Matra Alice
The Matra & Hachette Ordinateur Alice is a home computer sold in France beginning in 1983. It was a clone of the TRS-80 MC-10, produced through a collaboration between Matra and Hachette in France and Tandy Corporation in the United States.
The Alice is distinguished by its bright red casing. Functionally, it is equivalent to the MC-10, with a SCART connector replacing the RF modulator for video output and an AZERTY keyboard instead of QWERTY.
The Alice never became a popular computer in its home country. It tried to invade schools by being part of the country's Plan Informatique pour Tous ("Computing for All") programme, but Thomson won the whole deal.
The original model had 4 kB of RAM and used a Motorola 6847 video display generator chip, as used in the Dragon 32 and Acorn Atom among others.
Specifications
- CPU: Motorola 6803 at 0.89 MHz
- RAM: 4 KiB on-board, expandable to 20 KiB with a plug-in memory module
- ROM: 8 KiB (Microsoft BASIC)
- Display: Motorola 6847, 32 x 16 or 64 x 32 with 8 colors, 160 x 125 with 4 colors (with expanded RAM)
- Sound: 1 channel, 5 octaves
- Keyboard: AZERTY layout
I/O Ports:
- RS-232C serial interface
- Cassette interface
- Péritel video output
- Expansion interface
Later models
The Matra Alice 32, released in 1983, shared the case style of the original, but was a different computer inside, due to using the EF9345 video chip instead of the weaker Motorola 6847. This gave it higher resolution semi-graphic mode 320 x 250 pixels max in 8 colours. The Alice 32 had 8 kilobytes of main RAM, 8 kilobytes of dedicated video RAM, and 16 kilobytes ROM (the ROM incorporated an assembler). The CPU was clocked at 1 MHz.
The Matra Alice 90, released in late 1984, was an upgrade to the Alice 32, which featured 32 kilobytes of RAM and a full-size case and keyboard. Its video cable included video-in, so EF9345 graphics could be overlaid onto the input video.
The Matra Alice 8000, released in 1985 as a prototype preseries of 125 machines, was a more powerful machine with two CPUs, an MC6803 at 1.2288 MHz and an Intel 8088 at 5MHz. It had 64KB of RAM.
Links
- Le (wiki) d'Alice Alice Wiki
- Documentation Alice
- Motorola MC6803 CPU datasheet
- Motorola MC6847 VDG datasheet
- SGS-Thomson EF9345 datasheet
- DCAlice Emulator for Windows and collection of 86 programs and games
- Je vous dis tout sur ALICE, sans tabous ! by Olipix
