Mark Gets A New System (Spectravideo) – November 26th 2013 (ad-hoc style)

I got myself a new system (SV-328) in a pretty complete lot. Mind you I was pretty tired when I filmed this so bare with me. Check out what I got.

Spectravideo, or SVI, founded in 1981 as “SpectraVision” by Harry Fox was a US based firm. SVI originally made video games for the VIC-20 and Atari 2600 consoles. They also made Atari compatible joysticks and many C64s actually were completed with a set of Spectravideo joysticks. Some of the later computers were MSX-compliant and some even IBM PC compatible. SVI folded in 1988.

The SV-328 is an 8-bit home computer introduced by Spectravideo in June 1983. It was the business-targeted model, sporting a full-travel keyboard with numeric keypad. Making it look like a professional machine that could compete with the big professional systems out there. It has 80 kB RAM (64 kB available for software & 16 kB video memory). Other than the keyboard and RAM, this machine was identical to its predecessor, the SV-318.
The SV-328 is the design on which the later MSX standard was based. Spectravideo’s MSX-compliant successor to the 328, the SV-728, looks almost identical, the only immediately noticeable differences being a larger cartridge slot in the central position (to fit MSX standard cartridges), lighter shaded keyboard and the MSX lables.

This was the computer my cousin Ron owned back in the day before I got my own computer and was rocking the Odyssey2/Videopac. The setup I got today pretty much was what he had back in the day. He later moved on to an Atari ST and I continued to rock my C64. I stuck with the C64 for a long time but still have fond memories of this machine. I remember us hacking away at MSX based games (machine code) trying to get them to run by modifying them to the SV-328 hardware. A beast of a machine the in my eyes back then had limitless possibilities. Almost War-games quality this machine had because of all the tricks is was capable of.

Thanks to Tony aka ElectricAdventures for pointing this system out to me as it was local to me (at least it was in the same country 😛 )
http://www.youtube.com/user/ElectricAdventures

Some links:
http://www.samdal.com/sv328.htm
http://www.museo8bits.com/svi328.htm
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=228
http://www.network54.com/Forum/25917/

Mind you it’s a bit ad-hoc shaky cam. 😛