Demomaker's guide to Thomson computers

What is this all about anyway?

Thomson was a French company, with activities in various sectors. In particular, they designed, manufactured and sold some 8-bit computers from 1982 to 1987. These have an (unjustified) reputation of being badly designed machines with low capacities.

The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer. The main goal of a demo is to show off programming, artistic, and musical skills.

The overall low quality of software released for Thomson machines, combined with the very low diffusion out of France, make it a very unexpected platform choice for demoscene activities. Yet, it happened.

Ok, and then, what?

This website is an attempt to make documentation on these machines available to people who can't read French, in the hope that some of them will have a try at coding on Thomson and finally showing the real capabilities of the machine.

The existing documentation is not always accurate, some details are lost, some machines almost completely forgotten. Some of the hardware capacities have never been explored. It is probably an endless job to make this website complete.

If you want to contact me:

  • Shinra (the only demogroup on Thomson MO machines!)
  • pulkomandy at cpcscene dot com
  • The #cpc channel at freenode, or #z80 at ircnet (beware: these channels are not Thomson-related)

Disclaimer

While every reasonable step is taken to ensure that all information displayed on this website is accurate, I give no guarantee as to its accuracy or completeness, and accept no liability for any losses arising, however caused or alleged to have been caused.

Credits

  • The PULS demogroup, Daniel Coulom, Serveur 87 and LogicielsMOTO have made a great job of gathering existing documentations, and sometimes writing more.
  • Grimware, a similar site for Amstrad CPC machines, was a great source of inspiration. Also, Grim challenged me into doing this plasma on MO5.
  • Sylvestre provided some interesting discussions, and a cup of tea.
start.txt ยท Last modified: 2018/11/19 14:38 by pulkomandy
CC0 1.0 Universal
Driven by DokuWiki Recent changes RSS feed Valid CSS Valid XHTML 1.0