Canon X-07: Part 1 (First pull-apart)
29{Apologies - didn't plan on such a long video}
The Canon X-07 is an NSC800 (Z80-clone) based "hand held computer" that was popular in France in the early 80s. Well, popular enough to have some books and a reasonable number of magazine type-ins.
It has a built-in 20x4 character screen (132x32 pixels) but could also be connected (via the X-720 interface) to a TV for a larger 40x25 text screen or colour graphics. These interfaces seem to be very rare ... and unfortunately none of the owners seem curious enough to open one up, share photos, dump the ROM, etc. (well, I've not found any ... happy to be proven very wrong ...)
It has 8KB built-in but I've expanded it to 16KB by the addition of a TC5565 8KB SRAM chip. It could be expanded to 24KB with RAM included on a ROM card. But being a Z80-based machine ... it could probably be upgraded further ...
The serial and parallel ports have a custom connector (it seems) but the expansion bus (apparently 8085 compatible) is just a pin header.
The cassette interface is a mini-DIN type so I can make up a cable to connect to my Mac and playback WAV files via Audacity. I haven't been able to find any software (WAV) readily available but there is a tool that will apparently convert a text file program (got some) into a WAV file ... so that'll be up next.
One small thing I noticed inside the machine - there's a pair of links labelled KOKUGAI (国外 = foreign) and KOKUNAI (国内 = domestic, i.e. Japan). Wonder what the difference is ... perhaps starts in カナ (kana) mode if set to domestic? There was apparently a Japanese model called the X-07R that came with 16KB instead of 8KB ...
Someone's X-07 collection (in French):
https://casio.ledudu.com/pockets.asp?type=116
https://canonx07.ledudu.com/?lg=eng
Pocket computer cassette utilities (not just for the X-07!):
http://www.mvcsys.de/doc/casioutil.html
Example type-in from a French computer magazine:
https://archive.org/details/hebdogiciel-french-123/page/n3/mode/2up