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The Tatung Einstein

Tatung Einstein TC 01

Introduction

Released in 1984, the Tatung Einstein TC-01 was designed and manufactured in the UK for the Tatung Corporation of Taiwan.

 The TC-01 was designed at Tatung's Technical Laboratory in Bradford with production done at the Tatung factory in Telford. The machine was mainly targeted at the business market with an introductory price of £499 (excluding monitor), despite its quality and professional feel, it failed to achieve significant market share and was quickly discontinued.

The TC-01 has many features in common with the Memotech MTX series, including its CPU and Video processor, as well as having a version of Tony Brewer's Speculator available.

Specifications - Tatung Einstein TC-01

Processor  Zilog Z80A
Clock Speed 4 MHz (CPU) / 10 MHZ (Video Display Processor)
2MHz I/O
ROMs 8 KBytes, with expansion to up to 32k internally
RAM - fitted 64 KBytes
RAM - maximum 64 KBytes
Video RAM 16 KBytes of dedicated VRAM
Video Processor

Texas Instruments TMS 9929A (UK/PAL) or TMS 9918 (US/NTSC) .

There is a good summary of the VDP on the Absolute Astronomy website here

There is lots of really good TMS 9918/9929 information available at spatula-city.org, including lots of information from Karl Guttag, one of the designers of the TMS 9918.

The TI VDP Programmer's Guide can be found on the Technical Library pages

Video Output YUV or RGB (internally selected)
RF Modulator Output UK UHF Channel 36
Display

256 x 192 pixel resolution

32 independently controlled user defined "sprites"

Mode 0 (Text) : 24 lines of 40 characters (6 pixels/character) of text per line

Mode 1 (Graphics 1) : 24 lines of 32 characters of text with graphics per line

Mode 2 (Graphics 2) : 24 lines of 32 characters of text with graphics per line

Colours 16
Sound

AY-3-8910 with internal speaker

I/O Capability Z80 Bus, RF Out (TV), 2 Joystick ports, Hi-Fi out, YUV or RGB Video out, Centronics Parallel Port, Z80 "Tube" Interface, 8 bit User I/O port, External Disk Drive connector, RS-232 port, Z84C30 CTC, Z84C20 PIO, Intel 8251 SIO
I/O Options 80 Column Card
ROM Expansions Up to 32k internally
RAM Expansions None
Data Storage 1 or 2 built in 3" floppy drives
3" Teac FD30A, Single sided, 40 track, 10 sectors/track, 512 bytes/sector
500k unformatted capacity (250k/side), 400k formatted (200k/side)
Double density (MFM) recording
Double sided "flip-over" cartridge
Built in languages None !
The Einstein booted to a simple machine code monitor called MOS (Machine Operating System), the operating system and all other software is loaded from disk.
Power Supply Mains powered
Construction

Full travel QWERTY keyboard with 40 alphanumeric/graphics keys, 8 function keys and 11 control keys

Dimensions: 435 x 515 x 115 mm          Weight:  kg

 

 

 

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