The Sharp MZ-800 is an 8-bit home computer which was manufactured since late 1984. It offered an 80 chars width display, high colour graphics, 3 channel sound and high extensibility.
{{:en:img_001.gif |MZ-811}}
There was a "naked" version named MZ-811, which came without any storage device. But in Europe, the MZ-800 was sold as an MZ-821 with an inbuilt cassette recorder MZ-1T04, mostly.
There were also versions, which were sold with a quickdisk drive MZ-1F11 instead of the cassette recorder, although these were quite rare and more was sold exclusive on Japan market with MZ-1500 model. {{ :en:img_002.gif |MZ-831}} The machine was powered by a Zilog Z80 processor and owned 64KB RAM and 16KB VRAM, which both could be enhanced. The MZ-800 could be extended by a large variety of peripherals, ranging from ram cards, floppy disks, printers and plotters to hardware extension boxes. The MZ-800 was also able to run CP/M: There was a special CP/M 2.2 by Sharp named P-CP/M, which offered access to an enormous amount of business software. {{:en:img_003.gif |MZ-821}} And even more software was available for the MZ-800 due to its software-compatibility with the predecessor series MZ-700 and MZ-80. Due to Sharp's concept of "clean computers", which only have a bootstrap EPROM and a machine code monitor and need to load the programming language/operating system from a mass storage device, there were lots of languages available. Some of them were: Assembler, Basic, Eumel/Elan, Forth, Fortran, Lisp, Logo, Pascal, Prolog,... |
{{ :en:mz-800.png|MZ-811}}**Data sheet**
These are the MZ-800's technical data in detail:
^ Year | 1984 |
^ CPU | Zilog Z80A at 3.5467 MHz |
^ RAM | 64KB, expandable to 128KB |
^ VRAM | 16KB, expandable to 32KB |
^ ROM | 16KB, includes machine code monitor |
^ Video modes\\ (text) | * 40x25 characters, 8/16 colours PCG 8x8 |
^ Video modes\\ (graphics) | * 320x200, 4 out of 16 colours\\ * 320x200, 16 colours (VRAM*)\\ * 640x200, 2 out of 16 colours\\ * 640x200, 4 out of 16 colours (VRAM*) |
^ Sound | Programmable sound generator SN76489AN with noise generator and three channel/six octaves FM sound. Inbuilt speaker with volume control. |
^ Keyboard | QWERTY typewriter keyboard with seperate cursor keys and function keys blocks. There are up to two additional graphics symbols assigned to each key. |
^ Interfaces | Expansion bus, printer, monitor (rgb), video, tv, cassette recorder (1200 baud), joystick (two ports, compatible to Atari), power connector for peripherals. |
^ Mass storage | * 2.8" quickdisk drive MZ-1F11\\ * 5.25" floppy drive MZ-1F02\\ * 5.25" double floppy drive MZ-1F19\\ * Cassette recorder MZ-1T04 |
^ Extensions | * 64 KB RAM disk MZ-1R18\\ * 16 KB VRAM extension MR-1R25\\ * Expansion unit MZ-1ZU06 |
^ Compatible to | MZ-700 series, MZ-80 series. |
^ Similar to | MZ-1500 (black, integrated quickdisk drive, different graphical chip) |
^ Size (w/h/d) | 440x109x305 mm |
^ Weight | 4.0 kg (MZ-811), 4.3 kg (MZ-821) |
* (VRAM*) = 32 KB VRAM required
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