Well it's blogging time again, and It's September again! and it means another SepTandy Spectacular! This year, I'm taking a look at the Tandy computers not made by Tandy, As I show the various clones and licensed Tandy computers sold throughout the world. For Part 1, we begin by taking a look at TRS-80 clones starting with the Eaca Video Genie.
The Eaca Video Genie
One thing about early personal computer architectures like the TRS-80, Commodore PET, Apple II, and IBM PC is that they were all built using mostly off-the shelf parts, components that were available to anyone, and the thing about using off-the-shelf parts is that somebody can come along and built a computer that is compatible with yours.
Of course everyone is familiar with clones of the IBM PC because that architecture is essentially what evolved into the computers that most people use today.
Left to right: The IBM PC 5150 (1981), The Compaq Portable (1983), and the HP AIO-24-DF1053W (2023)
There also a smaller group of people familiar with clones of the Apple II, From machines that completely copied the ROM code leading to legal battles like the the Franklin Ace 1000, to smaller, less compatible clones like the Multitech (Now Acer) Microprofessor II, to even compatible clones on cards for IBM PC's like the Diamond Trackstar 128.
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The TRS-80 has it's own group of clones, and although its not as big as the Apple II or the IBM PC, it still has a decent handful of unique machines. The first one we'll be looking at today is the Eaca Video Genie.
The Eaca Video Genie (1979).
Released in late 1979, The Eaca Video Genie was a computer that, while not entirely the same as the TRS-80, had enough similarities on a hardware level to not only run a majority of TRS-80 software, but more features and better designs that made it better than the machine it copied.
Eaca was a small electronics manufacturer from Hong Kong. They were founded in 1975, and got their start producing Pong Consoles.
The Eaca Hide Away Colour TV game (1977).
Possibly after seeing the success of the Taiwanese Apple II clones Eaca decided to expand into the home computer market by designing a computer with a high degree of compatibility with the TRS-80 Model I.
Now by that point the TRS-80 Model I had changed considerably since its launch 2 years earlier. The customer base had built up to a reasonable size, Level II BASIC had started to be the standard built in BASIC on new units, the RAM had been upgraded from 4K to 16K, and it's software library also increased in size.
The Video Genie made its debut in the fall of 1979, and made it to the rest of the world in 1980. The Video Genie was distributed under different names in different counties. It went by the Video Genie name in Hong Kong and most of Europe, In the UK it was distributed (and occasionally branded) by Lowe Electronics at a retail price of £425 pounds, In Australia and New Zealand it was sold in Dick Smith Electronic stores as the Dick Smith System 80 at a retail price of $800 dollars in Australia and $1500 dollars in New Zealand, in South America it went under the dangerously similar TRZ-80, and here in North America it was sold by Personal Micro Computers Inc. as the PMC-80 at a retail price of $645 dollars.
Left to right: The Video Genie, the Dick Smith System 80, and the Personal Micro Computers PMC-80.
The design of the Video Genie takes a different approach than the TRS80. Rather than the "Battleship Grey" black and white color scheme, the Video Genie has more of a sort of hobbyist computer design, with a cream colored case with woodgrained veneer sides. It still uses black, white and gray for the trim and the keys respectively. On the front of the machine is the system badge for what variation it is, the keyboard and the built in tape deck. This is one of the first advantages this has over the TRS-80. Rather than having to have an external tape drive these already one built into the computer resulting in less clutter. Also on the keyboard are 2 keys labeled PAGE and F1. The PAGE key toggled between the sections of a 32 column mode (which Ill come back to later), and the F1 key turned the tape decks motor on and off so you could position the tape manually.
The front of the Eaca Video Genie.
Its worth noting that there were 3 different revisions of the Video Genie. The very first units that shipped in early to mid 1980 had removed the CLEAR key and substituted the left and right cursor keys for a right shift key, with only the up and down cursor keys remaining (labeled ESC and CTRL on the Video Genie keyboard). Also the tape drive had problems with its volume control circuitry, resulting in it having difficulty loading tapes at different volume levels.
The first revision of the Eaca Video Genie (1980)
By late 1980, a second revision was introduced. This revision added the left and right cursor keys (labeled BACKSPACE and TAB on the Video Genie keyboard) as well as the CLEAR key. EACA also created a solution for the volume control problem by adding a volume wheel and a VU meter.
The second revision of the Eaca Video Genie (1980)
In October 1981, the third revision was introduced. This version added a lowercase character mode and clearly labeled the cursor keys, and included a monitor program built into ROM.
The third variation of the second revision of the Eaca Video Genie (Genie I) (1981)
On the back of the machine is the built in power supply with the power switch, the power cord, and the fuse, a socket of an external tape deck, a monochrome video out, a Video Cut button an expansion port, a reset button and an RF cord. The Video Cut button activates a 32 column mode, cutting the text resolution in half so the text could be more visible on a TV, and you access the other half of the screen using the PAGE key I mentioned earlier. The Expansion Port is mostly the same as the TRS-80, only it has 50 pins rather than 40. The reason for the extra pins is for handling the S-100 bus in the expansion unit, but is still compatible with the 40 pin Expansion Port on the regular TRS-80 with an adapter. The Reset was another inclusion the TRS-80 didn't have, being more component friendly than a power cycle. It also has RF out so you could use it with a normal TV set, unlike the TRS-80 where you needed a monitor in order to use it.
The back of the Eaca Video Genie.
And finally on the bottom is the model information sticker which also has a copyright for Microsoft BASIC, as EACA had licensed Level II BASIC from Microsoft, just like Tandy did.
The bottom of the Eaca Video Genie.
Powering up the Video Genie drops us Into BASIC where we're greeted by a READY prompt. This is different to Level II BASIC on the TRS-80 which gave you a MEMORY SIZE or MEM SIZE prompt (Allowing you to reserve the amount of RAM to use in BASIC), and is somewhat unusual, because although its compatible with Level II BASIC, The READY prompt gives it a resemblance to Level I BASIC, which also booted to a READY prompt on start up. Despite this it is still Level II compatible as i've said so I'll type in the HELLO WORLD program for this example (As well as for the rest of these clones for the special) once again.
Much like the TRS-80, loading software into the Video Genie can be accomplished in 3 ways. The first is typing in a program yourself from books and magazines, and there were plenty to choose from, especially in North America where the TRS-80 was sold. From specific magazines like 80 Micro, to general computer magazines like SoftSide and Creative Computing. As well as books like the classic BASIC Computer Games (Microcomputer Edition) by David Ahl (Both its original 1978 version by Creative computing once again, or the later 1980 Radio Shack exclusive editions).
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Left to right: The covers and listings in 80 Micro, Compute and Compute and Creative Computing (1981), BASIC Computer Games (Microcomputer Edition) (1978), More BASIC Computer Games (TRS-80 Edition) and BASIC Computer Games Volume II (1980).
The second way is using cassette tape, using either the built in drive or external one hooked up to the socket on the back. the cassette port that is compatible with the TRS-80 line and the CoCo line, as you would expect, So any cable and cassette recorders, Radio Shack branded or otherwise, will work fine. The loading and saving commands are also the same of course, so you use CLOAD and CSAVE for BASIC, and SYSTEM then typing in the first letter of the program if its written in assembly.
The third way is by using floppy disks, and to do that you need the EG3014 Expander. This corresponds to the Tandy TRS-80 Model I Expansion Interface and has most of the same features such as a Centronics printer port, a single density floppy interface for up to 4 single-sided or 3 double-sided drives, a spot to hook up the EG3020 RS-232 interface, and 2 sockets for adding two 16K banks of RAM (making it possible to expand to 48K of RAM). But where it's the expansion capabilities.
The Eaca EG3014 Expander
As I've mentioned back when I first talked The TRS-80 Model I, it didn't use the S-100 bus like other early 8080 and Z80-based computers, using only the Expansion Interface. However EACA actually added the capability to use a S-100 bus interface to use S-100 cards, another advantage over the TRS-80. Early versions used a backplane for connection S-100 cards, but later models removed the backplane and required an interface instead.
The Eaca EG3014 Expander's S-100 bus backplane slots
The S-100 bus has historical significance as it was the first industry standard expansion bus for microcomputers. It's origins date back to the creation of the Altair 8800. In 1974, Ed Roberts, The engineer who created the Altair, was facing 2 design problems, A). The hardware required to make the Altair a usable computer did not yet exist, and B). The computers backplane was too large to add any room for expansions. On top of that, He had to have a working prototype ready in just 3 months to be shown of in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine, set to release on November 24, 1974!
Ed Roberts
So he decided to use slots so that boards to expand the computers capabilities could be added later. Wanting the connectors to be inexpensive, He looked through Military surplus supplies and found a surplus of 100 pin edge connectors. With the help of an unnamed draftsman, the interface was added and by October the had a working prototype to shown off in Radio Electronics (Although only photos of the prototype ended up being used in the magazine, as the prototype never arrived in the post due to a shipping company strike).
The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine featuring the Altair 8800 on the cover (1974)
However the bus didn't really have a name and was just simply called the Altair Bus. Around the same time, Harry Garland and Roger Melen, 2 engineers creating kit projects for Popular Electronics at the time, had began to design the first product that could interface with the Altair after Melen learned about the prototype while visiting Popular Electronics's headquarters in New York.
Harry Garland and Roger Melen
The 2 had already designed a solid state camera designed to hook up to an oscilloscope and Popular Electronics Technical Editor Les Solomon proposed that the Garland and Melen should make a version that could interface with the Altair. After getting encouragement and approval from Ed Roberts, Garland and Melen formed a company called Cromemco (Named after the Crothers Memorial Hall at Stanford University where Garland and Melen lived as grad students) to make the device and in January, 1976, The Cromemco Cyclops was introduced by MITS as the first periferal for the Altair. It's also considered to be the first commercially available digital camera.
The Cromemco Cyclops (1976)
The 2 also gave the bus the name Standard-100, or S-100 for short. Soon after, there were a number of different cards designed to use the bus from Cromemco and other companies for all sorts of things like RAM upgrades, I/O connections, and even joystick interfaces and some of the first color graphics cards. It continued to be used until 1994 when it was replaced by the ISA busses on IBM PCs and compatibles.
For hardware The Video Genie uses pretty much the exact same components as the TRS-80, as you would expect. It uses a Zilog Z80 CPU clocked at 1.76 MHz (Slightly slower than the TRS-80, but not that noticeable, and can probably be fixed with some overclocking but i'm not too sure), 16K of RAM, and 12K of ROM.
The graphics are also the same with a text resolution of 64 columns by 16 rows, built in block characters for a semigraphics resolution of 128x48, and the 32 column by 16 row mode accessible by the Video Cut button.
For sound, Unlike the TRS-80 there's no way to hook up a speaker to the microphone port on a cassette recorder to produce square wave tones, even if you have a second tape deck hooked up. However it was possible to mod the Video Genie and install a switch to change between the two tape decks to enable sound.
The Video Genie motherboard
So whats different from the TRS-80? Well first is the motherboard. As you can tell from above, Unlike the TRS-80 motherboard which is all 1 single board, the Video Genie uses 2 boards, the first board containing the CPU, ROM, and RAM, and the second containing the character generator and VRAM, with both boards being connected by 2 ribbon cables soldered in (The keyboard also connects with one of these ribbon cables as well). Also the power supply can be easily removed for repairs if needed.
The second difference is the 32 column by 16 row mode. The 32 character mode was achieved by using the Video Cut button and the PAGE key, But on the TRS-80, it was done by typing CHR$(23) in BASIC. The Video Genie accomplished this by putting a space after each character, effectively making the video display 32 characters wide, but with the same font as before.
The third difference is that the Video Genie showed different symbols corresponding to the arrow ASCII codes. The Up Arrow was "[", the Down Arrow was "\", the Left Arrow was "]" and the Right Arrow was "^". Similar to the TRS-80 Model III.
And the fourth difference is the I/O address routines are different. The printer port used I/O address "FD" whereas that in the TRS-80 used memory address "37E8", meaning some programs like SCRIPSIT require patching to get them to work. The serial interface was also addressed differently. In the Video Genie, I/O addresses "F8" and "F9" were used, whereas the TRS-80 used memory addresses "37DE" and "37DF". Switching between the two cassettes ports also differed in the use of addresses.
As for the software, most TRS-80 programs will work on a Video Genie unless they require addressing the I/O routines or read from a memory address that's different. For the Dick Smith System 80, Dick Smith actually commissioned a few programs specifically for the System 80 sold in their stores. Here's a demo program that would have played on a computer displayed in the store, It also contains some of the demos from Eaca's demo tapes.
There were also some games like this version of Space Invaders. All the Dick Smith programs avoided using the TRS-80 Model I's arrow keys so it could be played on early models.
Dicksmith also sold a DOS with their disk drives called OS-80 which was a rebranded version of Percom's MICRODOS. MICRODOS was one of the first Third Party DOSes for the TRS-80, launching in April of 1979. It boasted faster disk access, could easily read on any TRS-80 Model I or III, and was only 7k in size allowing it to work on 16k machines. However it did not use a file system, not only making it difficult to transfer programs between TRSDOS and MICRODOS, but many BASIC programs and all machine language programs designed to run under TRSDOS would not work with MICRODOS. While its certainly serviceable as a DOS, by the time the Video Genie Machines came out, it was getting a little bit dusty, as drive technology was expanding rapidly and quickly users switched to other Third Party DOSes like NewDOS/80.
The video genie sold well in most countries, but unfortunately, it's success in America was short lived. In 1981, Tandy sued Personal Microcomputers Inc., for patent and copyright infringement of the TRS-80's microcode and ROM code, as well as trademark infringement with the "-80" branding. PMC maintained their innocence, charging that Tandy had not informed the company of copyright infringement before launching the suit and that Tandy was trying to eliminate competition. The two companies supposedly settled out of court, and PMC took the PMC-80 off the market. PMC would later create the PMC MicroMate, A CP/M workstation that also functioned as an add-on for the Model 100 to offer both a means of disk storage and the ability to run CP/M programs, making it one of the few ways to run CP/M programs on the Model 100.
The PMC Micromate (1983)
As a result the PMC-80 versions are incredibly rare and are hard to find today. But while the Video Genies sales were short in the US, around the world it continued to be sold, and Eaca kept making new versions. In 1981, the Genie II was introduced, it swapped the tape drive for a numeric keypad and included a terminal program in rom. It was also sold by Dick Smith as the System-80 Mark II, and by PMC as the PMC-81.
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Left to right: The Eaca Genie II, the Dick Smith System 80 Mark II, and the Personal Micro Computers PMC-81.
PMC also sold a variation called the EPS-80 which was a PMC-80 with the Electric Pencil Word Processor built into ROM for $1495 dollars with a printer or $999 dollars without a printer.
An ad for the PMC EPS-80
There was also the Genie III, introduced in 1982, which was a machine targeting the business market similar to the TRS-80 Model III, but could run CP/M software, Much like the Model IIII did.
The Eaca Genie III (1982)
1982 was also the year Eaca Introduced the Colour Genie. This was released only in Europe, and had new features like color graphics, sound and joystick support. However it used different hardware, could not run TRS-80 software, and failed in the marketplace, being discontinued in 1983.
Unfortunately for Eaca, 1983 brought a wave of internal struggles. Apparently founder Eric Chung speculated unsuccessfully on the Hong Kong property market and that, along with the poor sales of other EACA products had lead to huge debts. By 1984 EACA International was bankrupt and Chung had fled Hong Kong (some sources suggest to Taiwan) with $10 million US dollars stuffed in a suitcase.
The last Genie computer, The Genie 16, was built for TCS by Ferranti (UK) and released in Germany in small numbers in 1984. It was an Intel 8088 based system sold in A,B and C versions. The A and B models were not IBM PC-compatible, and The Genie 16C was assembled by TCS from Taiwanese components, and may have been PC-compatible, but due to the machines rarity it's unknown.
However the story of the Video Genie did not end there. In 1983, Around the time Eaca declared bankruptcy, A Hungarian company called Híradástechnika Szövetkezet (Broadcasting Technology Cooperative) bought the rights to manufacture the Video Genie from EACA and sold them to Hungarian schools as the HT–1080Z. Its notable as it was was one of the first official school computers in Hungary. The HT–1080Z is Identical to the Video Genie but included a GI AY-3-8910 sound chip. Híradástechnika Szövetkezet continued to produce the HT–1080Z until 1986 when it was discontinued.
The Video Genie also has significance in video game history as it was used to write the Sinclair ZX Spectrum game The Hobbit, The very first video game based on The Lord of the Rings franchise.
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So how do I rate the Video Genie in terms of compatibility? To do this I've created a simple scale which ranks each clone that will look at this month by the following levels of compatibility:
Fully Compatible. Uses most of the same components Can run a majority to all software, can use peripherals and expansion boards, and read and write the cloned machines disks, tapes or cartridges.
Semi Compatible. Uses some of the same components, may use different ROMS, Cannot use use peripherals and expansion boards, and cannot read or write the cloned machines disks, tapes or cartridges, However software can be rewritten to work on the clone machine due to similar hardware
Incompatible. Uses little to none of the same components, uses different ROMS, Cannot use use peripherals and expansions, and cannot read or write the cloned machines disks, tapes or cartridges.
The Video Genie ranks as Fully Compatible due to using the same components and apart from some differences in I/O and ROM, A majority of software will run on these machines.
In conclusion, my look at the Eaca Video Genie, a TRS-80 clone from the tail end of the 70's and beginning of the 80's that had more features and better designs that made it better than the machine it copied, carving its own niche market until its manufacture went under and its remaining support shipped off far til the middle of the decade. Although the EACA machines were and still are dismissed simply as clones, the people who devised and engineered them could possibly deserve credit for what Compaq and most other hardware IBM Compatible manufacturers realized later, Software, and software compatibility, was an important market driver for personal computers, Shifting from making standards to following them, and creating the computer landscape as we know it today.
This concludes Part 1 of my third Septandy Spectacular, join me next time as we move forward to 1982, and take a closer look at the Eaca Colour Genie.
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