Sorcerer
The Sorcerer is an 8-bit home computer designed and sold by arcade video game manufacturer Exidy. It was first demonstrated on 1978-04-28, and pre-orders were taken, though it didn't ship until that summer. The computer was designed by Paul Terrell with additions by Howell Ivy. It featured hardware superior to its competitors in the same price range, and eventually sold around 20,000 units, but that didn't meet the expectations of Exidy, so they sold their computer division and it eventually landed with Dynasty Computer in February, 1982. Dynasty made minor updates and re-branded it as the "Dynasty smart-ALEC" which they tried selling door-to-door, but were not successful.
The CPU is a Zilog Z80 and it shipped with 32 or 48 KB of RAM. The custom black and white graphics chip is black and white and text-only. At 64 × 30 characters and 8 × 8 pixels per character, the total screen has a resolution of 512 × 240 which was high for the time. The character set is 256 characters with the first 128 mapping to ASCII and stored in ROM. The additional 128 characters are stored in RAM and initially loaded with various block bitmaps and characters, but they are fully programmable to any bitmap the user wants. The computer had a built-in ROM cartridge port, and had peripherals for cassette and diskette storage. The Sorcerer doesn't have any built-in audio capabilities. The computer was designed to run CP/M and shipped with a BASIC cartridge.
Contents
Personal
I've never used or even seen a Sorcerer in real life. I don't think I've ever even emulated one. I learned about the Sorcerer when I was around 40-years-old while reading about the history of The Wizard's Castle, the most popular game made for the platform.
Games
- See all Sorcerer Games.
Media
Pictures
The computer keyboard unit.
Documents
Manual - Technical Manual.
Manual - Software Manual.
Advertisement - Datasheet.
Advertisement - Assorted Ads.
Links
- liaquay.co.uk/sorcerer - Online Sorcerer emulator (requires Java).
