Matra Alice

The Matra & Hachette Ordinateur Alice is a home computer sold in France beginning in 1983. It was a clone of the TRS-80 MC-10, produced through a collaboration between Matra and Hachette in France and Tandy Corporation in the United States.

Alice 32 and cassette deck
The Matra Alice

The Alice is distinguished by its bright red casing. Functionally, it is equivalent to the MC-10, with a Péritel (SCART) connector replacing the RF modulator for video output.

Unlike its progenitor, the Alice became a popular computer in its home country, aided by its presence in schools as part of the country's Informatique pour tous ("Information technology for everyone") programme.

The original model had 4 kB of RAM and used a Motorola 6847 video display generator chip, as used in the Dragon 32 and Acorn Atom among others.

The colour-coordinated data recorder for the Alice

Matra later released two successor models:

  • The Matra Alice 32 released in 1984 shared the case style of the original, but was a different computer inside, due to using the EF9345 video chip. The Alice 32 had 8 kilobytes of main RAM, 8 kilobytes of dedicated video RAM, and 16 kilobytes ROM (the ROM incorporated an assembler).
  • The Matra Alice 90 released in 1985 was an upgrade to the Alice 32, which featured 32 kilobytes of RAM and a full-size case and keyboard. Its video cable included video-in, so EF9345 graphics could be overlaid onto the input video.

The EF9345 video chip in the Matra Alice 32/90 was backwards-compatible with the old model's MC6847 and is capable of displaying 8 colors, 128 alphanumeric characters and 128 semi-graphic characters, with a semigraphic mode, two text modes and eight graphic modes. It was still able to access 16 KiB of VRAM, although the hardware design of the Matra Alice 32 and 90 made use of only 8 KiB.[1]

Specifications

All other specifications should be comparable to those of the TRS-80 MC-10, but have not been confirmed.

References
  1. pt:EF9345
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