🇫🇷 Thomson MO5: Part 1

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The Clueless Engineer

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Published on March 8, 2024 8:20:04 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuWdGKsQzII

Duration: 10:32

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Something different ... un ordinateur Français! Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be working - no video output - so some further investigation required. It does use a large gate array so if that's faulty ... ? I have tried reseating the three ICs with no difference - same video output with the CPU removed.

The French Thomson MO5 uses a 6809 (same as the Dragon Data 32 and TRS-80 CoCo) and has 48Kbytes of RAM.

It has BASIC built-in to the ROM so no cartridge is required.

There is a lot of tape software available (in K7 file format) but it seems that the tape-input expects a digital data stream, decoded by the tape recorder itself ... similar to the VIC-20/C64?

There are open source board designs for RAM expansion and SD interfaces, so I'll look at getting those:
http://dcmoto.free.fr/bricolage/index.html

If I can get the machine working ...