Hello.
I’m currently on a road trip to pick up an interesting piece of computer history.
I got an email recently from a guy named Matt who said he had acquired an early portable
computer that has a color screen.
So, I looked up the computer online and saw that it came out in 1982.
That struck me as very interesting since I’ve always been told the Commodore SX-64 was the
first portable with a color screen and that came out around 1984, I believe.
Matt lives in the small town of Brownwood, TX, and I’ll be coming from Ft.Worth Texas.
It’s a pretty long drive, so we agreed to meet in the middle in a town called Stephenville,
Tx.
This is a bit of an interesting, or different road trip for me because normally when I go
on a road trip, I’m going down interstate highways, and you know the speed limit is
usually pretty constant around 70 miles per hour or something like that.
This is a rural highway, and so it’s kind of weird because the speed limit is constantly
changing between like 75 miles an hour and like, I’m going like 30 right now as we’re
passing through a small little city.
So that’s kind of weird, but also I’m driving an all-electric vehicle and since
we’re away from the interstates, there’s no charging stations or infrastructure out
here anywhere.
Which, shouldn’t be a huge problem because I should have enough battery range to make
the whole trip.
I think it’s like 150 mile round trip that I’m doing, so we should be okay.
So, I met up with Matt at a little restaurant and had lunch with him and, of course, took
the computer and put it in my car.
And of course now, I have it back at the studio.
So, let’s take a look at it.
In principle it’s designed similar to the Compaq portable of the same era, with a carry
handle on the back, and some fold out legs on the front.
OK, let’s move this thing around here.
The keyboard is an interesting design since the keyboard legs also double as the release
mechanism.
And there we are.
The Sanyo MBC-775.
And even the logo itself has the blue, green, and red to let you know this machine has color.
So, the keyboard is pretty yellowed, although interestingly enough it’s mostly just the
bezel.
The actual keys themselves don’t look too bad.
Now, this does have a standard XT type layout, you’ve got the function keys over to the
left, there’s only 10 of them, and just like an XT there’s no actual individual
cursor keys.
You’d have to use the ones on the number pad.
It’s also interesting that the bottom of the keyboard isn’t yellowed at all, mostly
just the top.
As for this part of the computer, it’s hard to say if this is the original color or not,
but I doubt it.
Now, I’m sure everyone is wondering if I’m going to retrobrite it.
But the answer is no.
First of all, because this doesn’t actually belong to me.
Although, I’m sure Matt probably wouldn’t mind if I were to retrobrite it for him.
But also because I have to go back to Stephenville this weekend to return this, so I just simply
don’t have enough time.
Let’s turn it around and check out the rear features.
We’ve got a door over here, which appears to house expansion slots.
It’s weird that two of them are shorter.
We’ll figure out the meaning of this later when we take it apart.
This also appears to be some cracked plastic.
And we’ve got another door down here.
And we’ve got both a Digital RGB and composite video output for external monitors.
And over here are some adjustments for the internal CRT.
And lastly, over here is the power supply.
I suspect this hole is for a power cable much like the Compaq does.
Of course, there is a plastic door that is missing right here.
In fact, you can see the little latch for it here.
So, I wanted to make a quick size comparison to the Compaq Portable 1.
The Sanyo unit is at least an inch taller here.
But it isn’t even the size I notice most of all.
It’s the weight.
The compaq is by no means light coming in at 28 pounds, but the Sanyo is a whopping
43.1 pounds, and I can definitely feel the difference when carrying them.
Well, let’s set this thing up.
I’ll extend the bottom legs, and get a power cord attached.
And, let’s power it on!
So, it shows it has 256K of RAM, and the floppy drive light is on.
However, it never actually gives any sort of message such as to insert a boot disk.
Anyway, I’ll insert a DOS disk, and it immediately starts to boot DOS.
So, we’ve got our A prompt.
And there are two things I notice right away.
For one, the picture is super sharp for a computer of this era.
The second thing I notice is the flickering screen when scrolling.
This is a telltale sign of the original CGA design.
Later cards managed to eliminate this flicker.
Well, I hate to toot my own horn again, but I’d like to play something and I don’t
have a lot of software handy on 5 and a quarter inch floppy disk that will run on 256K of
RAM, so Planet X3 it is.
By the way, these disk drives are an interesting design.
It’s surprisingly easy to line the disk up for insertion, and the closing mechanism
is also very easy to use.
I like it.
Let’s start Planet X3.
And here we go, it is color CGA glory.
I say that a bit sarcastically.
In fact, this is one of the things I find a little perplexing about this machine.
While CGA technically has 16 colors, the graphics modes usually only have 4.
And to be honest, I usually find the games more appealing on a monochrome monitor like
the one in the Compaq.
So, it’s weird that they went to the trouble to design a color screen for CGA systems.
My guess is they were probably thinking more about the 16 color text modes at the time,
and I don’t have any easy way to demonstrate those at the moment.
Of course, I can show you the warm CGA palette, if that is more to your liking.
So, doing a little research on this thing.
I had initially found this listed on the Obsolete Computer Museum’s website, with an introduction
date of 1982.
If this were true, it would mean this was the first color portable, beating out the
Commodore SX-64 by a couple of years.
However, looking at this magazine article in Creative Computing, of which this issue
was released on August of 1985, it appears the computer was just coming onto the market
at this point.
I also found it listed on this website, which said it was released in 1984 and goes on to
say the initial price was $2,599 or adjusted for inflation that would be like $6,668 in
today’s money.
So, I think it’s safe to say the first website was probably incorrect and thus the Commodore
SX-64 remains the first portable with a color screen.
However, we can definitely say this is the first IBM PC compatible portable computer
that had a color screen.
Some other interesting things to note from the review in Creative Computing.
The author praises the computer for the color screen, and the fact it runs at 8 mhz, which
is about 67% faster than my Compaq portable 1.
However, the author has a few negative things to say as well, for example the heavy weight
of it.
But the worst part, in my opinion, is that he said they tried numerous IBM PC applications
and found that the Sanyo could only run about 50% of them, this was everything from productivity
software to video games.
So I guess I’ll do some testing of my own.
Let’s take this thing apart.
It looks like there are just two screws, one on each side, to release the top panel.
And yep, that was it.
So that was easy enough.
But now where do we go?
I do see the internal speaker here.
Well, it looks like this shield here will come off by simple loosening some screws,
and then just sliding it off like so.
I’ll just disconnect the speaker.
And yeah, I see what appears to be 3 card slots, and one of them is filled with a giant
card of some sort.
So, I removed this card and one of the things I realized is that it isn’t just any ordinary
card.
It’s actually most of the motherboard.
I say most because the card slots are still on the bottom.
Yep, there’s the 8088 CPU.
And it has quite a few jumper wires on the back.
Ironically, the CGA card is integrated into the bottom PCB.
What I want to do next is install this XT-IDE interface, which allows me to use a compact
flash card as a hard drive.
This will allow me to easily test many pieces of software because it makes it easy to transfer
data from a modern computer.
And on that front, I have good news and bad news.
The good news is, the card’s internal BIOS comes up on the screen and it recognizes the
compact flash card.
The bad news is, it won’t boot from it.
I can boot from the DOS floppy I already had, but when I run FDISK, I noticed that it considers
the flash card a non-dos partition.
This is probably due to running such an old version of MS-DOS.
But, one of the things I quickly discovered is that I could not get it to boot any version
of MS-DOS newer than 2.11.
All I could get was the “starting MS-DOS” splash text, and then it would lock up.
So, that being the case, I setup another MS-DOS compatible computer so I could make some floppy
disks with different games on them.
I wanted to show off some games that run in text mode, because they would be very colorful.
However, surprisingly very few of them worked.
Flash attack, for example, starts to load, but once the game starts the screen goes nuts.
I suspect this may be down to the memory design on the original CGA cards, which is related
to that flickering I mentioned earlier when listing a directory.
I tried running the lost adventures of Kroz, which is another text-based game that is only
supposed to require 128K, but it actually says program too big to fit into memory.
Since that is not really true, I am guessing this boils down to an incompatibility.
Next I tried lawn mower, another text-based game, and it starts off like it is going to
work, but then something just doesn’t work right once the game starts.
So that’s another one marked off the list.
I’m starting to wonder if any software is going to run on this thing.
Next I tried Ms. Pacman.
And remarkably, this game actually works, that is if you ignore the garbage on the sides
of the screen.
Not sure what is causing that, but the game more or less plays correctly.
But, since this runs in graphics mode, there isn’t a lot of color to be seen.
The last game I tried was Ultima III, which only requires 128K of RAM and CGA.
And surprisingly, it works perfectly.
Of course, again, it’s in graphics mode so there isn’t much color to see.
But, I got the idea to hook up an external monitor.
I’m going to use my Commodore 1084 since it supports RGB and composite video.
One of the benchmarks I’m doing on all old CGA systems these days is to see which ones
actually display the correct colors in composite video.
Almost all of the clones have the wrong colors, with the exception of my Compaq portable.
So, let’s see what this one does.
At the moment I have the monitor in RGB mode so it is displaying exactly the same thing
as the internal monitor.
But, let’s flip it over to composite mode and see how it looks.
Well, I finally have one good thing to say about it, it does have the correct composite
colors.
The grass is green and the water is blue, so this looks correct.
So, I suppose I should try Planet X3 again using composite mode.
And yep, everything looks right.
So yeah, green grass and blue water.
And just to try some other landscapes, here’s the red look of inferno, and the white and
blue look of the North Pole map.
The cruel irony behind this is that all of this nice color is only visible on an external
composite display, and the internal screen will just show up as black and white.
So what’s the final word on the Sanyo?
Well, to be honest, I’m not very impressed with it.
It appears that Sanyo bundled this computer with several productivity applications, which
is what I think they intended most people to be using, which I don’t happen to have
a copy of those handy and even if I did, in this day and age they probably wouldn’t
be very interesting to you.
I also don’t feel like they tried very hard to make this computer 100% MS-DOS compatible,
in fact one of the things I discovered was that the MS-DOS I had been using was the one
that Matt got with the computer.
I actually started looking at it and I found out this is not a generic copy of MS-DOS.
It’s actually a Sanyo branded copy of MS-DOS, which means it’s a little bit proprietary,
which goes a long way to explain why I was not able to get the generic versions of MS-DOS
to boot on this thing.
I find it somewhat ironic that they put what was undoubtably an expensive color monitor
in this thing and they only planned it to be used with a handful of productivity applications,
when the gaming market would have probably been a much bigger market for people to want
a fancy colorful screen.
But the sad part is, that most games won’t even run on this machine and the ones that
do, don’t have a lot of color because the computer is CGA.
I’m actually amazed that Planet X3 works correctly on this computer, being that many
much simpler games crash or otherwise fail to work on this computer.
And, to be completely honest, I think that I would actually much rather spend my time
playing on my old Compaq portable 1, which has a green monochrome screen, but at least
it is 100% compatible with the software of the era.
Nevertheless, I hope you enjoyed having a look at this thing, and as always stick around
for the next video, and thanks for watching.