TABLE OF CONTENTS Holiday time, memory time... ◊ The Olivetti M20 and the history of a Pag. 3 website Summer, with its torrid heat and hot nights came to visit all of us again. Probably now more than ever warmth and ◊ The LM80C Colour Computer - Part 1 Pag. 7 temperatures above average have been expected with such ◊ Japan 12th episode: Game & Watch Vs Pag. 11 trepidation. After a horrible winter and spring, this summer MADrigal is not only synonymous with holidays, but also a slow ◊ Can we multiply the number of games Pag. 18 return to the normal life for some of us. for THEC64? Yes, we can! ◊ Back to the past... - Episode nr. 2: Pag. 19 Who’s writing have been living abroad for few years now Windows 2000 and summer is one of the most awaited moments to be able to return to Italy and embrace friends and family. This year ◊ Amstrad CPC - Redefining characters Pag. 21 you can easily imagine how ardently I was waiting for the ◊ A splash screen in SCR format for the Pag. 23 possibility to travel again and return to the places of my Amstrad CPC youth. For those who live far from their home country the ◊ Abbreviations & shortcuts on using a Pag. 27 chance to return once or twice a year is like browsing graphical interface through a memory album. Finding places and people you ◊ The 1st RMW 8-bit Home Computer Pag. 30 haven't seen in a long time makes you want to know what Chess Tournament happened in the meantime and likewise the possibility of ◊ Introduction to ARexx – Part 1 Pag. 34 making a comparison with what it was and what it is... The funniest thing, at least for me, is noticing how the little ◊ HEART CHASER 2 - a Locomotive BASIC Pag. 38 changes are much more impressive than the big ones. game They're not so obvious, and when you see them, you make ◊ YAMI NO RYŪŌ HADESU NO MONSHŌ Pag. 45 an immediate comparison. (MSX) ◊ WON-SI-IN (MSX) Pag. 46 Some of you may wonder what the link of this editorial is to ◊ CYBORG-Z (MSX) Pag. 47 our common passion. Easily said! Because of the complexity of the move and the chronic lack of space in our ◊ ELLENICA (Megadrive) Pag. 48 homes (at least in mine...) I had to give up transferring a ◊ STURMTRUPPEN (Amiga) Pag. 53 substantial part of my retro material. Books, magazines, ◊ WONDER BOY DRAGON’S TRAP (PC) Pag. 55 notebooks, remained in my house in Italy. So, coming back and finding this stuff is like opening a memory chest. It is ◊ MOON CRESTA (Arcade) Pag. 57 true that, as I have also written in other editorials, we can ◊ RAGING BEAST (C64) Pag. 59 find retro magazines and books on the Internet, but these ◊ LIGHTS OF FINANCE (Multi-platform) Pag. 60 are my personal ones. Reading their pages, immediately arise the memories, the doubts, the things that were not ◊ WARDNER (Arcade) Pag. 61 clear to me at the time and that I now easily understand… Bringing me back in time. Strangely, I feel a mixture of feelings; I would like to take this material with me, but at the same time I like the idea of coming back once in while and finding them for a real return to the past. People involved in the preparation of this issue of RetroMagazine World: What about you? Do you have your own treasure chest? If you want to tell us your stories, please contact us • Alberto Apostolo • Marco Pistorio through the references below. • Carlo N. Del Mar Pirazzini • Mathias Lorenz The number you have downloaded is full of interesting and • Daniele Brahimi • Michele Ugolini hopefully stimulating content. Before leaving you to enjoy • Davide Bucci • Querino Ialongo it, on behalf of the entire RMW Team, I would like to wish • David La Monaca • Sakis Kaffesakis you a very nice summer! • Ermanno Betori Francesco Fiorentini • Flavio Soldani • Graphics by Irene Valeri • Francesco Fiorentini • Cover by Flavio Soldani Email: [email protected] • Gianluca Girelli • Proof-reading by Facebook: www.facebook.com/RetroMagazine-2005584959715273/ Francesco Fiorentini Twitter: twitter.com/RetroMagazineW • Giorgio Balestrieri David La Monaca Robin Jubber • Leonardo Miliani Ralf Quint • Marco Fiaschi Carlo NDM Pirazzini Gianluca Girelli Page 2 of 62 RETROMAGAZINE WORLD-ENGLISH YEAR 1 - ISSUE 2 HARDWARE The Olivetti M20 and the history of a website by Davide Bucci 1 - Introduction 2 - The beat of a different drum, the Z8001 The Olivetti M20 was a remarkable computer, developed Development of the M20 (internally called PC1000) at a time when it was not yet clear that Intel processors started in 1979 in the Olivetti Advanced Technology Centre and MS-DOS would play a big role in the years to come. (ATC) in Cupertino, California, not far from the Apple Ultimately, it would not have direct successors and did headquarters. Olivetti presented the computer to the not create an ecosystem large enough to survive more public on March 31, 1982, in the magnificent castle of than a few years. Nonetheless it found a small niche, Agliè, not too far from Ivrea in Italy [1]. They had already notably in Europe and contributed to the daily work of used the M20 name for a older model of typewriter in many small businesses. 1920 and hoped to repeat the success for the then blossoming personal computer market. The newborn was This article presents the M20, as well as the operating based on the Zilog Z8001 processor, like all machines of system that Olivetti developed for it, the PCOS. I have the 'LINEA 1' (L1) family, completed by the M30, M40 been and still am the webmaster of a website, dedicated and M60 minicomputers. The M20 ran a proprietary to this machine, which went online in 2005, so the second operating system developed specifically for it, the part of this article is more of a personal nature and Professional Computer Operating system or PCOS-8000. describes the history of my computer as well as that of One colourful detail is that several Italian ministers and the website I dedicated to it. political representatives were invited to the Agliè meeting. Presenting a new computer in Italy in this way was not only a minor technological event, but more a political and (why not?) a cultural event, however the computer was actually distributed worldwide [2-4] and attracted a certain level of interest. The title of this paragraph paraphrases the subtitle of an American review [3]. Olivetti was well known for their industrial design and the M20 was no exception. A modern-looking plastic case was designed by Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007) and was praised at the time. The designer had a long history of collaboration with Olivetti, notably, he was in charge of the industrial design of the Elea 9003 in 1959, one of the first fully transistorised computers in the world. In 1969, he also drew the stylish Valentine typewriter, attractively adorned in a garish red colour. The M20 hosted a respectably sized motherboard, a well equipped keyboard (not detachable) as well as two 5.25" floppy disk drives or one floppy disk drive and one hard disk. A separate 12" monitor could be put on top of the case and oriented. The result can be seen in figure 1 and still retains a certain retro- futuristic appeal to the modern eye. 3 - The hardware The motherboard, shown in figure 2, occupied practically all the base of the computer, hence the choice of an Figure 1 - The M20 case, designed by Ettore Sottsass integrated keyboard was dictated by technical constraints. The motherboard contained a 4 MHz Z8001 processor, RETROMAGAZINE WORLD-ENGLISH YEAR 1 - ISSUE 2 Page 3 of 62 HARDWARE using a real 16 bit bus, 128 KB of RAM, a printer interface and an RS232 serial interface with a maximum speed of 9600 baud. The RAM could be expanded up to a maximum of 512 KB by using up to three expansion cards. Two slots were available for expansions such as an IEEE interface card, hard disk controller and so on. The build quality was excellent and the system was modular. Assembly and disassembly was a matter of a few screws and some clever latches. The keyboard was slightly noisy, but fast and excellent for touch typing. Italian readers may notice in figure 3 that it conserved the classic QZERTY layout for typewriters, as the modern Italian QWERTY layout plus the accented letters was yet to come, introduced by the same Olivetti Figure 2 - The wide M20 motherboard with the M24. Olivetti clearly wanted people to type as to the other tracks (MFM, 256 bytes/sector). Different comfortably as possible and aimed to people used to configurations exist, an 11.5 MB Winchester drive (similar typewriters. Contemporary reviews [3] tend to explicitly to the MFM ST251) was available to replace one of the mention the absence of separate function keys, however, floppy drives and 160 KB and 640 KB disk drives were special key functions were accessible via two coloured also available. Unusually, in the standard hardware keys named Command and CTRL, these were pressed configuration, the M20 identifies the two floppy drives as and held down before pressing another key. A detachable 1: on the left and 0: on the right. legend could be inserted in a slot on top of the keyboard, to indicate the function of each key. Two additional keys, A range of printers was available from Olivetti. The called S1 and S2, could be assigned various functions. PR1450S, PR1450G (G stands for "graphic"), PR1471, The most evident omission is the backspace key, normally dot matrix and the PR2400 thermal.