Thomson
Thomson is a French High tech corporation who produce Weapons or HI-FI Electronic devices.
It used to produce 8-bit home computers in the 80's.
Yet those machines were litteraly whipped out by Amstrad in the French market.
Despite this they were quite common because in the 80's, the french governement started a program "Plan informatique pour tous" (computering for all plan) which consisted of equipping schools with computers networks.
As a result, a lot of Thomson computers were only sold to schools.
Because a french computer, french games producers ported many of their games on those computers.
Thomson computers were know to have been used in some cross developpment for Amstrad CPC games.
- Le 5ème Axe (french name) from Loriciels, was originally a MO5 game.
Latter TO8 models did include Video mode similar to Amstrad CPC's ones, inb addition to a 16 colours character attributed mode (like on speccy) and a 4096 colour palette. also those latter models included more RAM than Amstrad's 8 bit computers.
But those computers were lacking a decent sound chip : Even the AY seems like a sifd in comparison. And the only market was France, where Amstrad litteraly raped Thomson's market shares in their homeland.
Palette and Video Modes
MO5 and TO7
The 1st generation of 8 bit thomson computers have a custom palette of 16 colours.
Quite comparable with the ZX Spectrum palette, it is indeed done with a range of medium and clear tones instead of dark and medium.
Also it is to notice that instead of having 2 Black, one was replaced by an Orange.
The Attribute system was comparable to MSX1 with attributes of 8x1 and 16 colours diplayable on screen (2 per attributes) superior to ZX Spectrum in almost every way.
- Logicielsmoto.com a complete French site with softwares and stuff on Thomson computers.
