The Tomy Tutor and the state of 1983 home computers

The Tomy Tutor was my first computer, in late 1983. I was seven and we got it at Federated. I've acquired several more since then, but this is the actual one I used and it still works perfectly.

Using a design modeled on the doomed Texas Instruments 99/8, one of several unreleased successors to the TI 99/4A, the Tomy Tutor and its overseas siblings, the Japanese Pyuuta (ぴゅう太) series, promised an easy kid-friendly introduction to computers with a durable case, nice graphics and sound, games on cartridge, and two, count 'em, two internal dialects of BASIC (one on early systems). It had 16K of RAM, though this was entirely tied up in the 9918A video display processor with only 256 bytes of RAM directly addressible by its 2.7MHz TMS 9995 CPU, and of Tomy's promised peripherals only game controllers and a tape deck were ever offered. Still, despite the bowdlerized operating system and bupkis contemporary expansion options, the Tutor was nevertheless one of the first true 16-bit home computers, and as part of the 1983 low-end home system cavalcade, an inexpensive choice as well.

Another thing the Tomy doesn't have much of is history: the story of its development is rather murky, and modern-day Takara Tomy all but disowns it. I don't compulsively collect for many systems, but I do for this one, because it was the first computer we actually had at home. So when a folder with handwritten Tomy marketing notes turned up on eBay, I jumped on it. It turned out to contain proposed names for what would become the Tutor, various test marketing slogans, and even an internal pitch discussing the competition, which I'll reproduce in its entirety as an interesting insider snapshot of the early 1980s U.S. home computer landscape — after we make a quick trip to that scene in its native Japan.

A few retrobits updates on Floodgap

Just a brief programming note. Before this blog there was Floodgap Retrobits, and I still maintain those pages. One of the earliest was my Tomy Tutor-specific page devoted to my very first computer which we got in 1983. Relatives of the Texas Instruments home computers and closely patterned after the unreleased TI 99/8, the history of the Japanese models is relatively well-known and there are a number of Japanese enthusiasts that specialize in the Pyuuta, the Tutor's ancestor system. On the other hand, hardly anybody knows anything about the British version. That system is the Grandstand Tutor:

The only good photographs of this machine, which may never actually have been released to the public, and the only known information on its history appear in Your Computer October 1983, at that time one of the major home computer magazines in the UK. The original form of this machine was very similar to the Pyuuta, which emphasized its TMS9918A-based built-in paint program and due to its specialization on graphics only implements a very simplified animation-oriented dialect of BASIC called GBASIC. Adam Imports rebadged many Asian and some American toys and games for the UK (and, for some period of time, New Zealand) and had a particularly close relationship with Tomy. In fact, the relationship was close enough that Adam in fact rejected this initial version as uncompetitive with other home computers and sent it back to Tomy for a more upgraded BASIC. Tomy provided this by modifying TI Extended BASIC, calling it Tomy BASIC and implementing it as a second mode accessible from the system's menu-based interface. The absence of Tomy BASIC places the earliest Grandstand Tutor prior to the American Tomy Tutor, which also has the upgraded Tomy BASIC. Tomy subsequently sold this upgrade in at least two forms as an option for the Japanese machines as well.

The interesting part is that while PAL Tutors have been documented to exist (the American Tutor is obviously NTSC), no one yet has reported finding a Grandstand. It wouldn't be hard to distinguish one — the photograph has obvious Grandstand branding on its silver badge. It's possible they were never released at all because even accounting for publishing delays, the second Grandstand would have emerged late in 1983, hitting in the wake of the video game crash and against heavier hitters like the Commodore VIC-20 and Commodore 64 as well as (in the UK) the ZX Spectrum. Adam may have simply concluded it wasn't a strong enough competitor even with the upgraded BASIC to sell.

I also finally got off my pasty white tuckus and scanned and OCRed the rest of the Tomy Tutor User Group newsletters in my possession (I also redid #2 and #9 with OCR). The TTUG is a great example, in my humble opinion, of the variety and importance of computer user groups in the early home computer years. Our family got one of these flyers as a registered user; Gene Dinovo, the president of the club, sent out over two thousand of them to everyone on Tomy's mailing list. Just like any user group would have done in those days, the newsletter collected type-in programs, news, tutorials, high score tables, and software and peripherals for sale, including original software written by the user group's own members. Especially for orphaned systems, and there were a lot back then besides the Tutor, the reassurance that "you are not alone" went a long way to helping people still make the most out of an expensive purchase that would otherwise have become a gilded doorstop.

Finally, and almost anticlimatically, I've added updates to the Solbourne Solace with various details and corrections submitted by former Solbourne engineer Dworkin Müller. Solbourne Computer was a relatively early SPARC licensee and one of Sun's most important competitors in the first few years of the 1990s, possessing an initially formidable lead in the performance sector due to their special multiprocessing sauce. OS/MP, Solbourne's bug-compatible licensed version of SunOS 4, let Solbourne buyers run their SunOS-compatible software out of the box with little or no compromises, including SunView. Later their IDT workstations, though uniprocessor, competed directly with and even could squeak by contemporary SPARCstations, at least in the beginning. Solbourne eventually ran out of money when they hit engineering limits with their own CPU and could never reclaim the throughput crown, abandoning the computer hardware market in 1994. We might be adding more remembrances as other Solbourne engineers are contacted.

You can see these updates at The Little Orphan Tomy Tutor as well as past Old VCR Tomy articles, and The Solbourne Solace as well as past Old VCR Solbourne-specific articles. Naturally, if you have anything to add, feel free to post in the comments or drop me E-mail at ckaiser at floodgap dawt com.

After 41 years, my first assembly program on my first computer, the Tomy Tutor

We got it in 1983, I think, so it only took me about 41 years to get around to it. This Tomy Tutor isn't a replacement system I secondarily acquired, nor is it a Ship of Theseus Frankenstein rebuild. This is my actual first computer, in its original case, on its original components, with the Federated Group sticker still on the original box. And it still works.

Now, why so long? Well, for one thing, it was only supposed to be a training wheels computer because a full Commodore 64 system would have cost too much, but my folks wanted to see whether we'd take to a home computer and His High Holy Munificence Fred R. Rated was blowing these babies out for a song by then. The receipt has long since disappeared, though $99 sounds about right plus maybe around $40 or so for a joystick, cassette deck and some cartridges, compared to somewhere between $200 and $300 for the recently discounted 64 — which didn't include anything else. (It tells you something about our family finances at the time when a C64 was too expensive.) I immediately started writing my own BASIC programs on it in its perverse little BASIC dialect and when my folks indeed saved up and bought us a C64 system the next year (complete with 1702 monitor and 1541 disk drive), I refused to use it. In retaliation my best interests, my parents forcibly relocated the Tomy to storage and I went on to do even bigger things on the Commodore, making it, not the Tutor, the defining computer of my childhood. That's why there's still a Commodore 128DCR on my desk.

The other reason is that there was never really a simple way to do it. Even when I found out what CPU was actually inside (incredibly a 16-bit TMS 9995, an evolved version of the TMS 9900 in the Texas Instruments 99/4 and 99/4A), there was never a Tomy assembler, and other than its small amount of scratchpad RAM (256 bytes) the entirety of the Tutor's 16K of memory is tied up in the 9918ANL VDP video chip. That sort of architecture was typical for the family, but that also means that almost everything is stored in non-executable VDP RAM, so short of burning your own cartridge EPROMs there's no way to actually create and run a machine language program on the Tutor. The first flashcart for the Tutor didn't exist until around 2016 and it was still all ROM; furthermore, while the 99/4A could have its CPU-addressable RAM expanded (as well as the 99/8, its unreleased successor to which the Tomy Tutor is closely related), there wasn't ever a Tutor RAM expansion cartridge either until very recently. But now there are multiple homebrew options even for obscure home computers like this one, and at last I've got my own assembly language program finally running on it.

And it's all done with its own, better I/O routines (if I do say my own better self) as a basis for bigger projects. But first, a little tour of the Tutor itself, and then we'll dig in.

More Tomy Tutor homebrew

Even the more obscure machines have their homebrews, and for the Tomy Tutor, I'm not just talking about third-pary tapes (though those are a thing too). In addition to 2018's Team Europe bounty (two multicarts and a reproduced "Game Adaptor" for those cartridges requiring additional addressing lines), a couple gamepads wired for the Tomy Tutor turned up on eBay. They are available in singles and doubles to replace either the Joy Stick or the Joy Controllers. Since the Tutor uses a unique pinout, these must indeed be made specifically for it; they all work fine with the Pyūta as well. (Not affiliated, just satisfied.)

64-bit build of Tutti II, the Tomy Tutor Emulator

A quick note that there is now a 64-bit macOS build of Tutti II, the best Tomy Tutor emulator other than MAME (being, near as I can tell, the only Tomy Tutor emulator other than MAME). This fixes issues with blank windows on 10.14 and runs correctly on 10.15, and damn well better run on 11.0. Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about Power Mac and 32-bit owners; you get a minor fix too with some improved timings. 32-bit Tutti II will run on any Power Mac or Intel Mac from 10.4 through 10.13; 64-bit Tutti II will run on any Intel Mac from 10.12 to 10.15.

Tutti II is open source; as of this release development has moved to Github. Although I don't offer a fully-fledged Win32 build yet, I do have work on a Windows port completed, and once I am satisfied it is of the same poor quality as the Mac versions, I will release that too. You can build it for yourself if you like if you have mxe and MinGW; I am willing to accept Visual Studio solution files if you come up with any.

TFW you find the last cartridge

I don't consider myself an obsessive collector because I'd rather use my vintage systems than simply collect for them. The majority of the systems in my back office may just be toys, but I don't collect (much) junk just for display, nor do I want to accumulate junk since I don't have much additional room to have out all the systems I'd like to and I try to regularly use them to keep them serviceable.

However, the exception to this rule is the very first home computer I ever had, the Tomy Tutor (that's my personal site dedicated to it), the toy company's one and only attempt at an American home computer system. This machine, whose closest hardware relative is actually the unreleased Texas Instruments 99/8, descends from the earlier Japanese-only Tomy Pyuuta (ぴゅう太). I still have the exact computer I used as a child before we upgraded to a Commodore 64 (that's me with it in the picture in my old apartment), and it still works. I figure if I'm going to be obsessive about one system, it should be that one, and I've now crossed the threshold where I have every single cartridge for it that Tomy ever manufactured. A few small-volume tape titles still elude me along with some third-party ones that I'll probably never find, but this particular last cartridge I've been trying to track down for a long time, and a boxed one (!) finally showed up for a not-impossible price relatively recently. COVID-19 has really upset international shipping and it took awhile to get it but it finally arrived.

The last cartridge I had yet to find was the Japanese domestic demonstration cartridge with a copyright date of 1983, intended for shops exhibiting systems for sale complete with a pretty little pink box. The great irony is that it actually doesn't work properly with the (Americanized) Tutor. I expected that it would appear wrong on-screen since the American Tomy Tutor naturally lacks katakana, but the demo cartridge additionally has its own menu — which seems to defeat the purpose of being a standalone demonstration cartridge — and it wouldn't read any of the Tutor's keys. So I dug out one of my Pyuutas and plugged it in and used it as it was intended. Let's look at some grabs.

Main title screen of the Pyuuta.

Main menu of the Pyuuta; you can read more about the system specifically, but everything is either in uppercase romaji or relatively primitive katakana glyphs, even Japanese native words. Typical of early Japanese home computers, this can sometimes makes it a little tricky to translate everything and my Japanese isn't so hot but I'll do my best. Here we're selecting the cartridge.

Pretty flowers and big sprites.

The demonstration cartridge menu's "three functions," namely, "color graphic," G-BASIC (the very limited peculiar subset of BASIC common to the Tomy computers, in this case the original Japanese keyword variant), and "cartridge game." The sprites shown are from Saurusland, which is vaguely related to the Tomy tabletop Caveman, but Saurusland isn't actually demonstrated here (read on). This is where the cartridge failed on the Tutor; it wouldn't register any of the number keys. There is a way documented on the box of going into an unattended mode with the SHIFT key but I couldn't get that to work.

The color graphic(s) demo using the classic Tomy built-in GRAPHIC paintbox. The Texas Instruments 9918A graphics are pretty well demonstrated here, along with sprite animation ("In addition, it's easy to make animation on the Pyuuta").

G-BASIC (GBASIC on the Tomy). Despite the Pyuuta and the Tutor being programmed in Japanese and English respectively, the internal representation uses the same tokens, so a tokenized program is actually mutually intelligible on both systems (once you account for differences in tape encoding). The blurb says, "Pyuuta is a personal computer. Programming is done in G-BASIC. G-BASIC is Japanese. In addition, it is easy to operate. Combining G-GBASIC with Pyuuta graphics can make beautiful original software."

The Pyuuta is advertised as having 20K of ROM, 16K of RAM and a 16-bit CPU (the Texas Instruments 9995). This is in fact incorrect; the Pyuuta has 32K of ROM. The Tomy Tutor has 48K of ROM owing to having both GBASIC and regular BASIC (descended from TI Extended BASIC) but is otherwise the same. The blurb adds, "Here a G-BASIC program is demonstrated."

G-BASIC "programming" is thus shown; you can see how simultaneously terse and inefficient this BASIC dialect is. The keyword kake is transliterated into English GBASIC as PRNT. In the monitaa (monitor) we are telling the Pyuuta jikkou (execution) to run the program.

The program is a simple math table generator.

Finally, cartridges. The blurb reads, "For Pyuuta, there are a lot of cartridges as well. Just insert a cartridge to easily enjoy a video game. Not only games but also other things such as education and home finance are planned for sale." Tomy never released these, though SKUs for them were reported in at least one Japanese marketing circular; all the Japanese domestic cartridges are games, and exactly one of the American Tutor cartridges is education-related despite similar promises here.

Despite using Saurusland sprites in the demo menu, the cartridge proceeds to show off Night Flight instead ("Here just a little of this fun cartridge game is demonstrated") which is fortunately a much better game (essentially the Tutor's answer to Qix, and subsequently ported by Colpax to MSX). This game never made it to American shores, by the way. You can't actually play it but the music and the graphics are exactly as they would appear on a real cartridge.

The Japanese demonstration cartridge was significantly rewritten for the American market, and you can see grabs of that cartridge (plus other Tomy marketing material). Not only was the language changed to English, but the cartridge menu was largely dispensed with, there were some minor changes to the sprites (a satellite instead of an astronaut), a completely new and different BASIC section replaced the G-BASIC segment with a primitive non-interactive card game, and the demo cartridge was changed to Traffic Jam (in my opinion the Tutor's best).

The most interesting difference between the Japanese and American demo cartridges, however, is the very last screen. I'll reproduce them both here.

Keep in mind that the Tutor was being sold in a rather different market somewhat later in 1983. Both systems have the TV, CPU and cartridge shown, though only the Tutor advertises the Joy Stick [sic]; the Pyuuta just has the Joy Controllers. Both systems also advertise a voice synthesizer (unreleased) and the cassette Data Recorder (released), which the Tutor calls a T. RECORDER even though it was sold as the Data Recorder here too.

The other expansion peripherals are where it gets a little different. The Pyuuta's "development schematic" has an orange box labeled mazaaboodo (motherboard), which connects to a line printer, floppy disk drive and onkyou kapara (acoustic coupler modem). In the Pyuuta manual each of these connect through a bespoke interface, such as an RS-232 serial interface for the acoustic coupler and a floppy controller board for the disk drive. Presumably this idea is what evolved into the BASIC-1 peripheral for the Pyuuta, which does indeed connect to the mainboard's expansion slot rather than through the regular cartridge port on top, but it only furnishes the printer interface (plus adding Tomy's version of TI Extended BASIC). The printer, disk drive, acoustic coupler and the other respective interfaces were never released nor to my knowledge demonstrated.

The Tutor, however, shows the printer connecting directly to the system (which is impossible, as there is no interface for it, and only homebrew ones ever existed). However, the most notable difference is the presence of the TI-ADAPTER. This is in fact nothing less than Tomy's planned rebranding of the TI Peripheral Expansion Bus cage, and there are mockup pictures of Tomy's version which provided the necessary interfaces for the disk drive and printer, but it was also never released (assuming it ever existed beyond a mockup in the first place). The PEB was even less well known in Japan, which probably explains why Tomy never bothered with that there.

It's a real feeling of accomplishment to complete this piece of my collection, even if there's still a few other items to mop up, and particularly when the last item has such interesting history behind it. I'll be updating my Tomy Tutor site with some of these grabs and some of my new tape acquisitions, but for those of you unfamiliar with this odd little computer, now you can share a little of my joy.