Welcome back to part 2 of my SepTandy Spectacular 3. In the last post I took a look at the Eaca Video Genie series of TRS-80 clones. In this post I'm going talk about another Eaca clone in more detail, The Eaca Colour Genie.
The Eaca Colour Genie (1982)
Released in 1982, The Colour Genie was Eaca's attempt to build a low cost color computer. However due to hardware and competition, it failed in the marketplace, being discontinued after just one year.
The development history of the Colour Genie is unknown, but it can be presumed that Eaca wanted to expand more into the home computer market, rather than the business market that the Video Genie was targeting. However, rather than taking the logical route by basing the new computer on the Tandy Color Computer, they decided just to alter the TRS-80's design and added color graphics, sound, and the ability to add joysticks and light pens.
The Colour Genie was introduced in August of 1982, in the UK for £200 pounds. Much like the Video Genie, it was it was distributed by Lowe Electronics. It was advertised in magazines with the tagline "Why Wait Months?", alluding to the production delays of the competing Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
An ad for the Colour Genie by Lowe Electronics (1982)
It was also distributed in Germany, as well as Australia and New Zealand. But unlike the Video Genie, Dick Smith was not involved with any distribution. but was sold on its own for $795 dollars in New Zealand. The computer never made its way to North America, Presumably due to the PMC lawsuit.
On the front of the machine is a colorful badge, a speaker grill, a power LED, and the keyboard.
The front of the Eaca Color Genie
Early models of the Colour Genie had a blank space above the function keys, but later models added a VU meter for tape deck, Much like the Video Genie did.
A later model of the Eaca Color Genie with the VU meter
On the right side, there is a parallel port, a light pen port, and a serial port.
The right side of the Eaca Colour Genie
On the back of the machine is a cassette port, an expansion port, RF cord, RCA video and audio out, the power switch, and the power cord.
The back of the Eaca Colour Genie
And finally on the bottom is the model information sticker.
The bottom of the Eaca Video Genie
Powering up the Video Genie drops you into BASIC where you're greeted by a MEM SIZE prompt, much like Level II BASIC does. Thats because most of the routines for Video Genie I BASIC commands were left over in the Colour Genie's BASIC ROM. So Colour Genie BASIC is mostly Level II compatible with the only difference being the commands for graphics and sound.
Storage wise, Eaca sold the EG2016 tape recorder for loading and saving to cassette. While the connector is the same as the TRS-80 the MIC and EAR pins are swapped, so you might need to make an adapter to use TRS-80 cables.
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The Eaca EG2016 tape recorder
The waforms of the cassette data are also different. Although it can read TRS-80 tapes, the format the color genie is completely different. So much so that there were special loader's available that could be used to load TRS-80 Cassettes, though unfortunately I could not find one of those loaders. Heres a comparison of the data from tapes from both computers.
Floppy disk interfaces were also available, although I believe these were mostly limited to the German market. It is possible to read Colour Genie disks on a TRS-80 and vice versa.
The TCS floppy disk controller for the Colour Genie
For joysticks, the Colour Genie makes use of the EG2013 Joystick Controller Interface. This plugged into the parallel port and gave you 2 analog joysticks with 2 buttons and a keypad,similar to an Intellivision, Colecovision, or an Emerson Arcadia 2001.
The EG2013 Joystick Controller Interface
For printers, Eaca advertised the EG603 Microprinter which is just your basic Centronics dot matrix printer of the time, but I believe you can just use any Centronics printer as well.
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The EG603 Microprinter
While the Interface is Centronics compatible, you do need the EG2012 Parallel Printer Interface in order to use it.
The EG2012 Parallel Printer Interface
Other peripherals include the EG2014 light pen, the EG2011 16K RAM Expansion and programs on ROM cartridges, but other than the RAM expansion, I've not found any photos of the light pen or ROM cartridges.
The EG2011 16K RAM Expansion
For hardware The Colour Genie uses pretty similar components as the TRS-80. It uses a Zilog Z80 CPU (A NEC) clocked at 2.2 MHz, 16K of RAM, and 16K of ROM, with the ROM sharing most most of the routines for BASIC commands as the Video Genie. later versions of the ROMS included minor changes to BASIC and upgraded the rows from 24 to 25. Even within these upgraded ROMS there was some variation, with some showing serial numbers on start-up.
Where it starts to differ is with the graphics. The graphics are generated with a Motorola 6845 CRTC, the same chip used in the BBC Micro, the Videx VideoTerm display cards for the Apple II, and the MDA, CGA, and Hercules graphics cards for the IBM PC. This provided a text mode of 40 columns by 24 rows and a graphics resolution of 160×96 with 4 colors. Interestingly, there are different versions of the video chip for different regions
For sound, the Colour Genie uses a General Instrument AY-3-8910, providing 3 channels and 7 octaves of either mono or stereo 8 bit squarewave audio or white noise.
The Colour Genie motherboard
As for software, there was a very sparse amount. Only about 190 games were published for the system in English and German, and probably a few hundred or so applications available.
While it certainly had decent specs for the time, it didn't translate to good sales. While it had a decent following in Germany, around the rest of the world, sales were misserable and the Colour Genie was off the market by 1983 along with Eaca shortly after.
So why did the Colour Genie fail? Well, there were a few main reasons. Problem #1: Eaca up to the Colour Genies release, relied on distributers in other countries to handle the sales of their computers, but by the time the Colour Genie came out, their distrubuters had moved on to other systems. So Eaca had to distribute the computer themselves, And since they didn't have as much experience, the marketing strategies suffered.
Problem #2: The market was growing fiercely competitive in the western markets. In the UK, The Colour Genie was competing against the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the Commodore Vic 20 and Commodore 64. Australia and New Zealand also had the Vic 20 and C-64 as well.
Left to right: The Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the Commodore Vic 20 and the Commodore 64 (1982)
Problem #3: Aside from simple BASIC programs, the Colour Genie wasn't compatible with software from the Video Genie or the TRS-80, so if users upgraded, they wouldn't be able to use any of their existing software.
And finally Problem #4: The Tandy Color Computer. The CoCo had been on the market for 2 years by that point and used completely different hardware and software and the Colour Genie couldn't even use any of its software, alienating it even more.
With all these problems, it's no wonder why the Colour Genie failed. Still it is an interesting footnote in the history of personal computing.
With all these problems, it's no wonder why the Colour Genie failed. Still it is an interesting footnote in the history of personal computing. As for compatibility It just barely ranks as semi compatible as only simple BASIC programs are compatible any anything beyond that would require major rewriting.
In conclusion, I hope you enjoyed my look at the Eaca Colour Genie, And this concludes Part 1 of my third Septandy Spectacular, join me next time as we take a look at the miscellaneous TRS-80 clones sold throughout the world.
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