Exidy Sorcerer

The Sorcerer is one of the first home computers, released by the video game company Exidy in 1978. Based on the Zilog Z80 and the general design of the S-100 bus, which was becoming In standard for those years, the Sorcerer was comparatively advanced when it was released, especially compared to the more commercially successful Commodore PET and the TRS-80. The basic design was proposed by Paul Terrell, formerly of Byte Shop, a pioneering computer store.

The Sorcerer is the first computer to use ROM cartridges. Basically it is an S-100 Bus device (like the Altair) in a keyboard case, which integrates the video card and the cassette port. The S-100 bus is presented as a 50-pin ribbon connector, into which you can directly connect floppy disk drives (first expansion possibility), use an auxiliary box (Expansion Unit, with six S100 sockets and a cost of US$419 ($1,741 in 2023)) or use a 12-inch monitor combo, two floppy drives, and an expansion box (Video/Disk, with a price US$2,995 ($12,443 in 2023)).

In the United States it is distributed by Exidy (Dynasty Computer Corp, a company in Dallas, Texas, obtains a license to market it as Dynasty smart-ALEC, the name by which it is also known). Lacking strong support from its parent company, which focused on the successful arcade game market, Sorcerer was primarily sold through international distributors and technology licensing deals. Distribution agreements with Dick Smith Electronics in Australia (the Sorcerer Computer Users group of Australia (SCUA) continues to support the computer with expansions such as 80-column cards, memory upgrades and CPU accelerators) and Liveport in the United Kingdom, as well as with Compudata, which included a manufacturing license to build, market and distribute the Tulip line of computers in Europe. The system remains relatively unknown outside of these markets.

After the bankruptcy of Exidy, CompuData continues distribution until it is discontinued. Over time, CompuData was renamed Tulip Computers, which is known for its PC equipment and, above all, for having also acquired the rights to the Commodore brand. The Exidy Data Systems division was sold to a Wall Street company, Biotech, in 1983.

History

Origins

Paul Terrell entered the computer industry by starting the first personal computer store, the Byte Shop, in 1975. By 1977, the store had grown into a chain of 58 stores, and Terrell sold the chain to John Peers of Logical Machine Corporation.

With free time on his hands, Terrell began looking for new companies. He wanted a consumer computer that was easier to use beyond anything currently on the market. At the time, the Commodore PET and Tandy TRS-80 offered the out-of-the-box experience he considered essential, but required an expensive computer monitor despite their inadequate graphics. The Apple II had superior graphics and colors, but required some user assembly before being operational.

Terrell's goal was a machine that offered the best of both worlds. Searching for a suitable name, he pointed out: "Computers are like magic to people, so let's give them computer magic with the computer Sorcerer " (Sorcerer means sorcerer, witch, in English).

Exidy

Terrell was a friend of HR "Pete" Kauffman and Howell Ivy of Exidy, a successful arcade game manufacturer. Terrell noted that "his graphic designs of him with a computer were so good they would take a quarter out of my pocket." Howell, vice president of engineering, was a computer enthusiast and was interested in Terrell's concept. The wish list of design improvements over the existing ones went like this:

• A keyboard computer that could connect to a TV like Apple II and TRS-80, but also connect to a computer monitor to display high-resolution graphics.
• A set of easily programmable graphic characters such as Commodore PET, so that programmers could write programs in BASIC language that would impress their friends. The design of Sorcerer was eloquent to the highest resolution of the market, and innovative because the graphic characters could be rescheduled to represent any type of character of 8x8 that the programmer wanted and were not fixed as the graphic characters of the Commodore PET. Howell did such a good job in this area of design that he won the "More innovative" award at the Consumer Electronics Show after his presentation.
• The fastest microcomputer chip with the most software compatibility on the market. Exidy Sorcerer used Zilog Corp's Z80 processor (like Tandy's TRS-80, while Apple II and Commodore PET used MOS Technology's 6502 processor), which allowed him to run the same BASIC language software that was becoming one of the first standards in the personal computer industry, the Microsoft BASIC. Exidy was one of the first Microsoft software licensing companies after they separated from MITS, Inc. and before moving from New Mexico to Seattle.
• Plug-in software cartridges so that the computer user can start using the computer immediately when switching on. The user would not have to upload a program from tape or disk to start operating the computer. Exidy would provide three licensed program cartridges: Microsoft 8K BASIC, Text Processor Cartridge (which was the king of PC app at the time) and a assembler cartridge (for programmers to write their own custom software for proprietary applications). White cartridges were provided for custom applications and the most popular application were the foreign language character games generated by the client, which made Exidy Sorcerer the most popular international PC.^{[chuckles]required]}
• An expansion unit designed for the S-100 standard industrial bus, so that all low-cost peripheral products available at that time could be connected to configure a computer system.

US release

The Sorcerer made its debut at the Long Beach Computer Show in April 1978. Standard expansions that plugged into the keyboard case (included in the base price of the unit) were a printer port, a cassette port for mass storage and serial port for communications. Some of these were included with the products and others were add-ons.

The Exidy Sorcerer was competitively priced at US$895 ($3,718 in 2023) and was released in Long Beach, California, in April 1978 and generated orders for 4000 units at introduction. Shipments did not begin until later that summer.

Exidy sold the rights to the Exidy Sorcerer design to Dynasty Computer Corp. of Dallas, Texas. They made minor updates and relaunched it as 'Dynasty smart-ALEC'.

Successes outside the US

The export of personal computers was complicated by the requirement for approval from the Department of State of the United States Government, but this was more than offset by the financial advantage provided by the usual export terms of sale under letter of credit, which generates immediate cash, compared to payments from national retailers, which were 30 days. Therefore, Exidy wanted to focus on international sales, although it recognized the importance of its presence in the United States for development and marketing purposes.

Exidy took this to another level by licensing production both domestically and internationally, increasing overall production and market penetration without tapping into cash flow. With its unique programmable character set for foreign language characters, Exidy Sorcerer was in a league of its own. Advance payments of royalties and licensing fees made this business a priority for Exidy, Inc.

The first Sorcerers sold in the UK were imported directly from the United States by a small Cornwall-based company called Liveport Ltd. Liveport also designed and built additional ROM-PAC cartridges and an additional floppy drive (based on the Micropolis units) that did not require the expensive S-100 chassis. Sorcerer sales in continental Europe were quite strong through its distributor, Compudata Systems. The machine had its greatest success in 1979 when the Dutch broadcasting company TELEAC, in a move that would later be emulated by the BBC with its BBC Micro, decided to introduce its own personal computer. The Belgian company DAI was originally contracted to design the machine, but they did not deliver it and Compudata delivered several thousand Sorcerer instead.

Sales in Europe were strong, and when the Dutch government endorsed small business computers, Compudata decided to license the Exidy design for local construction in the Netherlands, with government support. After several years of Exidy production, Compudata developed its own machine based on the 16-bit Intel 8088, called Tulip, replacing Sorcerer in 1983. One of the largest computing user groups in the Netherlands was the ESGG (Exidy Sorcerer Gebruikers Groep) which published a monthly newsletter in two editions, Dutch and English. For some time, they were the largest group in the HCC (Hobby Computer Club) federation. The Dutch company De Broeders Montfort was a major firmware manufacturer.

The Sorcerer was successful in Australia as a result of heavy promotion by its exclusive agent Dick Smith Electronics, although there was resistance over pricing as it was considered out of reach of most fans. The Sorcerer Computer Users Group of Australia (SCUA) actively supported Sorcerer long after Exidy discontinued it, with RAM upgrades, speed increases, the "80 column card", and even a replacement monitor program, SCUAMON.

The Sorcerer's story has some parallels with Exidy competitor Bally's attempts to build a home computer based on the Astrocade. In contrast to Astrocade (and Datamax UV-1)'s limited text capabilities but excellent graphics, Sorcerer had excellent text and only limited graphics.^{[citation needed]}

Description

The Sorcerer was a combination of parts from a standard S-100 bus machine and its custom display circuitry. The machine included the Zilog Z80 and various bus functions necessary to run the CP/M operating system, but placed them inside a "closed" case, with a built-in keyboard similar to machines such as the Commodore PET, Commodore 64, and Atari 8-bit family. The Sorcerer's keyboard was a high quality unit. The keyboard included a "Graphics" custom, which allowed you to easily enter the extended character set, without having to work too much with the Control key, the most common solution on other machines. Leading its peers, the Sorcerer included lowercase characters as a standard feature.

Unlike most S-100 CP/M machines of its era, the Sorcerer had no internal expansion slots and everything needed for basic computing was built in. A standard video monitor was required for display and optionally a standard audio cassette deck was needed for data storage. The Sorcerer included a small ROM containing a simple machine code monitor that allowed control of the machine at the machine language level, as well as loading programs from cassette tape or cartridges. The cartridges, known as 'ROM PACs', were constructed by replacing the internal tape into an eight-track tape cartridge with a circuit board and edge connector for interfacing with the Sorcerer.

The machine could be used without any expansion, but if the user wanted to use S-100 cards, they could do so with an external expansion chassis. This was connected to the back of the machine via a 50-pin connector. Using the expansion chassis, the user could directly support floppy disks and boot from them in CP/M (without which the disks did not work). Another expansion option was a large external cage that included a full set of S-100 slots, allowing the Sorcerer to be used as a "full" S-100 machine. Yet another option combined floppy disks, an expansion chassis, and a small monitor in a single case.

The Sorcerer's graphics sound impressive, with a resolution of 512x240, when most machines of the time supported a maximum of 320x200. These lower resolutions were a side effect of the video hardware's inability to read screen data from RAM fast enough; Given the slow speed of the machines, they would end up spending all their time operating the screen. The key to building a usable system was to reduce the total amount of data, either by reducing the resolution or reducing the number of colors.

The Sorcerer, however, chose a completely different method, which consisted of using definable character graphics. There were 256 possible characters for each screen location. The bottom half was fixed to ROM and contained the usual ASCII character set. The top half was defined in RAM. This area would load with a default set of graphics upon reboot, but could be redefined and used instead of addressable pixel graphics. In fact, the machine was actually drawing a 64×30 (8×8 characters) screen which was within the capabilities of the hardware. However, this meant that all graphics had to be within a checkerboard pattern on the screen and the system was generally less flexible than machines with "real" graphics. Additionally, the high resolution was far beyond the capability of the average color TV, a problem they solved by not supporting color. In this sense, Sorcerer was similar to PET and TRS-80 in that you only had "graphic characters" to draw, but at least in Sorcerer you could define a custom set. It was also possible to provide animation by replacing characters or redefining the character's bitmap.

Given these limitations, the quality of the Sorcerer's graphics was excellent. The clever use of multiple characters for each graph allowed programmers to create smooth movement on the screen, regardless of character cell boundaries. A more surprising limitation, given the genesis of the machine, is the lack of sound output. Enterprising developers then standardized the use of two pins of the parallel port, to which users were expected to connect a speaker.

A Standard BASIC cartridge was included with the machine. This cartridge was essentially the common Microsoft BASIC that was already widely used in the CP/M world. One modification was the addition of single-key replacements for common BASIC commands, pressing GRAPHICS-P would insert the word PRINT for example, allowing higher speed input. The machine included sound input/output ports on the back that could be connected to a cassette tape recorder, so BASIC could load and save programs to tape without needing a disk drive. An Extended BASIC cartridge requiring 16 KB was also announced, but it is unclear if it was actually available; Microsoft's Extended BASIC was available on cassette. Another popular cartridge was the PAC word processor, which contained a version of the first Spellbinder word processing program. A consistent ROM fault on the PAC word processor was the printer status switch setting, but most people were aware of it and turned it off at first power-up.^{[citation needed]}

The Montfort brothers made a PAC EPROM with a rechargeable battery inside and 16 kB of RAM with an external write-protect switch. Therefore, the boot software could be loaded into the package and retained for a longer period.

Many CP/M machines were designed to allow the entire 64 kB 16-bit address space to be filled with memory. This was problematic in Exidy Sorcerer. 32 kB could easily be filled. Another 16 kB was the address space of the ROM cartridge. This could be completed, but required disabling the ROM cartridge capability. The system required the last 16 kB for I/O, particularly for video, and would have required extensive system modification.

Features

The characteristics of the Sorcerer are:

• Microprocessor Zilog Z80 to 2,106 MHz
• 4 Kb widening ROM with memory cartridges (PAC ROM) from 4 to 16 Kb. The base ROM contains a small monitoring program, while the BASIC comes in a separate cartridge (serial delivered with the team)
• RAM 4 Kb expandable to 48 Kb
• Large housing, 49 x 33 x 10.2 cm in light brown color, with the keyboard area, cartridge port and lower lid in dark brown. The team weighs about 5.9 kg (which leaves the teen's advertising photo with the team in an unreal hand).
• ASCII keyboard of 63 keys, with 16 keypad. The key caps can be changed (the ROM PAC Word Processor comes with its own cover game), which can justify the one that separates from the official key game in the light color except 5 in dark brown, there are teams with red keys, etc. It is capable of capital and tiny (an extra at those times).

• Screen with two modes
  • Text 64 x 30 with 2 colors
  • Graphics of 512 x 240 with 2 colors

To avoid the slowdown caused by high resolution, characters are used. The first 127 are fixed in ROM with the standard ASCII, but the rest can be redefined, so being an 8x8 matrix gives us 64x8=512 and 30*8=240. Color is not supported to also lighten the CPU load.

• Sound: series does not have, but is standardized to connect to two pins of the parallel port a speaker.
• As a native support you use:
  • Cartridge ROM from 4 to 16 Kb
  • Casete to 1200 baudios or 300 baudios (soft switch)
  • Disk in CP/M format

• Your input / output connectors are
  • Cartridge base on the right side
  • RS-232 serial port
  • Parallel printer port
  • Two cassette ports
  • Video Port
  • Expansion Bus (S100)

Extensions

• Disc drives to run CP/M
• Expansion Unit, with a cost of US$419 ($1741 in 2023)
• Video/Disk, with a price US$2995 ($12 443 in 2023)