The Panasonic

Panasonic

Panasonic is an international brand name for Japanese electric products manufacturer Panasonic Corporation, which was formerly known as Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd...

 FS-A1WSX was the last MSX 2+ made by Panasonic. It was the successor of FS-A1WX and incorporated few changes like S-Video output, no tape support, color printer support and a improved A1 Internal Cockpit software with a Kanji color word processor.

Contrary to other MSX2+ systems the Panasonic FS-A1 used a Z-80 compatible MSX-Engine

MSX-Engine

An MSX-ENGINE chip is a specially developed integrated circuit for home computers that are built according to the MSX specifications.Generally, such a chip combines the functions of many separate, older/simpler chips into one...

 (T9769x) which could be switched via software to 6Mhz. This model supported up to 256 KB of RAM after doing a little soldering. 512 KB was also possible with a more complicated modification.

Technical specifications

Processor

• Z-80 compatible MSX-Engine (T9769x) with clock speeds of 3.58 and 5.37 Mhz

Memory

• ROM: 1552 KB
  • MSX BASIC v3.0: 80 KB
  • MSX Disk BASIC v1.0: 16 KB
  • Music BASIC (FM BIOS): 16 KB
  • JIS 1st & 2nd class Kanji Support: 256KB
  • MSX-JE: 512KB
  • MSX-JE/WP (MSX Word Processor): 656 KB
• RAM: 64 KB
• VRAM: 128 KB
• SRAM
  Static random access memory
  Static random-access memory is a type of semiconductor memory where the word static indicates that, unlike dynamic RAM , it does not need to be periodically refreshed, as SRAM uses bistable latching circuitry to store each bit...
  
  : 16 KB

Display

• VDP
  Video Display Controller
  A Video Display Controller or VDC is an integrated circuit which is the main component in a video signal generator, a device responsible for the production of a TV video signal in a computing or game system...
  
  
  • Yamaha YM9958 (embedded in MSX Engine)
  • Text: 80×24, 40×24 and 32×24 (characters per line × lines)
  • Graphical: resolution
    Display resolution
    The display resolution of a digital television or display device is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. It can be an ambiguous term especially as the displayed resolution is controlled by all different factors in cathode ray tube , flat panel or projection...
    
     max 512×212 pixels (16 colours out of 512) and 256×212 (19,268 colours)
  • Colours: 19,268 max
  • Sprites: 32 max

Sound

• PSG
  Programmable sound generator
  A Programmable Sound Generator is a sound chip that generates sound waves by synthesizing multiple basic waveforms, and often some kind of noise generator, and combining and mixing these waveforms into a complex waveform, then shaping the amplitude of the resulting waveform using...
  
  
  • Yamaha AY-3-8910 (embedded in MSX Engine)
• MSX Music
  • Yamaha OPLL YM-2413

Storage Memory

• 720 KB 3 1/2" DD/DS floppy disks

External links

• old-computers.com