Should you travel around Europe, you may notice that things in France are ever so slightly different. Not necessarily better or worse, simply that the French prefer to plough their own furrow rather than importing cultural tends from their neighbors.
In the 1980s this was evident in their home computers, because as well as a Minitel terminal in your house, you could have an all-French machine plugged into your TV. [Retro Krazy] has just such a machine — it’s a Matra Hachette Alice 32, and its red plastic case hides hardware any of us would have been proud to own back in the day.
At first sight it appears superficially similar to a Sinclair Spectrum, with its BASIC keywords next to the keys. But under that slightly calculator style AZERTY keyboard is an entirely different architecture, a Motorola 6803. The first Alice computer was a clone of a Radio Shack model, and while this one has no compatibility with its predecessor it retains some silicon choices. On the back are a series of DIN sockets, one for a SCART adapter, and more for serial connectivity and a cassette deck. The overall impression is of a well-engineered machine, even if that red color is a little garish.
The Alice hasn’t appeared here on its own before, but we have taken a look at French retrocomputers here in the past.
The main information is missing in this video: What type is the microprocessor and the other chips? What architecture has the computer?
The first computer my brother and I purchased second hand back then!
Fond memories !
The place to go is here (in french http://alice32.free.fr/)
Packaging illustration was done by Moëbius aka Jean Giraud.
“La chenille infernale” was a great snake game by the time (the best IMO)
I dream about an emulation port on linux but it will probably never happen.
Ah and it is fair to say that Alice 32 was a Tandy MC10 clone so not really a french creation unlike Thomqon TO7 or MO5
You can rely on HaD comments! As soon as I saw the title pic, I thought the layout (but not colour) looked familiar, but couldn’t place it.
What a shame the author of that emulator doesn’t seem to have open sourced it.
Though it’s from 2011, maybe they’d consider releasing the source if asked nicely?
Emulator from 2024 ;)
http://alice32.free.fr/emulateur/index.html
Hi, good idea! Back in the 90s, at height of shareware, public doman and freeware,
many authors were indeed willing to share their source code if being asked nicely.
Some even sold a copy of their source code, for a fair price.
It was being mentioned in the read.me files of the day, before open source had nowadays relevance. Good ol’ days.. sigh.
Since the emulator was written quite long ago,
it might be the case that the author still considers that kind of business.
That way he doesn’t need to give “his baby” out of hand,
as it it would be the case with open source.
No offense, open source is good in principle.
But to authors it’s not just all rainbows and sunshine.
Because if you make your programs open source,
you have to deal with the consequences.
Criticism, more feature requests (since the project is ongoing), legal worries, forks. Many forks.
You have to helplessly watch what others do to “your baby”.
Last but not least, you basically also loose the right to sell your program ever again, once its GPLed.
That’s bad if a major publisher sees your emulator and would be gladly paying for a license to use it.
That ruins your once-in-a-life chance.
not a port, but that one on the site you mentioned works ok under WINE , just ‘cat’ both binaries into one .exe – like on the install.bat
There is a Javascript emulation of the MC10. The two computers are very closely related.
https://github.com/mtinnes/mc-10/tree/master
The MC10 was a cool little box, nice and compact but much more usable than the Sinclair ZX80 and clones. Unfortunately it never got a critical mass userbase in the US to justify new software development for it, so it kind of died on the vine, a bit too expensive to be a throwaway but not useful for much except teaching yourself BASIC.