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>>> VZ 300 <<<
Yes, this was the ultimate VZ 200 upgrade. IMHO (and possibly many other's too), not a totally new VZ color computer but one that addressed a few of the shortcomings of its predessor. Gone was the rubber keyboard but replaced with a proper typewriter style QWERTY keyboard with an actual full space bar and two shift keys !
It came standard with 16K of RAM ... wow !
It also included a small switch underneath the unit to disable the color part of the video signal (is that a feature ?). I would rather that they improved the graphics department because some of the arcade games caused an annoying flicker on my tv. I was told that the computer was not capable of handling really fast moving objects on the screen.
New memory cartridge
The original 16K cartridge only gives 6K when plugged into a VZ 300. The new 64K cartridge provides the VZ 200 an additional 28K over the basic machine whereas the VZ 300 gets another 18K more. Because of the way the VZ 200/300 memory space is allocated, with user RAM starting at 7800H, both models can only a total of 34K of RAM at any instant. Only machine language programs can take advantage of the extra 32K of RAM available in the 64K cartridge. The 64K was divided into four 16K chunks and employed the technique of bank switching. Ask Guy Thomason for more information.
New cassette recorder
The introduction of the VZ 300 also brought in a replacement to the Laser DR10 cassette recorder. In its place, came the Laser DR30 which probably borrowed its design from the datasette that was part of the Commodore 64 range of add-ons.
New disk drive
Finally, VZ users were out of the stone age. Apart from the VZ 300, this was my next most wanted VZ toy. To be frank, when I heard the disk drive motor going 'crank crank crank', I was not too thrilled about it. It reminded me so much of those Apple II disk drives and I was not crazy aout htose either.
The basic system consists of three items of hardware: the controller cartridge, the disk drive and the power supply. The controller cartridge plugs into the 'Memory expansion' but at the same time, provides another connector for you to slot in the memory cartridge. A further two connectors on the drive controller meant that it was capable of supporting two disk drives.
The disk drives uses a standard single density storage format with 40 tracks each of 16, 128 bytes sectors. This gives 624 sectors which equals to 78K of formatted storage per disk. Dick Smith Electronics later sold games compilation on floppy disks (Cat. no. X-7400 up to X-7403) for $AUS 39.95.
