Released in 1982, the EACA Colour Genie became one of the first home computers to feature colour. It was quite a simple computer, and was aimed at the computer beginner in the home market, and was fairly good for simple programming and games. It had all the standard features of the day, reading programs from tapes, as well as a disk drive available for the rich. There was nothing to really make people stand up and notice the Colour Genie and so it went down the tubes fairly quickly.
I've tested the emulator out, but without knowing anything about the colour genie operating system I'm more than a little lost. The emulation seems fairly quick in comparison to other MESS drivers, but I have been unable to get anything up and loaded because I'm not sure the commands detailed in the manual are correct. If anyone can send me details of the commands to use to load a DSK image I'd be more than grateful.
Michael Koenig has told me the following:
"First of all Juergen changed the disk format from his DOS emulator to the MESS driver. It's best to take the new format disks from this page, but it's also possible to convert the old ones: At first delete the first &450 bytes of that image, and then rename the extension from "/cgd" to "/dsk". Note: It is *very important* that an disk image name ends with "/dsk", otherwise disk access will not work! Now that you have the disk images start MESS, eg. like the following: MESS cgenie games1/dsk After the few info screens a message "MEM SIZE?" should appear. Press the F9 key to reset the emulator. Now you should see the message "DISK BASIC FILES?". Press return for this one, and also for the next "MEM SIZE?". After that disk access should be possible. Fow this is done depends on what ROMs are active. If the DOS extension is active simply use DIR or NAME to list the disk catalog or start the program NAME/CMD. If it's not active use CMD"I" and CMD"S NAME/CMD" for the same tasks."
Speed Rating: StrongARM
Technical Information
CPU - Zilog Z80A running at 2.2 MHz
Display- Text mode 40x24 chars and 8 colours, Graphics mode
160x96 and 4 colours,
Sound - 3 mono channels
RAM - 16Kb, expandable to 32Kb
ROM - 16 Kb OS ROM
reference - Machine
Room, and this
site
Software:
Software
Paks 1 & 2
Game Disks
ColourGenie
resources