[Coco] My first Radio Shack computer (pre-dating the Coco)

[Brendan Donahe]

John,

The former is my extremely old web page from the 90s.  Very cool that there
is now emulation of it.  BTW, Gakken also has released a small kit version
of this within the past 10 years.  More below from an email excerpt I sent
to the RetroComputing Roundtable guys a few years ago - perhaps you will
find it interesting:

============

Its 4-bit microcontroller is a Texas Instruments TMS1100.  I _think_ based
on doing research about 5 years ago that these could be had with custom
ROMs.  So the TMS1100 in the Microcomputer Trainer is a different mask ROM
from the MB Electronic Simon is different from each of the MB MicroVision
cartridges (and those of course differ from each other).  I hear a version
might have been in the Speak and Spell...

http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/TMS_1000_Data_Manual.pdf
http://www.waitingforfriday.com/index.php/Reverse_
engineering_an_MB_Electronic_Simon_game
http://www.atarihq.com/danb/MicrovisionCarts.shtml

http://forums.bannister.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=25217

FWIW, my TMS1100 in my Microcomputer Trainer is labeled with a TI logo,
then MP1312 MASL[delta]8414.

Note that there is a clone of this made by Gakken in the past 5 years or so
called the GMC-4 which is a much smaller form factor, and almost as cool,
but you don't get to wire it up yourself.  Oh, and the microcontroller is
glob-topped...

http://www.japantrendshop.com/gmc4-microcomputer-p-789.html

Brendan


On Mon, Nov 13, 2017 at 12:28 PM, John Guin <johnguin at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Say all,
>
> I just saw this web page - this was actually my first computer ever:
> http://www.polylith.com/~brendan/ClassicComputers/Tandy/uCptrTrain.html
>
> And there is even an Arduino emulator for it nowadays:
> http://microcontrollertrainer.blogspot.com/p/arduino-code.html
>
> I don't remember much about it, frankly, or even what year I got it (1976
> or so?).  I do remember the wires and the springs and mowing a lot of yards
> to get money for it.  I'm surprised someone hasn't open sourced/open
> hardwared some electronics kit like this by now.
>
> Enjoy!
> John
>
>
> --
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> Coco at maltedmedia.com
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>
>