The Tandy MC 10 (MC means Micro Color) was designed as an "initiation" computer to compete with the Timex Sinclair 1000, the american version of the Sinclair ZX-81. It was more expensive than the Sinclair machine, but outpassed it in every category. It had sound, color, more memory and even a better keyboard.
In fact, the MC-10 is basically a cut down version of the Tandy "Coco" computers, but didn't have as much success as its big brothers.
It is fully compatible with the first version of the Matra Alice (a French computer). Actually both are the same computer (except for the case color, the Alice is red and the Tandy is white).
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Richard Vermeulen adds:
The Tandy MC-10 micro color computer was not a commercial success. Tandy did
not support this machine. In Basic you could only use 8 color and a graphic
resolution of 64x32 dots. However, the MC-10 had much more
capabilities: 2 color 256x192 graphics, 4 color 128x192 graphics and the
sound-chip had synthesizer posibilities. If all these extra functions were
mentioned in the manual, I bet that these machine would have sold much more.
Jeff, you mentioned that you also have/had a floppy for the MC-10 ? Strange, because I never heard about a floppy based system for the MC-10. The only backup was a tape-recorder system.
Sunday 23rd May 2010
Richard (Belgium)
Gary, I have both the MC-10 and a CoCo 2 with EDASM+. Do you mind sharing your information about the 6803 opcodes that need to be added and which advanced 6809 features need to be avoided?
Thanks, Ed
Monday 17th May 2010
Ed (USA)
I bought one of these on clearances along with the 16k memory upgrade and the thermal printer. I used it until I could afford the more usable Color Computer 2. At one point, I got into writing assembly language programs for the MC-10. Since there was no support from Radio Shack, I had to analyse the Rom to find useful routines. The 6803 processor was backward compatible to the 6800, but included added features which which made it closer to the 6809 processor used in the color computers 1 through 3. When I upgraded to a color computer 2, I found it possible to use the EDASM+ cartridge on the Coco 2 to develop machine language prograns for the MC-10, by defining 5 opcodes unique to the 6803 and avoiding the advanced features of the 6809. The MC-10 used the same cassette tape format as the color computers, but the BASIC interpreter used different keyword tokens and the MC-10 was unable to load or save ascii format programs. It was also unable to use the serial port and the tape drive at the same time.
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