovely bloke. Champion maze-solving robot mouse builder. True story.
Companies that included built in joysticks clearly underestimated the unrelenting destructive force of children in the heat of hectic and exciting gameplay.
My dad bought just the motherboard of one of these in (I think) 1987 and I spent that summer, aged 11, manually soldering up a physical keyboard for it and housing it in a perspex box. Other than the satisfaction of getting it working, I don't have any other memory of what we did with it. I imagine I quickly got frustrated with the lack of software and went back to my Speccy.
I had an Enterprise 128, about 17 years ago, with a whole bunch of cassettes (none of them were prerecorded at the factory) but I was too young to be interested in retro and to find out how to do stuff so I gave it away for a 4 GB thumb drive. I regret doing that ever since.
Great video, as always. The 80's gave us a huge choice of home computers here in the UK. Nobody else I knew had one but I do still have a soft spot for the Dragon 32 and 64. Yeah it was never a huge success. I recall how excited I got being able to briefly use the Dragon MSX prototype years later. I also recall my Dad coming home with an Apricot F1 he got via work. Again nobody had one, but for some reason that made it feel more special. That Enterprise is a good looking machine, that joystick I find cute.
Interesting to compare the Sixty Four's motherboard with the One Two Eight's we both looked at back in 2020. Looks identical except it's missing the daughterboard which I presume has the additional RAM. Does that mean the Sixty Four can be turned into a One Two Eight with the same daughterboard?
This machine was always on my collectors list. Some great specs for its time, but is came to late on the market, when the so calles 16 bit era stated. If i recall correctly you could also hook up up to 32 machines in a network with network storage and network printing.
This video inspired me to look at My Enterprise 64 again. I was getting horrible waving with a SCART to HDMI converter. The waving got better when I switched to the RetroTink 2x SCART adapter, and adjusting the voltage on my power supply from 9 to 11 VDC stabilized the image. The voltage is probably closer to 10.5, as the power supply seem to output a slightly lower voltage than shown.
There was 1 kid in my year who had one. We mocked him! Why? No games, at all. nada. he went moths before he got any games. But deep down we loved the look of it. Better than my bread bin or those horrible ickle speccies. lol. Anyway I think there was the problem, just no support from anyone. No support and the machine dies.
Yes, it's a tragedy - that machine was a beast in those day, so much potential! When I first saw one, with that joystick, I nearly had a lonely island experience! ROFL :D (NSFW don't blame me if you find the right song!!)
I remember that they had some problems with the design of the case. Apparently they had two people making the plugs for the front and the back. You can see the divide just behind the keyboard. Problem was that these did not have the same dimensions. Instead of remaking one or both of the plugs they managed to stick them together. There was some shaving of some part, but I can't remember the details. In the end I think no one really thought about it, but it is the reason the part towards the back is slightly narrower than the front with the keyboard. The reason I remember was because I was one of the many thousand who really wanted a Elan with 128KB memory. And I have to say it felt like a lot more than a year between it being announced and it actually being released. Heck I didn't even remember it being renamed, and I never got to see one in person. I have to say I really wonder what the hardware was capable of, though I doubt there ever was any programs written for it that came close to squeezing everything it had to give out of it. Compare that to the C64 and Spectrum, both of whom had thousand of titles and a lot of programmers who learned to push the hardware to do things that you wouldn't have thought it could do.
I wrote an emulator of the Enterprise about six months ago; one of the saddest things about the machine is that almost all of the software is just Amstrad CPC conversions. The sound chip has the capacity to be really interesting - e.g. it allows one channel to sort-of ring modulate another, albeit at a harsh digital approximation - but it's mostly AY conversions and a really-decent MOD player that just uses the sound chip as a DAC, and the video chip's built-in mode and address splits should have allowed for some fantastic arcade games but the machine never really took off enough to attract sufficient developer attention. EDIT: pedantic comment, but the switch from width x height to height x width when discussing colour depths is perhaps slightly misleading; in 256-colour mode you get 80 pixels horizontally across the screen. It has the same video bandwidth as a CPC, so one-pixel-per-byte mode naturally has half as many pixels across as its (and the Enterprise's) 16-colour mode. But what makes the Enterprise cool is that the video clock is decoupled from the processor clock, so you can relatively easily drop in a 6MHz or better CPU. It'll have to wait more in terms of its local clock when accessing the shared 64kb but if expansion RAM can serve it quickly enough then it can run unthrottled elsewhere.
I have ordered SD+RAM expansion from Hungary and it works very well. There are DB9 joystick adapters also, but you should be looking for EnterMice, modern joystick+mouse adapter (I do not have that one yet). Software-wise, Hungarian programmers made some, at least for me, mind-boggling stuff for an 8bit micro, like: ZX Spectrum 48/128 emulator (executes ZX binary files, not just basic; someone even loaded up ZX81 emulator in it and then loaded ZX81 game inside that emulator and it worked), Amstrad CPC 464 emulator (executes binary files for CPC), SID Player (plays C64 SID files), MOD player (Amiga ProTracker modules) and so on... I was amazed at what the machine is capable of, BASIC is something that was way ahead of many others, shame it was a flop back then.
I remember reading about Enterprise 64 when it was released, in the Greek "Pixel" Magazine. They had a complete presentation / test along with all the hilarious story of "Elan/Flan". I loved the looks of the machine, but it was already too late in 1985 for just another 8 bit machine. Amstrad CPC / ZX Spectrums were well established by then even if they didn't have the custom graphics / sounds chips. And of course talking about custom chips, everyone would immediately think of the Amiga. All in all the Enterprise was in this weird category of machines released which was like companies trying to prove that "Z80 still can!" (Remember Sam Coupe?) while 16 bit machines were already on their way and could do much more with similar custom chips.
I have a NOS unit now, but never even powered it up. Mostly because every bit of needed new cables are highly priced and there didn't seem to be any reasonable solutions for running anything more than the cartridge that came with the thing.
You're turning into quite the wordsmith, Neil. I have to admit, this is one computer I've noticed in older videos that has really stood out from the others, so I'm glad to see it finally covered.
@@DailyCorvid Wordsmith is defined as a person who is skilled at using words. However, surely a clever construction of sentences by placing two words near each other in ways that have not previously been so would be closer to your parameters? I was impressed by, 'the chip hits the flan'. Clever.
OMG seeing this video, the local computer shop had one of these in the window for years. Eventually the shop closed, never knew whether it was sold. I remember a friend looking at it, but when he couldn't find any games for it went off the idea and bought a second hand C64 instead.
Thanks for introducing me to a micro that I’ve never heard of. Have you got a Sam Coupè in the cave? My friend has one since they came out. Rather nice little machine and had an awesome keyboard and could have two floppies!
Despite being a complete Acorn nut, an Enterprise 128 is still the prize micro in my collection. It is a taste of what might have been. It's been said that, because of the launch delays, Alan Sugar somehow got wind of the Enterprise colour styling and just copied it for the CPC, along with other aspects such as the custom max RAM expandability (I believe both can use up to approx. 4MB via external switching logic). DId Alan copy the colours, etc.? Hmm. I remember seeing one in a store in Glasgow and really wanted it, but I was too young to afford it myself. My Dad bought me an Acorn Electron which kicked off my micro obsession, but it was still a delight to finally obtain an Enterprise 128 about a decade ago for 165 UKP, along with quite a few original peripherals (tape deck, disk controller, cables, etc.) If anyone's interested in some pics, post a reply and I'll dig it out, though I've not powered it up in a very long time. So yeah, I have literally dozens of Acorn machines (and Sinclair, Commodore, Amstrad, etc.), but the Enterprise is the only one that almost has its own shelf. :D Just a shame the cost cutting went so far as to remove standard I/O ports in place of raw PCB edges, that was a big mistake. But then, the launch delay was so long that by the time it came out it was pretty much too late anyway. Most of the surplus stock went to Hungary, where there is now a strong and vibrant hobbyist community for them: enterpriseforever.com/ Here's an old article from The Register about it: www.theregister.com/Print/2013/10/24/elan_flan_enterprise_micro_is_30_years_old/
This machine becoming popular in Hungary reminds me of the relative popularity of the Commodore Plus 4 in certain countries in Europe. It was more or less dumped in them to recover what costs could be recovered, and I suspect so were these.
Why not ask David Murray (The 8bit Guy) if he can knock up a port of "Attack Of The PETSCII Robots" for the Enterprise? And, of course, get Captain Kirk to run the machine, as he's had plenty of experience at the helm of The Enterprise. OK, you need software, not a smart arse like myself, so I'll get going now ..... (P.S. Really love "The Cave"!)
Interesting machine. I've never heard of this one before but it may not have gotten any press outside the UK. I wonder if it would be possible to make it run CP/M.
I'm sure this dates from before the time when electronic items in Britain by law had to come with a mains plug already wired up, so someone must have opened the box before. Steve Benway has an Enterprise, I don't recall if he has actual tapes, or uses a method to load from converted audio files. [Edit] The story behind the name I recall reading was that Enterprise had tasked a company to produce thousands of name plates for the cases that said 'Elan', but they came back reading 'Flan'. And it was maybe a financial decision to go with the name: cheaper to change the name than produce more name plates. The C16 and Plus/4 machines enjoy a lot of support today, it's rather a shame that the Enterprise has not enjoyed the same.
In Germany the machine was sold as "Mephisto PHC 64" by a company that successfully sold chess computers...For the price of 1200 German Marks about 80,000 pieces are said to have been sold. No huge success. In those days in Germany there was only the C64 and - with a big gap - the Amstrad (Schneider) CPC. I love this channel
My cousin had one with a cassette unit. He showed me a game where you would need to bomb houses from an airplane. Considering it was the late 80's, it wasn't very appealing, even for Hungary which was well behind in the field of computing. However I remember the tape loading sound could be turned off by typing "set tape sound off" into the command line - I thought it was very neat, compared to the options of the C64 basic prompt.
You have one! I’ve been looking for that for sometime. I remember seeing it in a magazine as an early teen. And I’d love to add that to the collection. A very quirky playful thing.
Hungarian retrogeek here. Here's my solution to the mystery. The Hungarian Communist government was struggling with a school computer project since around 1980. Numerous attempts to build a simple 8-bit machine failed, mostly due to the unavailability of necessary parts and manufacturing capacity. The few models produced are very interesting from a collector's perspective: the Primo (a Sinclair ZX-80 clone), the HT-1080Z and its successors, the Aircomp 16, etc. Most of them were only built in relatively small numbers, despite the fact that Hungary had a fairly strong computer industry and produced state of the art, modern office computers. All of these proposed school computers had a Zilog Z80 CPU, or its East German copy, the U808. The other common thing about them was that nobody had ever seen one in their school. Only legends circulated about a few lucky kids whose parents worked at some high place and were somehow able to obtain one. Although even this wasn't that magical any more: by 1985 a lot of Hungarians could travel to Austria, and Commodore 64s bought in Austrian shopping centers started to become fairly common.
Also by 1985 the government started to realize that they're pumping a lot of funds into a fairly hopeless project, and it would make more sense to purchase leftover stocks of failed Western products. This is how the Enterprise arrived to Hungary. Since it was a flop, the manufacturer was happy to sell them at production price. The Commodore 16 and Plus/4, also a failed product line, was highly popular in Hungary for the same reason. Ultimately many schools received Commodores, the 16s being the students', and the Plus/4 the teachers' machines. (The 16 was a simplified version of the Plus/4, thus they were compatible.)
However, the government still hadn't given up their plans to introduce a domestically produced microcomputer, and in 1986 a final and definitive school computer, the Videoton TV Computer (TVC) appeared. It was actually a cheap copy of the Enterprise, without the custom chips, and in much poorer quality. It was also much larger. However, it had the advantage of being very cheap. By 1986 the Commodore 64, and even the Amiga 1000 were already available in some Hungarian stores, but the TVC only costed a fraction of what they did.
In some schools the TVC was still in use in the early 1990s. When I went to technical school in 1991, we had two in the computer lab, along some thirty Atari 600XLs. Yes, the government really purchased anything they could get, as long as it could run BASIC.
Despite all of its shortcomings and poor quality, the TVC was a popular computer. Even today, there's an enthusiastic TVC community in Hungary, doing all the things retro geeks do. I also have two TVCs, which are likely the only specimens on the North American continent. Their power supply, of course, didn't survive until 2021, and they were European too, so I gutted them and replaced their insides with a modern PSU, made in China. At least it still only contains parts made in a Communist country.
Still waiting for part 2... such a cool machine with so much potential. I want to see a game use the hardware as it was intended!
We used to stock these in a store I used to work in. IIRC, we never sold a single one. It never stood a chance against the Amstrad CPC, C64, & Speccy. Great to see one again. Always loved the physical appearance of it.
It looks like the Japanese computers i can't remember the name. I'd love to have one though I love these old micros I wanted one so bad a a kid the c64 but my grandparents who raised me thought they were a fad.
@@allanfulton8922 MSX computer maybe?
I had a CPC 464, but this looks cool, never seen one on the shelves.
@@allanfulton8922 I wanted a NES in the early 90's but my Mum bought me a C64 GS instead. The other kids had Mario, I had Flimbo's Quest.
Perhaps it is character building.
🤣🤣🤣
Nice one! I am a hungarian and I was 13 years old (at 1989) when I went to a computer camp where I have seen Enterprise 128 for the first time! It was in the media lab, I assume because of the graphics capabilities together with C16s ans Plus4s, on which we learned graphics programming in BASIC! The camp also had a LAN of 32 C64s, something that I have never seen before!
C16, Plus4, Enterprise 128, all that in 1989... It sounds like you got to buy up all the excess stock of machines that didn't sell in the rest of Europe.
@@Nibb31 I think that was exactly the case!
What do you do with 32 networked C64s?
@@stealthslide2723 It was a long time ago but I remember that it was a classroom setup, so the teacher could see anyone's monitor, also could do some stuff on our computers and also there was only one printer and floppy drive that all of them reached! So it was pretty cool thing.
@@Nibb31 Speccy(well, its clones) in USSR just began to appear around the same time, so... it's no wonder. Prior to that we had all kinds of clones produced domestically - 8080, 6502, even pdp-11 based micros (and mostly these latter ones) 🙂
Seems Hungary (my home country) somehow became a safe haven for computers which were absolute flops "in the west", including the Commodore 264 series (which was my first computing experience) and the Enterprise. And Intelligent Software might have connections to another (mostly) Hungarian micro, which was actually made in Hungary: the Videoton TV Computer, a.k.a. the TVC. These are all quite some stories to tell.
“The chip hit the flan”. I see what you did there! :)
And he kept a very straight face there!
It's so BEAUTIFUL
I remember seeing one of these as a kid and I thought it was the coolest looking computers I had ever seen!
"Failed British Micros" could be a series, my favourite of the bunch being the SAM Coupé.
I remember Your Sinclair having a Sam Coupé news section for a long time, but nothing ever seemed to actually get released.
Such a shame there was never a Part 2 to this!😪
Probably still waiting for the membrane 😅
So that’s why I was searching for part 2 and found nothing.
This channel deserves way more subscribers.
Interesting you mention it was a hit in Hungary. Well, I live in a relatively small town in Hungary and I knew someone who had one. The guy was really good programming it, he wrote quite a few, simplier games and demos on it and whenever we were at their place, we'd play a port of the Star Wars arcade game. As a matter of fact, that was my first encounter with that legendary game.
You can repair the box with PVA wood glue, it's very good for sticking expanded polystyrene, I did some sculpting and model making with it at college many years ago.
3 years later, still waiting for part two :D :D :D
Great video as always and so good to see you back on fine form with a classic RMC video! I'd seen pictures of the Enterprise but knew absolutely nothing about them so it's fascinating to learn the story. It's amazing just how many weird and obscure British micros there were in the 80s, we really were punching above our weight during that era.
Oh, and thanks for having me on of course - always happy to provide dessert-related content!
With about 80,000 units made and a quarter of them being sold in Hungary, there should still have been a userbase large enough for sales of games and other software. But shops weren't that interested in stocking software for "minority" computers. Was there ever a magazine or fanzine ? Much homebrew software in the UK ? Are there 60,000 Enterprises in landfill scattered across the UK with all the software published for it ?
It's a bit sad that most of the Enterprise Demos are from Hungary....the only people who really showed off what the Machine could do.....
If it's of any interest I ran the fanzine. Private Enterprise. I also published software for it.
I was UK around the time of its release and I've never heard of it
Great video, bought a 128 back in 1985, bundled with monitor and 4 games. One of which was Nodes of Yesod, which you definitely should try out. Still have the original machine and monitor, and collected a few more in the early 90s plus software. Release was 12 to 18 months too late, and mid 1985 the Amiga 1000 was released. I have my original A1000 also. Love the CBM Pets btw!
Im glad we had so many choices in the early 1980s. I would hate the UK market to have been as boring as the US market in the same time period.
Choice beats little choice.
I don't know the Commodore 64 was one the best in my opinion and I had them all at one point (8 bit)
@@Salfordian I started with a ZX81, then a Vic-20, then a C64. Then I had a very short lived Atari 400 which was replaced with an 800. Along side the 800 I had a Camputers Lynx. I loved them all! I now have over 200 retro computers!
@@chrislong6601 Are there many retro computers still needed for your collection?
@@doctorcrankyflaps1724 A few machines I don't have - that I either need to save for, or trade things I have for maybe such as an Amiga 1000. I bought a 1000 when they were brand new - and to be honest didn't last long with it because of lack of software and moved the ST for which I had plenty of access. There are a few other machines I need too. And a few I have far too many of!
I don't know if you're under the impression that the US market was nothing but IBM and Apple or something, but we had Commodores, Ataris, Tandys, Sinclairs, the TI-99/4A, and even the BBC Micro was sold briefly as the Acorn Electron. We even had a few also-rans of our own like the Coleco ADAM and the Exidy Sorceror, the latter of which had the distinction of using 8-track cartridge cases for its ROM cartridge format.
Another good video. Interesting machine technically, slightly more powerful than the Amstrad CPC and with a far larger colour palette, but it seems to lack the hardware sprites and scrolling of the C64. The sound chip is also unusual being a custom build and not an off the shelf component, there's also parallels with the later Sam Coupe computer. There's an interesting video of the machine running Jon Ritmans Batman on TH-cam and it's quite impressive :)
The mains plug has no sleeves on the live and neutral pins, not seen that for a very long time!
Never owned one but I think I remember my local computer shop stocking some, it was a independent computer shop that was around from the late 1970's to the early 2000's where my brother got his first computer the Commodore 16, then a year or two later he got his Commodore 128. The shop was small but always had interesting stock, it was called Computer's Plus based in the high street of Sittingbourne, Kent. Good memories.
The Enterprise 64 was my second computer (The first being a Sharp PC1245 pocket PC)
I loved it and the community that was built up around it.
I was a member of the Independent Enterprise User Group (IEUG) Ran by Tim Box of Boxsoft fame and the only other name I can remember from those days was nicknamed "Spider".
We even had a group magazine.
I had an article in it.... then it folded (co-incidence?)
I loved the way it handled the screen graphic modes and sound.
I loved the structured, but very slow BASIC (BBC was ten times faster - Mandelbrot program)
I built and RGB interface to connect to my portable TV which had an analogue RGB input (So much better than RF)
Those were the fun fun fun days.
Given its expandable potential and what it has under the hood, I'm flanbergasted 😉 it didn't do so well. I imagine if they were able to get it out early enough it would have competed nicely. Looking forward to part 2!
A real missed opportunity. And all down to price and timing. This always looked like an interesting machine to own to me.
Alas the CPC464 came was released first and pretty much soaked up any potential market between the C64 and Speccy that the Elan could have captured.
I remember me and my best friend salivating over this back in the day (that headline 672x512 res seemed next gen!). We had C64s. Oh and the saga in Popular Computing Weekly re: name changes etc . I've never really seen it in action so super looking forward to part 2!
Having some wax paper or old floppy label backing around when removing old labels really helps with the process and gives you a place to safely store it whilst you service.
On my amiga i just sat the disk on the psu for 2 mins to sofen the glue...
The point of having two tape decks is that you can use them in a RAIT 0 configuration and load twice as fast.
How can you have a RAID 0 with tape drives??
@@adrianwestley3982 RAIT, not RAID. Also: it's a joke.
I got the same damage of the vent on my E64. Mine is same brand new old stock from eBay and the only problem I had was the keyboard membrane that I was able to fix it but I also bought the replacement. I really hope that you will cover this machine in your show more often.
Did part 2 ever happen?
I've got one of these in perfect nick. Wish I still had the cassette tapes of the programs I wrote at the time. I upgraded from a Vic20, then a BBC C, then this lovely machine and its beautiful PASCAL/BASIC hybrid. But ofc against the C64 and Ataris, it didn't stand a chance.
It was so hard to find software for the Enterprise that I taught myself to write my own games. Bought my house through programming, so ... thank you very much, Enterprise.
Funny thing is that I live in Hungary now, so I'm going to have a gander and see if there are any of these lying around!
It was great to be reminded of all those old machines -- some had totally slipped my mind. The Dragon! Was it the Jupiter than was supposed to run FORTH?!
I love the appearance, amazing content right there, welcome back br
Awesome calendar! Although that Rock & Wrestle cassette made me feel nauseous!!
How many time have I sat there with 2 pencils to wind one of those back in!!
Great vid as always, Thankyou!!
Ohhh... I remember reading computer magazines, back then, and drooling over The Enterprise 64. It was so beautiful and had such incredible form.
ChibiAkumas has a video on the 128k version and has a link for contacting the maker of the sd emulator Szörg who also makes a few other things.
I had one, but donated it to a computer museum in the Netherlands. It had crazy good hardware capabilities (sound and graphics)
The fact that a plug was installed on the power cord suggests that this is not actually new old stock.
It’s really cool to see one of these computers on this channel! I’ve seen a picture of one in an older issue of Retro Gamer Magazine, but that’s it.
Those red, blue and green keys have held their colour a lot better than my old 464. The font used on those keys looks really 80's too.
I never saw one in the wild and will be curious to see and hear what it can do.
I picked a new old stock earlier this year and its box condition was almost identical to this one. I decided not to use the PSU and used a modern replacement instead. To my surprise however, the machine was in perfect working order and showed no signs of prior refurbishment. The only downside is the lack of software available to buy for it and even flash cart/card solutions weren't readily available when I looked. Most homebrew software is also 128k only and ther isn't currently an easy way to upgrade the 64k model. It's a nice collection piece if not a practical one.
In my opinion, the Enterprise should have been made as a BBC competitor / business machine, with better keyboard, proper expansion connectors, 128K Ram as standard and Z80B at 6 Mhz or Z80H at 8 Mhz. If they had made a simple 5 1/4 or 3.5" floppy drive, and with its 80 column mode, it would have allowed CPM, or other Graphic OS to be used. With it's Spectrum emulator, it would have also made an awesome upgrade for Spectrum owners as it was way more reliable than the Sam Coupe Spectrum emulation.
Thanks for reminding me about the Z80B. I forgot how exactly I overclocked it
I remember thinking these looked fantastic and very futuristic at the time, think it was featured in a computer magazine I read in the 80's but I cant remember ever seeing one for sale in an actual shop
"My perfect box has been ruined" Finbarr Saunders moment there
What a fun machine! I hoped that the joystick would have been a standalone stick with some internal wiring to a DB-9 pinout. What a nightmare to replace if you bought one and then it broke...
Always thought it looked cool embedded in the machine like that, but it's not practical, many of them are snapped off!
Fortunately the joystick wrecking Daley Thompson's Decathlon wasn't available for this computer
Your channel is so great. Here in the US we never saw some of the technology that existed across the pond. I really appreciate your channel and the way you present everything. Great stuff. 👍
Exciting stuff I can't wait for part 2! I've never heard of this thing 😊
Ah, nice to see a familiar face here at RMC ))
@@viciious1234I even own two RMC mugs! 😁
"With obsolescence built out"
To be fair, it probably runs Cyberpunk 2077 about as well as PS4 and Xbone do.
Thanks for showing this computer on the channel. I recall seeing it advertised in many magazines in the 80s and it had great specs. Can't wait to see your next videos on it.
I thought that warranty sticker was a red herring for a second lol
The new set looks great, as well as segments filmed in the "store". Great job!
you can use polystyrene cement to repair the box. Architects use this for modelling, so easy to obtain. I was also very surprised to see the plug supplied and fitted, which is very unusual for this era.
😂 This must have been mentioned, and I just missed it… “Flan” is a cheap graphical change to “Elan”, removing the bottom horizontal line in E creating an F. A “safe” business move to avoid changing stock and molds, just “mutilating” them a bit. 🙈
In the mid nineteen eighties I owned a "Tatung Einstein" it is the one British computer I have never seen on any retro channel
We have one here, I'll see what I can do!
There also was the Tatung 256 model, a even more obscure 8-bit computer from the same firm
Always loved the joystick with the ribbed base, colours, shape of the keys, font on the keys, ever since it was featured in Your Computer magazine.
There should be a (rare) Spectrum emulator cartridge for it.
Kind of makes me wonder if some of the design team from Sinclair were involved in this. It has a lot of similarities with the Spectrum. Even the motherboard looks like it will fit inside the dktronics keyboard for the speccy.
Geoff Hollington made the Enterprise 64 case and Nick Toop designed the hardware, Nick Toop also helped design the hardware for the Acorn Atom
Flantastic!
I always thought this was a beautiful looking machine. Really looking forward to seeing what it can do.
I love the idea of the drives sitting on top of the machine. If they'd put them side by side that would have looked much more normal, kind of like the DuoDisk for the Apple IIe. And they could've made them modular to cut down on cost, so you could either plug one into the expansion bus, or two side by side. All they'd need was a U shaped connector to go from the expansion port to the drives above the unit.
Also, I must congratulate you on that flan party pun. That was excellent in every way. Don't get me wrong, the other flan-based puns were pretty good, but the flan party was really a cut above the rest.
I was terribly excited when this was announced. Exchanged many letters with the company. Waited. WAITED. Finally it was released and a friend got one and... it was horrifically slow. The flood fill was glacial. So disappointing. Years later I got to work with Dave Woodfield on a project. Lovely bloke. Champion maze-solving robot mouse builder. True story.
Companies that included built in joysticks clearly underestimated the unrelenting destructive force of children in the heat of hectic and exciting gameplay.
9:50 Dammit Neil. 🤣
20:14 _Dammit Neil!_ 🤣🤣
My dad bought just the motherboard of one of these in (I think) 1987 and I spent that summer, aged 11, manually soldering up a physical keyboard for it and housing it in a perspex box. Other than the satisfaction of getting it working, I don't have any other memory of what we did with it. I imagine I quickly got frustrated with the lack of software and went back to my Speccy.
I had an Enterprise 128, about 17 years ago, with a whole bunch of cassettes (none of them were prerecorded at the factory) but I was too young to be interested in retro and to find out how to do stuff so I gave it away for a 4 GB thumb drive. I regret doing that ever since.
@@laylatrix22 Gondolom nálunk még jónak számítottak akkor is ha az angoloknál már rég elavult volt.
not sure if its by desifn or not, but one of the legs on the DAVE chip is clearly broken. see at 18:32
Great video, as always. The 80's gave us a huge choice of home computers here in the UK. Nobody else I knew had one but I do still have a soft spot for the Dragon 32 and 64. Yeah it was never a huge success. I recall how excited I got being able to briefly use the Dragon MSX prototype years later. I also recall my Dad coming home with an Apricot F1 he got via work. Again nobody had one, but for some reason that made it feel more special.
That Enterprise is a good looking machine, that joystick I find cute.
One of the rarest computers out there. I still have it
Got my calendar in the post today, will take pride of place in my new electronics workshop.
Interesting to compare the Sixty Four's motherboard with the One Two Eight's we both looked at back in 2020. Looks identical except it's missing the daughterboard which I presume has the additional RAM. Does that mean the Sixty Four can be turned into a One Two Eight with the same daughterboard?
As a kid I LOVED the idea of the built-in stick, but even as a kid marveled at the decision to make it left handed...
This machine was always on my collectors list. Some great specs for its time, but is came to late on the market, when the so calles 16 bit era stated. If i recall correctly you could also hook up up to 32 machines in a network with network storage and network printing.
This video inspired me to look at My Enterprise 64 again. I was getting horrible waving with a SCART to HDMI converter. The waving got better when I switched to the RetroTink 2x SCART adapter, and adjusting the voltage on my power supply from 9 to 11 VDC stabilized the image. The voltage is probably closer to 10.5, as the power supply seem to output a slightly lower voltage than shown.
There was 1 kid in my year who had one. We mocked him! Why? No games, at all. nada. he went moths before he got any games. But deep down we loved the look of it. Better than my bread bin or those horrible ickle speccies. lol. Anyway I think there was the problem, just no support from anyone. No support and the machine dies.
Yes, it's a tragedy - that machine was a beast in those day, so much potential! When I first saw one, with that joystick, I nearly had a lonely island experience! ROFL :D (NSFW don't blame me if you find the right song!!)
I remember that they had some problems with the design of the case. Apparently they had two people making the plugs for the front and the back. You can see the divide just behind the keyboard. Problem was that these did not have the same dimensions. Instead of remaking one or both of the plugs they managed to stick them together. There was some shaving of some part, but I can't remember the details. In the end I think no one really thought about it, but it is the reason the part towards the back is slightly narrower than the front with the keyboard.
The reason I remember was because I was one of the many thousand who really wanted a Elan with 128KB memory. And I have to say it felt like a lot more than a year between it being announced and it actually being released. Heck I didn't even remember it being renamed, and I never got to see one in person. I have to say I really wonder what the hardware was capable of, though I doubt there ever was any programs written for it that came close to squeezing everything it had to give out of it. Compare that to the C64 and Spectrum, both of whom had thousand of titles and a lot of programmers who learned to push the hardware to do things that you wouldn't have thought it could do.
Why not produce the promised second part?
I wrote an emulator of the Enterprise about six months ago; one of the saddest things about the machine is that almost all of the software is just Amstrad CPC conversions. The sound chip has the capacity to be really interesting - e.g. it allows one channel to sort-of ring modulate another, albeit at a harsh digital approximation - but it's mostly AY conversions and a really-decent MOD player that just uses the sound chip as a DAC, and the video chip's built-in mode and address splits should have allowed for some fantastic arcade games but the machine never really took off enough to attract sufficient developer attention.
EDIT: pedantic comment, but the switch from width x height to height x width when discussing colour depths is perhaps slightly misleading; in 256-colour mode you get 80 pixels horizontally across the screen. It has the same video bandwidth as a CPC, so one-pixel-per-byte mode naturally has half as many pixels across as its (and the Enterprise's) 16-colour mode. But what makes the Enterprise cool is that the video clock is decoupled from the processor clock, so you can relatively easily drop in a 6MHz or better CPU. It'll have to wait more in terms of its local clock when accessing the shared 64kb but if expansion RAM can serve it quickly enough then it can run unthrottled elsewhere.
The Enterprise 128 was my first computer. Loved it. Loved the demos.
I have ordered SD+RAM expansion from Hungary and it works very well. There are DB9 joystick adapters also, but you should be looking for EnterMice, modern joystick+mouse adapter (I do not have that one yet). Software-wise, Hungarian programmers made some, at least for me, mind-boggling stuff for an 8bit micro, like: ZX Spectrum 48/128 emulator (executes ZX binary files, not just basic; someone even loaded up ZX81 emulator in it and then loaded ZX81 game inside that emulator and it worked), Amstrad CPC 464 emulator (executes binary files for CPC), SID Player (plays C64 SID files), MOD player (Amiga ProTracker modules) and so on... I was amazed at what the machine is capable of, BASIC is something that was way ahead of many others, shame it was a flop back then.
I always enjoy these videos about lesser known computers, and am looking forward to part 2.
I think if it had released early in 1983 it might have stood a chance.
Enterprise forever has all of the software in one place and there is also an SD card reader for the cartridge port to put your software on.
To quote Eddie Izzard: "Yes, all they did was slowly collapse like a flan in a cupboard."
watching operation wolf on the cpc6128 brought back so may memories . So much nostalgia
It has a lot of plastics, I can't think of any that didn't
9:40 I noticed that skyhawk joystick - I had the same one to play Tie Fighter and I still have it
I remember reading about Enterprise 64 when it was released, in the Greek "Pixel" Magazine. They had a complete presentation / test along with all the hilarious story of "Elan/Flan". I loved the looks of the machine, but it was already too late in 1985 for just another 8 bit machine. Amstrad CPC / ZX Spectrums were well established by then even if they didn't have the custom graphics / sounds chips. And of course talking about custom chips, everyone would immediately think of the Amiga. All in all the Enterprise was in this weird category of machines released which was like companies trying to prove that "Z80 still can!" (Remember Sam Coupe?) while 16 bit machines were already on their way and could do much more with similar custom chips.
I have a NOS unit now, but never even powered it up. Mostly because every bit of needed new cables are highly priced and there didn't seem to be any reasonable solutions for running anything more than the cartridge that came with the thing.
I’m impressed that it was pre fitted with a plug, I remember with most electrical items back then you used to have to fit a plug yourself.
You're turning into quite the wordsmith, Neil.
I have to admit, this is one computer I've noticed in older videos that has really stood out from the others, so I'm glad to see it finally covered.
"Wordsmith" should mean making up words, not being sussinct with existent words. It's taken from the word Swordsmith - a person who creates swords.
@@DailyCorvid Wordsmith is defined as a person who is skilled at using words. However, surely a clever construction of sentences by placing two words near each other in ways that have not previously been so would be closer to your parameters?
I was impressed by, 'the chip hits the flan'. Clever.
OMG seeing this video, the local computer shop had one of these in the window for years. Eventually the shop closed, never knew whether it was sold. I remember a friend looking at it, but when he couldn't find any games for it went off the idea and bought a second hand C64 instead.
Thanks for introducing me to a micro that I’ve never heard of.
Have you got a Sam Coupè in the cave? My friend has one since they came out. Rather nice little machine and had an awesome keyboard and could have two floppies!
Despite being a complete Acorn nut, an Enterprise 128 is still the prize micro in my collection. It is a taste of what might have been. It's been said that, because of the launch delays, Alan Sugar somehow got wind of the Enterprise colour styling and just copied it for the CPC, along with other aspects such as the custom max RAM expandability (I believe both can use up to approx. 4MB via external switching logic). DId Alan copy the colours, etc.? Hmm.
I remember seeing one in a store in Glasgow and really wanted it, but I was too young to afford it myself. My Dad bought me an Acorn Electron which kicked off my micro obsession, but it was still a delight to finally obtain an Enterprise 128 about a decade ago for 165 UKP, along with quite a few original peripherals (tape deck, disk controller, cables, etc.) If anyone's interested in some pics, post a reply and I'll dig it out, though I've not powered it up in a very long time. So yeah, I have literally dozens of Acorn machines (and Sinclair, Commodore, Amstrad, etc.), but the Enterprise is the only one that almost has its own shelf. :D
Just a shame the cost cutting went so far as to remove standard I/O ports in place of raw PCB edges, that was a big mistake. But then, the launch delay was so long that by the time it came out it was pretty much too late anyway.
Most of the surplus stock went to Hungary, where there is now a strong and vibrant hobbyist community for them:
enterpriseforever.com/
Here's an old article from The Register about it:
www.theregister.com/Print/2013/10/24/elan_flan_enterprise_micro_is_30_years_old/
This machine becoming popular in Hungary reminds me of the relative popularity of the Commodore Plus 4 in certain countries in Europe. It was more or less dumped in them to recover what costs could be recovered, and I suspect so were these.
Why not ask David Murray (The 8bit Guy) if he can knock up a port of "Attack Of The PETSCII Robots" for the Enterprise? And, of course, get Captain Kirk to run the machine, as he's had plenty of experience at the helm of The Enterprise. OK, you need software, not a smart arse like myself, so I'll get going now ..... (P.S. Really love "The Cave"!)
New software and hardware is being made even today for the Enterprise 128! Here you can visit the forum of active EP users:
enterpriseforever.com
Interesting machine. I've never heard of this one before but it may not have gotten any press outside the UK. I wonder if it would be possible to make it run CP/M.
I'm sure this dates from before the time when electronic items in Britain by law had to come with a mains plug already wired up, so someone must have opened the box before. Steve Benway has an Enterprise, I don't recall if he has actual tapes, or uses a method to load from converted audio files. [Edit] The story behind the name I recall reading was that Enterprise had tasked a company to produce thousands of name plates for the cases that said 'Elan', but they came back reading 'Flan'. And it was maybe a financial decision to go with the name: cheaper to change the name than produce more name plates.
The C16 and Plus/4 machines enjoy a lot of support today, it's rather a shame that the Enterprise has not enjoyed the same.
Exposed fingers is a good idea for cost cutting, surprised we didn't see more of that.
In Germany the machine was sold as "Mephisto PHC 64" by a company that successfully sold chess computers...For the price of 1200 German Marks about 80,000 pieces are said to have been sold. No huge success. In those days in Germany there was only the C64 and - with a big gap - the Amstrad (Schneider) CPC.
I love this channel
I have a 128k motherboard for one of these and need a case/keyboard to put it in!
8:56 Shirley you can't be serious? 😂
My cousin had one with a cassette unit. He showed me a game where you would need to bomb houses from an airplane. Considering it was the late 80's, it wasn't very appealing, even for Hungary which was well behind in the field of computing. However I remember the tape loading sound could be turned off by typing "set tape sound off" into the command line - I thought it was very neat, compared to the options of the C64 basic prompt.
You have one! I’ve been looking for that for sometime. I remember seeing it in a magazine as an early teen. And I’d love to add that to the collection. A very quirky playful thing.
There's a port of R Type for the enterprise 64. Idk if it was a contemporary release from back in the day or a more modern release