The first PC portable computer with color screen

Hello. I'm currently on a road trip to select up a stimulating piece of computer history. I got an email recently from a man named Matt who said he had acquired an early personal computer that features a color screen. So, I searched the pc online And saw that it came call at 1982. That struck me as very interesting since I've always been told the Commodore SX-64 was the primary portable with a color screen which came out around 1984, I believe. Matt lives within the village of Brownwood, TX, and I'll be coming from Ft. Worth Texas. It's a reasonably long drive, so we agreed to satisfy within the middle during a town called Stephenville, TX.

This is a touch of a stimulating, or different road trip on behalf of me because normally once I continue a road trip, I'm taking place interstate highways, and you recognize the regulation is typically pretty constant around 70 miles per hour or something like that. This is often a rural highway, then it's quite weird because the regulation is consistently changing between like 75 miles an hour and like, I'm going like 30 immediately as we're passing through a little little city. So that's quite weird, but also I'm driving an all-electric vehicle and since we're faraway from the interstates, there's no charging stations or infrastructure out here anywhere. Which, shouldn't be an enormous problem because I should have enough battery range to form the whole trip.

I think it's like 150 mile trip that I'm doing, so we should always be okay. So, I met up with Matt at a touch restaurant and had lunch with him and, of course, took the pc and put it in my car And in fact now, I even have it back at the studio. So, let's take a glance at it. In theory it's designed almost like the Compaq portable of an equivalent era, with a carry handle on the rear, and a few fold out legs on the front.

OK, let's move this thing around here. The keyboard is a stimulating design since the keyboard legs also double because the release mechanism. And there we are. The Sanyo MBC-775. And even the brand itself has the blue, green, and red So, the keyboard is pretty yellowed, although curiously enough it's mostly just the bezel. 

The actual keys themselves don't look regrettable. Now, this does have a typical XT type layout, you've got the function keys over to the left, there's only 10 of them, and a bit like an XT there's no actual individual cursor keys. You'd need to use those on the amount pad. It's also interesting that rock bottom of the keyboard isn't yellowed in the least, mostly just the highest. As for this a part of the pc, it's hard to mention if This is often the first color or not, but I doubt it. Now, I'm sure most are wondering if I'm getting to retro rite it. But the solution is not any. First of all, because this doesn't actually belong to me.

Although, I'm sure Matt probably wouldn't mind if I were to retro rite it for him. But also because I even have to travel back to Stephenville this weekend to return this, so I just simply don't have enough time. Let's turn it around and inspect the rear features. We've got a door up here, which appears to deal with expansion slots. It's weird that two of them are shorter. We'll find out the meaning of this later once 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 up here are some adjustments for the interior CRT. And lastly, up here is that the power supply. think this hole is for an influence cable very similar to the Compaq does. Of course, there's a plastic door that's missing right here.

In fact, you'll see the small latch for it here. So, I wanted to form a fast size comparison to the Compaq Portable 1. The Sanyo unit is a minimum of an in. Taller here. But it isn't even the dimensions I notice most of all. It's the load. The Compaq is by no means light coming in at 28 pounds, but the Sanyo may be a whopping 43.1 pounds, and that I can definitely feel the difference when carrying them. Well, let's set this thing up. I'll extend rock bottom legs, and obtain an influence cord attached. And, let ’s power it on! So, it shows it's 256K of RAM, and therefore the floppy drive light is on.

However, it never actually gives any kind of message like to insert a boot disk. Anyway, I'll insert a DOS disk, and it immediately starts else DOS. So, we've got our A prompt. And there are two things I notice directly. For one, the image is super sharp for a computer of this era. The second thing I notice is that the flickering screen when scrolling. This is often a telltale sign of the first CGA design. 

Later cards managed to eliminate this flicker Well, I hate to toot my very own horn again, but I'd wish to play something and that I don't have tons of software handy on 5 and 1/4 inch diskette which will run on 256K of RAM, so Planet X3 it's. By the way It's surprisingly easy to line the disk up for insertion, and therefore the closing mechanism is additionally very easy to use. I like it. Let's start Planet X3. And here we go, it's color CGA glory . I say that a touch sarcastically.

In fact, this is often one among the items I find a touch 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 So, it's weird that they visited the difficulty to style a color screen for CGA systems. My guess is that they were probably thinking more about the 16 color text modes at the time, and that I don' t have any easy thanks to demonstrate those at the instant. 

Of course, I can show you the nice and cozy CGA palette, if that's more to your liking. So, doing a touch 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 might mean this was the primary color portable, beating out the Commodore SX-64 by a few of years.

However, watching this article in Creative Computing, of which this issue was released on August of 1985, it appears the pc was just coming onto the market at now. I also found it listed on this website, which said I used to be released in 1984 and goes on to mention the initial price was $ 2,599 or adjusted for inflation that might be like $ 6,668 in today's money. So, I feel it's safe to mention the primary website was probably incorrect and thus the Commodore SX-64 remains the primary portable with a color screen.

However, we will definitely say this is often the primary IBM PC compatible personal computer that had a color screen. Another interesting things to notice from the review in Creative Computing. 

The author praises the pc for the color screen, and therefore the fact it runs at 8 MHz, which is about 67% faster than my Compaq portable 1.

However, the author features a few negative things to mention also, for instance the heavy weight of it. But the worst part, in my opinion, is that he said they tried numerous IBM PC applications and located that the Sanyo could only run about 50 % of them, this was everything from productivity software to video games. So I assume I'll do some testing of my very own. Let's take this thing apart. It's like there are just two screws, one on all sides, to release the highest panel. And yep, that was it. In order that was easy enough. But now where can we go?

I do see the interior speaker here. Well, it's like this shield here will come off by simple loosening some screws, then just sliding it off like so. I'll just disconnect the speaker. And yeah, I see what appears to be 3 So, I removed this card and one among the items I  noticed is that it isn't just any ordinary card. It's actually most of the motherboard. I say. most because the cardboard slots are still on rock bottom. Yep, there's the 8088 CPU. And it's quite a few jumper wires on the rear. 

Ironically, the CGA card is integrated into rock bottom PCB. What I would like to try to to next is install this XT-IDE interface, which allows me to use a compact flash card as a tough drive. This may allow me to simply test many pieces of software because it makes it easy to transfer data from a contemporary computer.

And thereby front, I even have excellent news and bad news. The great news is, the card's internal BIOS comes abreast of 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 once I run FDISK, I noticed that it considers the flash card a non-dos partition. 

This is often probably thanks to running such an old version of MS-DOS. But, one among the items I quickly discovered is that I couldn't catch on else any version of MS-DOS newer than 2.11. All I could get was the “starting MS-DOS” splash text, then it might 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 point out off some games that run in text mode, because they might be very colorful.

However, surprisingly only a few of them worked. Flash attack, for instance, starts to load, but once the sport starts the screen goes nuts. I think this might be right down to the memory design on the first CGA cards, which is said immediately that's not really true. I attempted running the lost adventures of Kroz, which is another text-based game that's only alleged to require 128K, but it actually says program too big to suit into memory. Next I attempted mower, another text-based game, and it starts off love it goes to figure, on the other hand something just doesn't work right once the sport starts. So that's another one marked off the list.

I'm beginning to wonder if any software goes to run on this thing. Next I attempted Ms. Packman. And remarkably, this game actually works, that's if you ignore the rubbish on the edges of the screen. Unsure what's causing that, but The sport more or less plays correctly. But, since this runs in graphics mode, there isn't tons of color to be seen. 

The last game I attempted 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 ascertain. But, I got the thought to attach an external monitor. I'm getting to use my Commodore 1084 since it supports RGB and composite video . one among the benchmarks I'm doing on all old CGA systems lately is to ascertain which of them actually display the right colors in composite video.

Almost all of the clones have the incorrect colors, with the exception of my Compaq portable. So, let's see what this one does. At the instant I even have the monitor in RGB mode so it's displaying precisely the same thing because the internal monitor. But, let's flip it over to composite mode and see how it's. Well, I finally have one good thing to mention about it, it does have the right composite colors. The grass is green and therefore 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 undertake another landscapes, here's the red look of inferno, and therefore the white and blue look of the North Pole map.

The cruel irony behind this is often that each one of this nice color is merely visible on an external composite display, and therefore the internal screen will just show up as black and white. So what ’s the ultimate 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 feel they intended most of the people to be using, which I don't happen to possess a replica of these handy and albeit I did, during this day and age they probably wouldn't be very interesting to you. 

I also don't desire they tried very hard to form this computer 100% MS-DOS compatible, actually one among the items I discovered was that the MS-DOS I had been using was the one that Matt got with the pc. I actually started watching it and that I acknowledged this is often not a generic copy of MS-DOS. It's actually a Sanyo branded copy of MS-DOS, which suggests it's a touch bit proprietary, which matches an extended thanks to explain why I used to be unable to urge the generic versions of MS-DOS else on this thing.

I find it somewhat ironic that they put what was undoubtedly an upscale color monitor during this thing and that they only planned it to be used with a couple of productivity applications, when the gaming market would have probably been a way bigger marketplace for people to require But the sad part is, that the majority games won't even run on this machine and therefore the ones that do, don't have tons of color because the pc is CGA. 

I'm actually amazed that Planet X3 works correctly on this computer, being that a lot of much simpler games crash or otherwise fail to figure on this computer. And, to be completely honest, I feel that I might actually much rather spend my time playing on my old Compaq portable 1 , which features a green monochrome screen, but a minimum of it's 100% compatible with the software of the age. Still, I hope you enjoyed having a glance at this thing, and as always stick around for subsequent video, and thanks for watching.

IBM PCjr Repair and Restoration