Sharp MZ-800
The Sharp MZ-800 was a home computer made by the Japanese company Sharp , which came on the market in 1985. The device appeared in Japan under the name Sharp MZ 1500.
technology
The MZ-800 continued the concept of the MZ series and was the successor to the MZ-700 . Technically, the computer was based on a Z80 A processor with 3.55 MHz . The device was equipped with 64 KiB RAM , but the memory could be expanded to 128 KiB.
New for the MZ series from Sharp was the graphic resolution of 640 by 200 pixels on the MZ-800 (and the MZ80B ) , which was a considerable improvement over the MZ-700 series.
The MZ-800 is backwards compatible with the MZ-80 and MZ-700. In contrast to the MZ-80 (1979), the MZ-800 does not have a built-in monitor and is accordingly flatter. It was available in three versions: as a basic model (MZ-811), with a built-in datasette (MZ-821) and with an additionally integrated four-color plotter (MZ-831). Instead of the datasette, a quick disk drive for a 2.8 inch diskette with sequential access could be installed. You could also connect an external 5.25 "floppy drive. There was a joystick for games .
In contrast to other home computers , the ROM of the devices from the MZ series did not contain any programming language, but only a boot monitor with elementary input-output commands. This made it possible to read in data from cassette or floppy disk, read out individual memory cells and change their content in hexadecimal notation, as well as write data back to the mass storage device. The assembler source code of the monitor was included as a printout in the manual supplied. Sharp called this concept clean computer . Applications or programming languages first had to be read in from the cassette or floppy disk after switching on. The manufacturer's own S-Basic (an interpreter) and some games were included. But there were also compilers for Basic as well as for Pascal or Fortran and for working with Z80 assembler. The Office applications widespread at the time could be operated under CP / M.
In Germany the computer was available for a retail price of DM 1198.
Web links
- Games and Downloads for the Sharp MZ-800 (Czech)
- MZ-800 at Old-Computers.com (Engl.)
- Technical information on the MZ-800 (Engl.)
- Comprehensive information on the MZ series (Engl.)
- Emulator MZ-800 (Engl.)