Exidy Sorcerer
Encyclopedia
The Sorcerer was one of the early home computer
systems, released in 1978 by the videogame company, Exidy
. It was comparatively advanced when released, especially when compared to the contemporary more commercially-orientated Commodore PET
and TRS-80
, but due to a number of problems including a lack of marketing, the machine remained relatively unknown. Exidy eventually pulled it from the market in 1980, and today they are a coveted collector's item.
started looking for new ventures. He eventually convinced the founders of Exidy, H.R."Pete" Kauffman and Howell Ivy, that a truly simple computer with reasonable performance still wasn't available. At the time, the PET and TRS-80 offered the out-of-the-box experience he felt was necessary, but these lacked the graphics he felt would be needed, and required the use of a computer monitor which drove up the price. The Apple II
offered both graphics and color, but required at least some user assembling to get operational. His dream machine would combine these features.
The result was the Sorcerer. It was powered by a Zilog Z80
running at 2.106 MHz with 4 to 48 kilobyte
s of RAM, giving it performance parity with the TRS-80. In its basic form it consisted of a single chassis containing the computing hardware with the keyboard on top, a layout that became common with machines like the Atari 800
and Commodore VIC-20
. In this form it could be attached to a 3rd party computer monitor and used with software loaded from the "ROM-PAC" cartridges
and a cassette tape drive as a low-cost offering. For larger systems, the base unit could be attached to an external S-100 expansion chassis that sat behind the console, allowing cards to expand the system as well as offering floppy disk
support.
sets for output, reducing overall system costs.
Exidy tired of the effort quickly. In 1979 the company sold the rights to the design to Dynasty Computer Corp. of Dallas, Texas. They made minor updates and re-released it as the "Dynasty smart-ALEC".
decided to introduce their own home computer. The Belgian company DAI
was originally contracted to design their machines, but when they couldn't deliver, CompuData delivered several thousand Sorcerers instead.
By 1979 Exidy had already decided to give up on the machine, but sales in Europe
were strong enough that CompuData decided to license the design for local construction in the Netherlands
. They built the machine for several years before developing their own 16-bit
Intel 8088
–based machine called the Tulip
, which replaced the Sorcerer in 1983. One of the largest groups in The Netherlands was the ESGG (Exidy Sorcerer Gebruikers Groep) which published a monthly newsletter in two editions, Dutch and English. They were the largest group for a while in the HCC (Hobby Computer Club) federation. The Dutch company De Broeders Montfort was a major firmware manufacturerer.
The Sorcerer also had a strong following in Australia. This is most likely due to Dick Smith Electronics
, being a leading electronics and hobbyist retailer at the time, pushing the Sorcerer quite heavily. The Sorcerer Computer Users group of Australia (or SCUA) actively supported the Sorcerer long after Exidy discontinued it, with RAM upgrades, speed boosts, the "80 column card", and even a replacement monitor program, SCUAMON.
The history of the Sorcerer has some parallels with Exidy's competitor Bally's attempts to build a home computer based on the Astrocade. While the Astrocade (and Datamax UV-1
) had limited text capabilities but excellent graphics, the Sorcerer instead had excellent text and only limited graphical capability.
machine, combined with their custom display circuitry. The machine included the Zilog Z80
and various bus features needed to run the CP/M
operating system
, but placed them inside a "closed" box with a built-in keyboard similar to machines like the Commodore PET
, the Commodore 64
, and the Atari 8-bit family
. Unlike those machines, the Sorcerer's keyboard was a high quality unit with full "throw". The keyboard included a custom "Graphics" key, which allowed easy entry of the extended character set, without having to overload the Control key, the more common solution on other machines. Somewhat ahead of its peers, the Sorcerer included lower case characters as a standard feature.
Unlike most S-100 CP/M machines of its era, the Sorcerer did not have any internal expansion slots, and everything that was needed for basic computing was built-in. A standard video monitor was required for display, and optionally a standard audio cassette deck was needed for data storage. The Sorcerer included a small ROM
containing a simple monitor program which allowed the machine to be controlled at the machine language level, as well as load programs from cassette tape or cartridges. The cartridges, known as "ROM PAC"s in Exidy-speak, were built by replacing the internal tape in an eight-track tape case with a circuit board and edge connector
to interface with the Sorcerer.
The machine was usable without any expansion, but if the user wished to use S-100 cards they could do so with an external expansion chassis. This was connected to the back of the machine through a 50-pin connector. Using the expansion chassis the user could directly support floppy disk
s, and boot from them into CP/M (without which the disks were not operable). Another expansion option was a large external cage which included a full set of S-100 slots, allowing the Sorcerer to be used like a "full" S-100 machine. Still another option combined the floppies, expansion chassis and a small monitor into a single large-ish box.
Graphics on the Sorcerer sound impressive, with a resolution of 512×240, when most machines of the era supported a maximum of 320×200. These lower resolutions were a side effect of the inability of the video hardware to read the screen data from RAM fast enough; given the slow speed of the machines they would end up spending all of their time driving the display. The key to building a usable system was to reduce the total amount of data, either by reducing the resolution, or by reducing the number of colors.
The Sorcerer instead chose another method entirely, which was to use definable character graphics. There were 256 characters possible for each screen location. The lower half was fixed in ROM, and contained the usual ASCII character set. The upper half was defined in RAM. This area would be loaded with a default set of graphics at reset, but could be re-defined and used in lieu of pixel
-addressable graphics. In fact the machine was actually drawing a 64×30 display (8×8 characters) which was well within the capabilities of the hardware. However this meant that all graphics had to lie within a checkerboard pattern on the screen, and the system was generally less flexible than machines with "real" graphics. In addition, the high resolution was well beyond the capability of the average color TV, a problem they solved by not supporting color. In this respect the Sorcerer was similar to the PET and TRS-80
in that it had only "graphics characters" to draw with, but at least on the Sorcerer one could define a custom set. It was also possible to provide animation by character replacement or by redefining the character bitmap.
Given these limitations, the quality of the graphics on the Sorcerer was otherwise excellent. Clever use of several characters for each graphic allowed programmers to create smooth motion on the screen, regardless of the character-cell boundaries. A more surprising limitation, given the machine's genesis, is the lack of sound output. Enterprising developers then standardized on attaching a speaker to two pins of the parallel port
, which users were expected to supply.
A Standard BASIC cartridge was included with the machine. This cartridge was essentially the common Microsoft BASIC
already widely used in the CP/M world. One modification was the addition of single-stroke replacements for common BASIC commands, pressing GRAPHICS-P would insert the word
The Montfort Brothers made an EPROM
PAC with a rechargeable battery inside and 16 kB RAM with an external write-protect switch. Thus bootable software could be uploaded to the pack and kept for a longer period.
Many CP/M machines were designed to allow the full 16-bit address space of 64 kB to be populated by memory. This was problematic on the Exidy Sorcerer. 32 kB could easily be populated. Another 16 kB was the ROM cartridge address space. This could be populated, but required disabling the ROM cartridge capability. The last 16 kB was required by the system for I/O, particularly for the video, and would have required extensive system modification.
Home computer
Home computers were a class of microcomputers entering the market in 1977, and becoming increasingly common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single nontechnical user...
systems, released in 1978 by the videogame company, Exidy
Exidy
Exidy was one of the largest creators of arcade video games during the early period of video games, from 1974 until at least 1986 . The company was founded by H.R."Pete" Kauffman...
. It was comparatively advanced when released, especially when compared to the contemporary more commercially-orientated Commodore PET
Commodore PET
The Commodore PET was a home/personal computer produced from 1977 by Commodore International...
and TRS-80
TRS-80
TRS-80 was Tandy Corporation's desktop microcomputer model line, sold through Tandy's Radio Shack stores in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first units, ordered unseen, were delivered in November 1977, and rolled out to the stores the third week of December. The line won popularity with...
, but due to a number of problems including a lack of marketing, the machine remained relatively unknown. Exidy eventually pulled it from the market in 1980, and today they are a coveted collector's item.
Origins
Having recently sold his share of the seminal personal computer stores, the Byte Shop, Paul TerrellPaul Terrell
Paul Terrell is the founder of the Byte Shop, one of the first personal computer retailers. He started the store in December 1975 in Mountain View, California.-Byte Shop and Apple:...
started looking for new ventures. He eventually convinced the founders of Exidy, H.R."Pete" Kauffman and Howell Ivy, that a truly simple computer with reasonable performance still wasn't available. At the time, the PET and TRS-80 offered the out-of-the-box experience he felt was necessary, but these lacked the graphics he felt would be needed, and required the use of a computer monitor which drove up the price. The Apple II
Apple II
The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer and introduced in 1977...
offered both graphics and color, but required at least some user assembling to get operational. His dream machine would combine these features.
The result was the Sorcerer. It was powered by a Zilog Z80
Zilog Z80
The Zilog Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor designed by Zilog and sold from July 1976 onwards. It was widely used both in desktop and embedded computer designs as well as for military purposes...
running at 2.106 MHz with 4 to 48 kilobyte
Kilobyte
The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Although the prefix kilo- means 1000, the term kilobyte and symbol KB have historically been used to refer to either 1024 bytes or 1000 bytes, dependent upon context, in the fields of computer science and information...
s of RAM, giving it performance parity with the TRS-80. In its basic form it consisted of a single chassis containing the computing hardware with the keyboard on top, a layout that became common with machines like the Atari 800
Atari 8-bit family
The Atari 8-bit family is a series of 8-bit home computers manufactured from 1979 to 1992. All are based on the MOS Technology 6502 CPU and were the first home computers designed with custom coprocessor chips...
and Commodore VIC-20
Commodore VIC-20
The VIC-20 is an 8-bit home computer which was sold by Commodore Business Machines. The VIC-20 was announced in 1980, roughly three years after Commodore's first personal computer, the PET...
. In this form it could be attached to a 3rd party computer monitor and used with software loaded from the "ROM-PAC" cartridges
ROM cartridge
A ROM cartridge, sometimes referred to as a cart, is a removable enclosure containing read-only memory devices designed to be connected to a computer or games console....
and a cassette tape drive as a low-cost offering. For larger systems, the base unit could be attached to an external S-100 expansion chassis that sat behind the console, allowing cards to expand the system as well as offering floppy disk
Floppy disk
A floppy disk is a disk storage medium composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic carrier lined with fabric that removes dust particles...
support.
Launch and US failure
The Sorcerer was first launched in April 1978 at the PERCOMP convention in Long Beach, California at a price of . The expansion systems and drives were released at the same time. Shipments did not start until later that summer. However, the machine never sold well in the US, likely due to the introduction of newer machines like the Atari 800 that offered many more features (including color graphics and sound) and directly supported televisionTelevision
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
sets for output, reducing overall system costs.
Exidy tired of the effort quickly. In 1979 the company sold the rights to the design to Dynasty Computer Corp. of Dallas, Texas. They made minor updates and re-released it as the "Dynasty smart-ALEC".
Successes outside the US
The first Sorcerers sold in the UK were imported direct from the US by a small company based in Cornwall called Liveport Ltd. Liveport also eventually designed and built extra plug-in ROM-PAC cartridges and eventually an add-on floppy disk drive (based on Micropolis units) that did not require the S-100 chassis. Sorcerer Sales in Europe were fairly strong, via their distributor, CompuData Systems. The machine had its biggest brush with success in 1979 when the Dutch broadcasting company TELEACTeleac
Teleac may refer to several villages in Romania:* Teleac, a village in Ciugud Commune, Alba County* Teleac, a village in Budureasa Commune, Bihor County* Teleac, a village in Feliceni Commune, Harghita County...
decided to introduce their own home computer. The Belgian company DAI
DAI Personal Computer
The DAI personal computer is a rare, early home computer from the Belgian company Data Applications International. The DAI came to market in 1980. It provided many pioneering features such as high resolution color graphics, a maths co-processor, and a pre-compiling BASIC interpreter...
was originally contracted to design their machines, but when they couldn't deliver, CompuData delivered several thousand Sorcerers instead.
By 1979 Exidy had already decided to give up on the machine, but sales in Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
were strong enough that CompuData decided to license the design for local construction in the Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
. They built the machine for several years before developing their own 16-bit
16-bit
-16-bit architecture:The HP BPC, introduced in 1975, was the world's first 16-bit microprocessor. Prominent 16-bit processors include the PDP-11, Intel 8086, Intel 80286 and the WDC 65C816. The Intel 8088 was program-compatible with the Intel 8086, and was 16-bit in that its registers were 16...
Intel 8088
Intel 8088
The Intel 8088 microprocessor was a variant of the Intel 8086 and was introduced on July 1, 1979. It had an 8-bit external data bus instead of the 16-bit bus of the 8086. The 16-bit registers and the one megabyte address range were unchanged, however...
–based machine called the Tulip
Tulip Computers
Tulip Computers NV was a Dutch computer manufacturer that manufactured PC clones. It was founded in 1979, and listed on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange in 1984....
, which replaced the Sorcerer in 1983. One of the largest groups in The Netherlands was the ESGG (Exidy Sorcerer Gebruikers Groep) which published a monthly newsletter in two editions, Dutch and English. They were the largest group for a while in the HCC (Hobby Computer Club) federation. The Dutch company De Broeders Montfort was a major firmware manufacturerer.
The Sorcerer also had a strong following in Australia. This is most likely due to Dick Smith Electronics
Dick Smith Electronics
Dick Smith is an international electronics retailer, founded in 1968 by Richard "Dick" Smith. Today, it is a subsidiary of Woolworths Limited, incorporating Tandy, and the remaining Dick Smith Powerhouse Stores...
, being a leading electronics and hobbyist retailer at the time, pushing the Sorcerer quite heavily. The Sorcerer Computer Users group of Australia (or SCUA) actively supported the Sorcerer long after Exidy discontinued it, with RAM upgrades, speed boosts, the "80 column card", and even a replacement monitor program, SCUAMON.
The history of the Sorcerer has some parallels with Exidy's competitor Bally's attempts to build a home computer based on the Astrocade. While the Astrocade (and Datamax UV-1
Datamax UV-1
The Datamax UV-1 was a pioneering computer designed by a group of computer graphics artists working at the University of Illinois at Chicago, known as the Circle Graphics Habitat...
) had limited text capabilities but excellent graphics, the Sorcerer instead had excellent text and only limited graphical capability.
Description
The Sorcerer was a combination of parts from a standard S-100 busS-100 bus
The S-100 bus or Altair bus, IEEE696-1983 , was an early computer bus designed in 1974 as a part of the Altair 8800, generally considered today to be the first personal computer...
machine, combined with their custom display circuitry. The machine included the Zilog Z80
Zilog Z80
The Zilog Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor designed by Zilog and sold from July 1976 onwards. It was widely used both in desktop and embedded computer designs as well as for military purposes...
and various bus features needed to run the CP/M
CP/M
CP/M was a mass-market operating system created for Intel 8080/85 based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc...
operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
, but placed them inside a "closed" box with a built-in keyboard similar to machines like the Commodore PET
Commodore PET
The Commodore PET was a home/personal computer produced from 1977 by Commodore International...
, the Commodore 64
Commodore 64
The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer introduced by Commodore International in January 1982.Volume production started in the spring of 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of US$595...
, and the Atari 8-bit family
Atari 8-bit family
The Atari 8-bit family is a series of 8-bit home computers manufactured from 1979 to 1992. All are based on the MOS Technology 6502 CPU and were the first home computers designed with custom coprocessor chips...
. Unlike those machines, the Sorcerer's keyboard was a high quality unit with full "throw". The keyboard included a custom "Graphics" key, which allowed easy entry of the extended character set, without having to overload the Control key, the more common solution on other machines. Somewhat ahead of its peers, the Sorcerer included lower case characters as a standard feature.
Unlike most S-100 CP/M machines of its era, the Sorcerer did not have any internal expansion slots, and everything that was needed for basic computing was built-in. A standard video monitor was required for display, and optionally a standard audio cassette deck was needed for data storage. The Sorcerer included a small ROM
Read-only memory
Read-only memory is a class of storage medium used in computers and other electronic devices. Data stored in ROM cannot be modified, or can be modified only slowly or with difficulty, so it is mainly used to distribute firmware .In its strictest sense, ROM refers only...
containing a simple monitor program which allowed the machine to be controlled at the machine language level, as well as load programs from cassette tape or cartridges. The cartridges, known as "ROM PAC"s in Exidy-speak, were built by replacing the internal tape in an eight-track tape case with a circuit board and edge connector
Edge connector
An edge connector is the portion of a printed circuit board consisting of traces leading to the edge of the board that are intended to plug into a matching socket. The edge connector is a money-saving device because it only requires a single discrete female connector , and they also tend to be...
to interface with the Sorcerer.
The machine was usable without any expansion, but if the user wished to use S-100 cards they could do so with an external expansion chassis. This was connected to the back of the machine through a 50-pin connector. Using the expansion chassis the user could directly support floppy disk
Floppy disk
A floppy disk is a disk storage medium composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic carrier lined with fabric that removes dust particles...
s, and boot from them into CP/M (without which the disks were not operable). Another expansion option was a large external cage which included a full set of S-100 slots, allowing the Sorcerer to be used like a "full" S-100 machine. Still another option combined the floppies, expansion chassis and a small monitor into a single large-ish box.
Graphics on the Sorcerer sound impressive, with a resolution of 512×240, when most machines of the era supported a maximum of 320×200. These lower resolutions were a side effect of the inability of the video hardware to read the screen data from RAM fast enough; given the slow speed of the machines they would end up spending all of their time driving the display. The key to building a usable system was to reduce the total amount of data, either by reducing the resolution, or by reducing the number of colors.
The Sorcerer instead chose another method entirely, which was to use definable character graphics. There were 256 characters possible for each screen location. The lower half was fixed in ROM, and contained the usual ASCII character set. The upper half was defined in RAM. This area would be loaded with a default set of graphics at reset, but could be re-defined and used in lieu of pixel
Pixel
In digital imaging, a pixel, or pel, is a single point in a raster image, or the smallest addressable screen element in a display device; it is the smallest unit of picture that can be represented or controlled....
-addressable graphics. In fact the machine was actually drawing a 64×30 display (8×8 characters) which was well within the capabilities of the hardware. However this meant that all graphics had to lie within a checkerboard pattern on the screen, and the system was generally less flexible than machines with "real" graphics. In addition, the high resolution was well beyond the capability of the average color TV, a problem they solved by not supporting color. In this respect the Sorcerer was similar to the PET and TRS-80
TRS-80
TRS-80 was Tandy Corporation's desktop microcomputer model line, sold through Tandy's Radio Shack stores in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first units, ordered unseen, were delivered in November 1977, and rolled out to the stores the third week of December. The line won popularity with...
in that it had only "graphics characters" to draw with, but at least on the Sorcerer one could define a custom set. It was also possible to provide animation by character replacement or by redefining the character bitmap.
Given these limitations, the quality of the graphics on the Sorcerer was otherwise excellent. Clever use of several characters for each graphic allowed programmers to create smooth motion on the screen, regardless of the character-cell boundaries. A more surprising limitation, given the machine's genesis, is the lack of sound output. Enterprising developers then standardized on attaching a speaker to two pins of the parallel port
Parallel port
A parallel port is a type of interface found on computers for connecting various peripherals. In computing, a parallel port is a parallel communication physical interface. It is also known as a printer port or Centronics port...
, which users were expected to supply.
A Standard BASIC cartridge was included with the machine. This cartridge was essentially the common Microsoft BASIC
Microsoft BASIC
Microsoft BASIC was the foundation product of the Microsoft company. It first appeared in 1975 as Altair BASIC, which was the first BASIC, and the first high level programming language available for the MITS Altair 8800 hobbyist microcomputer....
already widely used in the CP/M world. One modification was the addition of single-stroke replacements for common BASIC commands, pressing GRAPHICS-P would insert the word
PRINT for instance, allowing for higher-speed entry. The machine included sound in/out ports on the back that could be attached to a cassette tape recorder, so BASIC could load and save programs to tape without needing a disk drive. An Extended BASIC cartridge requiring 16 KB was also advertised, but it is unclear if this was actually available; Extended BASIC from Microsoft was available on cassette. Another popular cartridge was the Word Processor PAC which contained a version of the early word processor program Spellbinder. A constant ROM fault in the wordprocessor PAC was a printer status switch setting for the printer, but most people learned about it and turned it off early in their power-on.The Montfort Brothers made an EPROM
EPROM
An EPROM , or erasable programmable read only memory, is a type of memory chip that retains its data when its power supply is switched off. In other words, it is non-volatile. It is an array of floating-gate transistors individually programmed by an electronic device that supplies higher voltages...
PAC with a rechargeable battery inside and 16 kB RAM with an external write-protect switch. Thus bootable software could be uploaded to the pack and kept for a longer period.
Many CP/M machines were designed to allow the full 16-bit address space of 64 kB to be populated by memory. This was problematic on the Exidy Sorcerer. 32 kB could easily be populated. Another 16 kB was the ROM cartridge address space. This could be populated, but required disabling the ROM cartridge capability. The last 16 kB was required by the system for I/O, particularly for the video, and would have required extensive system modification.
Specifications
- CPU: Zilog Z80, 2.106 MHz (later 4 MHz)
- RAM: 4 kB, expandable to 48 kB. larger sizes came standard in later runs
- ROM: 4 kB, cartridges could include 4 to 16 kB
- Video: 64×30 character display, monochrome
- Sound: none (external additions possible)
- Ports: composite videoComposite videoComposite video is the format of an analog television signal before it is combined with a sound signal and modulated onto an RF carrier. In contrast to component video it contains all required video information, including colors in a single line-level signal...
, Centronics parallelIEEE 1284IEEE 1284 is a standard that defines bi-directional parallel communications between computers and other devices.-History:In the 1970s, Centronics developed the now-familiar printer parallel port that soon became a de facto standard...
, RS-232RS-232In telecommunications, RS-232 is the traditional name for a series of standards for serial binary single-ended data and control signals connecting between a DTE and a DCE . It is commonly used in computer serial ports...
, sound in/out for cassette use, 50 pin ribbon connector including the S-100 bus.