We got it in 1983, I believe, so it just took me about 41 years to navigate to it. This Tomy Tutor isn’t a replacement system I secondarily obtained, nor is it a Ship of Theseus Frankenstein reconstruct. This is my real Computer system, in its initial case, on its initial parts, with the Federated Group sticker label still on the initial box. And it still works.
Now, why so long? Well, for something, it was just expected to be a training wheels computer system due to the fact that a complete Commodore 64 system would have cost excessive, however my folks wished to see whether we ‘d require to a personal computer and His High Holy Munificence Fred R. Rated was blowing these infants out for a tune already. The invoice has actually long because vanished, though $99 sounds about ideal plus possibly around $40 or two for a joystick, cassette deck and some cartridges, compared to someplace in between $200 and $300 for the just recently marked down 64– which didn’t consist of anything else. (It informs you something about our household financial resources at the time when a C64 was too pricey) I instantly began composing my own BASIC programs on it in its perverse little BASIC dialect and when my folks undoubtedly conserved up and purchased us a C64 system the next year (total with 1702 screen and 1541 drive), I declined to utilize it. In
retaliation
my benefits, my moms and dads by force moved the Tomy to storage and I went on to do even larger things on the Commodore, making it, not the Tutor, the specifying computer system of my youth. That’s why there’s still a Commodore 128DCR on my desk.
The other factor is that there was never ever actually a basic method to do it. Even when I discovered what CPU was really within (extremely a 16-bit TMS 9995, a developed variation of the TMS 9900 in the Texas Instruments 99/4 and 99/4A), there was never ever a Tomy assembler, and besides its percentage of scratchpad RAM (256 bytes) the whole of the Tutor’s 16K of memory is bound in the 9918ANL VDP video chip. That sort of architecture was normal for the household, however that likewise indicates that nearly whatever is saved in non-executable VDP RAM, so except burning your own cartridge EPROMs there’s no chance to in fact produce and run a device language program on the Tutor. The very first flashcart for the Tutor didn’t exist till around 2016 and it was still all ROM; moreover, while the 99/4A might have its CPU-addressable RAM broadened (along with the 99/8, its unreleased follower to which the Tomy Tutor is carefully associated), there wasn’t ever a Tutor RAM growth cartridge either till really just recently. Now there are numerous homebrew alternatives even for unknown home computer systems like this one, and at last I’ve got my own assembly language program lastly running on it.
And it’s all finished with its own,
