Thomson TO7/70 Emulation in MESS

System

Thomson TO7/70 (French, 1984)

Driver name: to770

Enhanced TO7.

It has improved graphics features (16 colors instead of 8) and more RAM. The TO7/70 supports virtually all TO7 software, devices, and extensions (in particular, floppy and game controllers).

Features

We only show the differences with respect to the TO7:

RAM: 48 KB base + 64 KB extension = 96 KB, + 16 KB dedicated to video
Video: 16 fixed colors instead of 8, but identical proximity constraints
Lightpen: the horizontal precision has improved to the pixel

Usage

Please read the documentation for the to7 driver.

Cartridges, cassettes & floppies

They have the exact same format and image formats as the TO7 ones: .k7 for byte-processed cassettes, .wav for raw cassettes, .sap or .fd for 80 KB or 160 KB 5"1/4 and 320 KB 3"1/2 floppies, .qd for 50 KB 2"8 floppies, and .m7 and .rom for cartridge. Moreover, they are used in the exact same way. You need a BASIC 1.0 cartridge to load most cassettes, and an extra BASIC DOS boot floppy to use floppies.

The TO7/70 is backward compatible with the TO7. However, many TO7/70 software are designed to exploit the enhanced graphics capabilities and RAM space, and will not work on a TO7.

BASIC 128

Of particular interest is the BASIC 128 cartridge. Designed quite late, it allows exploiting the full memory of the TO7/70 and all 16 colors from the BASIC. It also provides its own DOS (no need for a DOS boot disk). However, many games were developed before the BASIC 128 appeared and are incompatible with it. Thus, you should stick to the BASIC 1.0 to play games (most are coded in machine code and can access all colors and RAM without BASIC support).

Keyboard

The TO7/70 keyboard is identical to the TO7 one.

In addition, the ACC key can be followed by 6, 7, 8, 9, or 0 to typeset é, è, ù, ç, and à directly.

History and Trivia

With the MO5, the TO7/70 was a very popular computer in France, despite its price. This may be due to the government plan "Informatique pour tous" (meaning: "Computer Science for Everyone") to buy schools a large amount of those.

Although it is backward compatible with the TO7, the TO7/70 has some notable hardware changes. In particular, a lot of generic chips have been replaced with a custom gate-array from Thomson.

The TO7/70 has a large library of games and educational software.