Lovely video! I too have a soft spot for this machine. I was just as drooly/excited as you were about all the write-ups in Your Computer and so on... and agonised about the delays. I bought a Camputers Lynx in 1983 which I still have today. When I was at Ocean Software, I got one that Enterprise had sent to the company for development, but they weren't using (i.e. electing not to publish any games on it) I took it home and was playing around with it in the evenings just exploring the O.S. and the various features. I feel like that was around mid-1987. I eventually put it back in the box and took it back to Ocean. It sat on the top shelf in my office after that... no-one ever touched it. Had I just kept it at home a little longer I think they would have forgotten and it would have been all mine!!! 😀 I thought the O.S. and documentation was really, REALLY professionally designed and put together. Influenced by more than one larger O.S.'s like CP/M and such. Definitely designed for future expansion and a long life. Like you said, if the machine had gotten released quicker it would have been a powerful force. Loved the industrial design too. The example you received is in amazing condition, congratulations. Would love to see someone find Nick Toop and interview him about the Enterprise chipset. (Right after someone interviews Bob Yannes about the SID lol)
Thanks Martin - did you ever compose or convert any music for the Enterprise? It seems on paper that the sound chip would have been quite capable in the right hands and it would have been interesting to see how far it could have been pushed.
@@TheRetroShack I think I tried out a few sound commands in the basic. It was a little like the BBC IIRC. Assembler is required for better results and I didn't have a Z80 assembler to hand. The sound quality out of the audio output seemed a little bright & tinny... can't say I really got the lay of the land on it though, didn't get my hands dirty enough
@@MartinGalway Hi Martin, just a short note to say thankyou for, along with Rob Hubbard et al, providing the soundtrack to my childhood. Your Parallax theme is a SID masterpiece.
I bought a Lynx too - and got a £5 discount (£220) for cash. I bought mine in St. Austell, and replaced my 16K Spectrum with it. I got that earlier than any of the other lads at school as they ordered 48K ones. Had it for a week before I let on to my mates that I had it. These were brilliant times, so much going on, so many machines - but I too drooled over the Elan/Flan/Enterprise. I picked up a flier at the PCW show in London, was taken there by Microdeal as I was working on or had finished Frogger for the Mattel Aquarius. That was a total waste of time, £250 advance and that was it. Happy days though!
@@ian_b 12 year old me thought the joystick was a cool idea. Present day me looks at all the ways it will fail. I think I preferred the wonder of 12 year old me.
I was part of Realtime Games Software (Tank Duel/ Starstrike on Speccy). This machine needed a software base. We met Levy back in the day, who was famous even then for offering a £20kprize to anyone who could write a chess program capable of beating him. We did some quick and dirty conversions for other software houses for twopence halfpenny. The video was so flexible, it could be set up almost identically to the Speccy (memory mapped at the same location and interleaved the same. The only difference was the attribute map, where instead of flash )on top bit IIRC), a different set of colours was used.
A few years ago I accidentally got my hands on a Enterprise 128k system. An older gentleman had to move into a nursing home home after the death of his wife. So he had to sell nearly his whole household including his computer collection. I bought some items on that auction platform. When I arrived at his home to load my stuff we chatted a little bit and he offered me some items which got not sold in the auctions. There was that "Enterprise" system with main unit, floppy drive, colour monitor and some other stuff. Never heard of that but it looked very interesting. Some keycaps were missing and we could not test it but that was O.K. I handed it over to the colleauge from the home computer branch of our museum and said "look what I found" . He then spent a lot of time to repair the cpu, the interfaces, the floppy and at least 3d printing of the missing keycaps. While working on this he came in contact with a fan community in Budapest . One of the Enerprise CEO's was hungarian and after the business in western europe stopped he went back to Hungaria and spread the rest of the stock there. We were invited to the 40 year anniversary of Enterprise Computers in Budapest. But the the government decided to close the borders.☹️ Maybe we get another chance to celebrate but so far my personal story of Enterprise Computers.😁
@@TheRetroShack You ever find any images? I did online. You should be able to write the images, I'm assuming this reads from a cassette? It's just a matter of converting the images to cassette, possible. I'd give you the website I got it from, however, there's no way to share such information HERE. How are you contacted?
Having a joystick built into the case seems bizarre now, but for everyone who spent years up close mashing the ZX Spectrum rubber keys, it would have been very attractive.
Lots of joysticks had to be held down while you used them, they were a bad shape for it, and the ones with suckers were worse. I liked my late-model Atari joystick to a different design which was was nice to hold and worked very well when held on my knee. @@GeirEivindMork What kind of trash were you buying? XP
@@AndrasMihalyi No, but now you mention it, I can imagine the joystick-waggling! My joystick was pretty tough, but because of the way you held it, there was quite a low a limit to how much force you could apply. Aaand that makes a joystick built into the case seem _really_ stupid. I give up! 😂
@@eekee6034 The joysticks that had microswitches were quite robust. The cables broke earlier than the switches... I remember my uncle replaced the cables of my joysticks with telephone cord (coil type). They looked funny but worked 😂
As an Atari 800 owner at the time, I remember reading the Elan/Flan/Enterprise specs and thinking that, on paper at least, this was the UK machine that would finally prove superior to the 8-bit Atari. And then, after that long delay, when the computer finally arrived and I got to see it in person at my computer club (brought in by a member called Gerald who'd actually got a job with Enterprise), I was genuinely surprised at how unspectacular it was. It wasn't any kind of major leap over what had previously been available. The games (and let's face it, it's the game software that was most important to the market back then) were unremarkable and I rapidly lost interest and wandered off.
An unfortunately familiar tale it seems. People buy machines when they see the software running on it. Specs don't mean a thing if it ain't got that zing :)
@@turrican4d599 Except, it really wasn't that much better. Where the same game was available for the Atari and C64, the Atari version was always faster and smoother.
16:35 - there is "shape or guide" for the connector, there are two slides on each side and a peg/stem/blop of plastic on top that is used to prevent you sliding real cables in the wrong way. Of course, its just a bad/cheap designed cable so they did not bother using this feature.
Back in the 80's I used to love wandering into a mate's house and discovering which computer they (or more specifically their parents) had opted for. There was always something different to try or an interesting system quirk to learn. I think thats why modern me has a compulsive desire to change operating system every week - its the closest you can get in the modern age.
Same here. One mate had speccy, one had Amiga (but wouldn't let you play it, just watch him play it) and I had C64. I did lust after the Amiga versions of test drive and defender of the Crown :)
I remember seeing this on display at the PCW show at Olympia. I tried my standard test of the time, a Sieve of Eratosthenes prime finder. The problem was that it could only work with 8 byte floating point numbers in IS BASIC, which on an 8 bit machine was crazy, and the interpreter was incredibly buggy so that, for example, if you tried to request more memory than was available it wouldn’t produce a polite error message and stop, it would crash completely. My conclusion at the time was that it was rubbish.
@@juxty3102 Yep, things moved incredibly quickly back then. We went from the ZX80 with 1K of RAM to 16 bit machines with 1/2 megabyte in only 5 or 6 years, and everyone and their uncle was competing to be the next big thing.
It was in all probability a prototype or pre-production unit dragged out for the show. Besides, software on cartridge, disk or tape can be easily updated and replaced, whilst firmware was often updated by replacing internal ROMs. That was something many manufacturers were guilty of after releasing a product. There's more to a system than the BASIC cartridge.
@@another3997 even with the bugs fixed it was 8 byte floats only, no integer variables, which made the BASIC slow and inefficient. BASIC was the way that most programmers interacted with the hardware of the time (assembler wasn’t something that most understood), so short of playing games on it, the machine wasn’t competitive. The hardware specs looked good, but there is a truism in computing: people don’t buy hardware, they buy software and something to run it on. There’s also a virtuous cycle: people buy a machine for the software, which means that there’s a bigger pool of potential buyers, which means that there are more developers working on the machine, which means there is more software, which means there are more buyers. There was nothing to kickstart that cycle.
I actually owned an Enterprise 64 and an Enterprise 128. My wife worked at the Welwyn factory in Bedlington (now TT Electronics) where they manufactured these for a while. Staff were given huge discounts on them which is why I ended up with two! I also acquired copies of the Operating System documents and full circuit diagrams which were indispensible when I began programming the machine in Z80 machine code and adding joysticks, colour monitor, etc. Sad to say, I gave everything away to a friend when we moved house 19 years ago, but I'll always remember how these machines vastly improved my programming skills. Strangely enough, I programmed a complete Connect 4 game in Z80 machine code with sprites and sound using code I built after reading David Levy's 'Computer Gamasmanship' book. This taught me a lot about MiniMax theory and evaluation functions. I amazed myself by not being able to beat my own game on it's highest level!
I worked at a plastics design agency. We were presented with one of these computers as there was a request to produce some plasitc shells around some expansion PCB's and also a need for a mouse design. Computer mice were VERY new then and some were absolute position type using rotary tyre rheostats running onto a mouse ball (rubber coated large ball bearing) and the more popular ones were the light encoder ones also running onto a mouse ball. The project did not go well, I think it sort of fisseled out. I remember one guy quoting a comment in a computer magazine of the time that said (ironically) 'you might as well be writing software for the Enterprise' so I guess it was already on it's way out then.
It was finding an EP64 in a muddy field in 1998 that started me collecting. It had a yellow post-it on top saying '£3' and there was also a big muddy footprint. I realised that if I could get one of these I could get pretty much everything I'd been lusting after as a teenage reading Your Computer, Personal Computer News etc. When I came down to Cambridge for work I met up with Nick so he could look at my Acorn Atoms, as thanks I gave him that Enterprise that started me collecting, an excellent moment :) Excellent video! Cheers, Adrian @ Binary Dinosaurs.
I remember reading about the Enterprise at the time too, and the look and design of the case has always fascinated me, especially the joystick. Thanks for telling us about the history of this computer and I look forward to other installments.
A cool feature was how easy it was to write OS extensions that were automatically exposed in whatever language you were using, accessed simply by starting the command with a colon. In a few lines of assembler I wrote a little command that printed out colour-cycling text like the effect in Eugene Jarvis' Defender arcade game. I was - and still am! - a massive Jeff Minter fan so it had to be done. /edit - and, by extension, a massive Eugene Jarvis fan as well, natch!
One thing people seem to forget is that you can't just compare the Mhz of a 65xx vs. a Z80 or 68000. The Z80 and 68000's generally takes twice the cycles to access memory and will score in benchmarks only slightly better than a 6502 clocked at half their speed.
I love the aesthetics of the early UK computers, and this one is beautiful. In the US we mainly had the industrial case designs, and while they were well made, the UK designs like this have so much more style.
I'm pretty sure I saw one of these in a store back in the mid 1980s when my dad and I were shopping around for a computer. He was adamant that we buy something educational for me and not just a game console, so when he saw the joystick built right into this one he immediately said "not that one" and we moved on. It stuck in my head because since then I've only ever seen one other computer (a Spectravideo I think) that had a joystick built in.
I remember tracking this computer at the time as it was called the Elan, the Flan, the Enterprise. Months turned into years. By the end it was scarcely worth buying.
I got one if these boxed at a farm sale in the late eighties. Eventually sold it to someone from Hungry because they had one when they were a kid and apparently this is where quite a lot of them went when the company folded. Was sad to sell, but needed the dosh. Still have my trusty Memotech MTX though, (just in case someone tries to accost me at my desk).
There's a fascinating article on The Register about the history of these and what went wrong - I seem to recall that something went badly wrong with the development of the larger memory models.
I first noticed this machine in a table which appeared in Your Computer (I think) as 'Elan Enterprise' shortly prior to Christmas '85. I knew I was getting an upgrade to my computer at the time (a 16K ZX81) and my jaw dropped when I saw the specs; particularly the resolution. I was a young kid though (age 10) and was getting a new computer for Christmas; the next machine down in terms of specs at the time as far as I could see was the C64 so my parents got me one of those. I still love the Enterprise, but the C64 is what I grew up with and I gotta love that. I seem to remember going to a computer shop after it *was* released and being told that because you couldn't get more than one basic statement on a line at the same time, it was 'just like the ZX81'. Since I knew the BASIC was fully procedural and had data statements, I thought he didn't know what he was talking about. All I've found out about IS-BASIC since has only reinforced that view. I can't help but wonder how many other computer shop operators did the same; it can't have helped!
You can use a tape emulator software on Windows to load some stuff. It comes with some games ported over from the Spectrum. And I made myself some more tap files with CPC ports based on the disk versions where this worked. I also made a label for the cartridge. Let me know, if you are interested in any of these.
I am an American and had never hear of the Enterprise computer before, so I found your video very interesting and informative. I had to laugh at your video cable connector being labeled lower case "up" in a san-serif font. It could just as easily be read as "dn". I have seen boxes labeled the same way, and it cracks me up every time.
I followed the whole saga but it was pretty obvious early on that once the delays were factored in events would overtake their vision. That built in joystick didn't help either. If they could have got that Z80 running a bit quicker maybe those extra clock cycles could have been used to enhance some of those Spectrum titles and make it an attractive upgrade. As it was most of us were running ST's and Amiga's by that time and weren't looking to take a step back.
Remember seeing this at a the first computer show I went to held in the Barbican Event Centre it look amazing the brochure promised so much their stand was stacked with people trying to get a view of the machines. Unfortunately couldn’t afford and got a C64.
I remember seeing this computer in computer mags back in the 80s and my dad was very keen on getting one but bought a BBC Micro in the end. Good to see a production one.
I wonder about those proprietary "ports", given that most bought there were a lot of crossovers in peripherals market due to shared (at least) physical dimensions the price of them kept low. If you bought into the Enterprise in 83, you would be locked in to a smaller peripheral market and less ability for friends to bring their own joystick. I get that it was mostly a cost-cutting measure rather than an Apple-esque attempt at creating an exclusive market for their own peripherals. The most tantalizing part of the boxes promises is the "Networking" one, that could have been the killer feature if implemented smartly and properly utilized.
When it was announced I desperately wanted one, and remember frequenting visiting my local business computer store to see if it had become available. In the end I got an Amstrad CPC464, which had the advantage, in addition to being available, of coming with a colour monitor and built in cassette.
At the time of me being what 14?15? I wanted a home computer, I liked the look of the C16/64 and the spectrum (my mates had them), but, my Dad being my Dad said "If I get you one, you'll have what the schools have" so, had the Beeb Model B. 'Miffed mode' fully engaged... Until I started collecting the weekly magazine "Input" (collected all and got all 4 binders - yay!), and my Dad (as he was working in the PC industry, bringing home PC XT's & AT's, bought a 'Viglen PC kit' for the Beeb, he also fitted two 5 1/4 floppies, one being a 360Kb and the other a 720Kb. I also managed to get 'Software cassette ripping software' to transfer my tape games to disk (handy) which made my life easier. I also loved playing 'Elite' and even managed to get the complete cheat list to load myself up with mucho credits, top weapons and defences, bought myself some chewing gum and.. "Kicked ass" hahaha.... Ohhhh them were the days... My Dad STILL to this day has the Beeb in his loft with all the stuff for it, might dig it our at some point, and give it a try.. 🤔👍😉 😎🇬🇧
really interesting machine, I believe the scene is very much alive and well in Hungary where a lot of them ended up in schools and became popular. Looks like you could probably use an IDC card edge connector to build your own scart, I did something like that for the Atari Jaguar which also has an edge connector on the back for RGB.
The Enterprise was/is my favourite computer. My father sold them from our basement - he also sold NewBrain, Memotech, SpectraVideo, Atari ST, Bondwell and more, but the elegance of the Enterprise beat them all. The joystick works very well in the text editor, e.g., control and a flick of the joystick to go to the beginning or end of the line. You didn't show it in your video, but it supports the 672x256 graphics mode which translated into 84 columns (and 28 lines, I think). I did all my homework on the Enterprise, printing the result on my trusty Mannesmann Tally matrix printer - unless the teacher accepted the text file on Enterprise cassette tape - a few did! Later I got the EX-DOS floppy drive adapter, which used an almost MS-DOS compatible disk format. The adapter accepted any Shugart interface floppy drive, so I used the same double sided drive from Cumana (sold as an accessory for the BBC, I think) for my Enterprise and for my Atari ST (520 ST came with a single sided floppy drive - I don't think Atari sold double sided drives until much later). There aren't two tape ports though, AFAIK. If you think of the REM 1/2, it is remote control, ie. to stop/start the tape motor.
I remember doing a project involving Enterprise when I was a kid in junior school. I think we had to write to companies asking for brochures and other promotional materials and Enterprise was the company I wrote to. I don't know if it was some stealth marketing from the company or the teacher just picked out a number of companies but I remember getting some pretty nice brochures. I have pretty much no memory of seeing anything to do with Enterprise after junior school. My gran bought herself a ZX Spectrum and we followed her down that path so I think I was pretty blind to any other offering.
Very nice video, thank you. Please let me note that no, Enterprise could not just load ZX Spectrum software as it is. There was an optional ZX Spectrum emulator hardware available for the purpose. But Enterprise could work in such an attribute graphics mode what the Spectrum used, so it was not too hard to port game binaries from Spectrum to Enterprise.
Ah the memories.. I was fortunate to have both the 64 and 128 in my house as kid.. Both were given to my brother by Enterprise Computers to develop games for the system. I just loved the look of these machines, but as a 8 year old at the time I was pretty busy learning and gaming with my Dragon and Speccy.. I say mine.. again the brothers dev machines, so they did not really get a look in... . I have both of them still, along with some carts given to my Bro by the company, which I presume are really rare. great vid as always.
Remember seeing those at computer shows - think it was nicknamed "The Egg Flan" - I do remember having a play with one at one of the shows at Olympia back around 1983. Fun times.
@@TheRetroShack The Amstrad CPC didn't have a raster interrupt like the C64, or Display List Interrupt like the A800 - the multi-mode was implemented with very careful timing. Extremely clever developers.
8 bit Ataris never caught on in UK? They were popular in Europe at least. Even longer than they were in the US. The later models like the 1040 really caught on with early electronic music folks. Oh whoops that was 16 bit, forgot. I do take issue with saying 4 channels of 8 bit is better than 3 channels of 12 bit. 12 bit audio is almost indistinguishable from CD quality in a lot of cases. 8 bit sound is not! Also that is doubtless a VHF channel selector.
Ah, well the 1040 was a 16-bit machine :) The ST's were very popular in the UK - it was the earlier 8 bit machines that didn't really make a massive impact.
Atari hardware and software pricing was kept absurdly high for far far too long allowing the C64, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC become the lead formats. No turbo loaders made cassette loading a mare.. Developers wrote for the common denominatior which was the 48K machine. I had an 800XL, loved it but software was so scarce I had to move onto the C64
Graphics edit Enterprise has four hardware graphics modes: 40-column text modes, Lo-Res and Hi-Res bit mapped graphics, and attribute graphics. The OS offers 80-column text via high-resolution graphics mode. Bit mapped graphics modes allow selection between displays of 2, 4, 16 or 256 colours (from a 3-3-2 bit RGB palette), but horizontal resolution decreases as colour depth increases. Interlaced and non-interlaced modes are available. The maximum resolution is 640 × 512 pixels interlaced, or 640 × 256 pixels non-interlaced. These resolutions permit only a 2-colour display. A 256-colour display has a maximum resolution of 80 × 256. The attribute graphics mode provides a 320 × 256 pixel resolution with 16 colours, selectable from a palette of 256.
Footage of R Type at the end is from a modern conversion from Easter Egg. It was released on Amstrad in 2012 and then made it's way over to the Enterprise
It's an incredible piece of work isn't it?! I think this, along with the recent port of Sonic to the C64 are just real indicators of how much developers have learnt about these machines over the years!
@@TheRetroShack A nice improvement over the original rushed conversion. Might I suggest Pinball Dreams, Red Sunset, Sword of Ianna, Puzzle Bobble, Zelda ( yes that Zelda 🙂 ) and Alcon 2020 on Amstrad as well. Sonic on C64 looks very good. Sonic on GX4000 is in development
And I’m remembering again how exciting this time was. I devoured computer magazines constantly and was fascinated at all the new systems and personalities.
I mind seeing this in an electrical shop one time, another victim of the 80s home computer tidal wave. To many companies trying to cash in on the market but a lack of power or software was the nail in the coffin.
Thanks for this fascinating video. The account of your experiences and recollections from the 80s almost exactly mirrors my own. I was very excited by the Enterprise and read all about it in the press, yet never saw one in real life. Your video tells me various interesting things about the machine’s background that I didn’t know before (or didn’t recall, anyway!). But the one burning question that still isn’t answered, and to which I’d still like an answer, is: what really went wrong? What were the reasons for all those product-killing delays? For me, this is one of two machines that I really coveted in the 80s, and that failed when they deserved to succeed. The other one is the Memotech MTX series. It’s intriguing that both machines have some Sinclair/Acorn connections, and that the both had the ability to run Spectrum software. Seemingly the appeal of access to the Spectrum software library (which must have seemed a really important bonus to the makers) didn’t matter as much to the public as might have been expected. Recall that a similar set of circumstances applied to the SAM Coupé a little later; though that did, I think, have a little more success than the Memotech or the Enterprise (albeit not much).
Very narrowly missed out on one of this this week on ebay due to being on holiday. its a machine I always wanted but its bitter sweet knowing that Levi was at the helm.
@@TheRetroShack Unfortunately the Sixty-Four is not a Sinclair Spectrum. For those brand new keyboard membranes are available - but I don't know of any source for the Sixty-Four. And it is not that easy to make your own.
I will see if I can add some more back story. The delay was due to the company that made the chips deciding to move to another fab. They took a long time to make the parts as they were new setting up.
The specifications of this computer remind me if the Tandy Colors Computer 3, released in 1986. The Coco3 had a MMU chip and could address up to 2 mb through 8 kB page banks. Graphics résolution and colors were also comparable. 640x225 in 4 colors, 320x225 in 16 colors (from a palette of 64). Processor was a 6809 running at 1.6 MHz. It had only moderate success since it was considered undepowered when it was released.
Brilliant! Literally. The colors and video look fantastic. I don't know what a scarp cable is, but that's the ticket. Too bad it didn't come out in time to compete more fairly. All good wishes.
Owned one of these, briefly. A massively capable micro but by the time it arrived comparatively few people gave a damn about the BASIC or the raw capabilities - it was all about software on the shelf, and the Enterprise just never had that. Sold it once I got my mitts on the Amiga 1000 (which is still upstairs :) )
It didn't help that the Enterprise was meant to represent a major leap forward in 8-bit computing power, but there was no evidence of that in the available software - the graphics and sound capabilities looked and sounded barely any different to what already existed in the higher-end 8-bit machines.
The Spectrum wasn't 8 colours, it was 15. It had 8 colours, but 7 of them could be set to 'bright'. You could also set the other colour, black, to bright, but for some reason this still gave you black, not grey.
I loved the looks of this machine ever since I first saw it on the cover of a 1983 _Your Computer_ magazine. Especially liked the font on the keyboard, the ribbed joystick base and the colours. Many of these machines ended up in Hungary and apparently in Egypt, where I assume you bought it from, ammiright? Even more rare: a Spectrum emulator cartridge for this machine!
I did drool over this machine too...and the Memotech too, back in the day. Could not afford one and ended up with an Oric 1 later upgraded to Oric Atmos. Still have my Atmos in original box and receipt...
If Enterprise had managed to release it only 1 year late, bundled with the Spectrum Emulator (or at least it being a cheap "option") then this machine could have been huge. But the Atari ST kind of rocked the home computer market (the Amiga while technically superior was initially expensive until the cheaper models came out) and suddenly became the one to have. The Spectrum and C64 carried on under their own fame and momentum for a surprising number of years, but 16 bit once used was impossible to go back from!
I saw one in action at a computer fair back then. Its main feature you did not mention was the graphics ASIC chip. It functioned like an early graphics card, making it able to display 2D and 3D graphics much faster than any computer near it, except maybe the far more expensive Amiga. Due to the slow development of Intel and AMD CPU's, however, we are now in a phase were fast graphics on slow computers are the norm again! It had a few features I did not like so much - the slow and by then already outdated CPU, the rubber membrane instead of springs under the keyboard (though it was better than the mechanical keyboards back then with their extremely long travel and, in cheap computers, tendency to get stuck).
I remember when rumors about this machine started poping up - we were all SOOOOOO excited... ...and, then nothing happend??? We waited and waited, and eventually we lost interest - can't even remember that it was actually released???
wooow, lovely Enterprise 64. My dream machine... like you I had a Atari ST after my BBC. I heard that in some east europe country, some people used them a lot longer and did lots of demos
An Enterprise 64 or 128 is a dream for me. I like such strange computers. I have a Bit 90 (the 60 unfortunately not), a C65 and also a Meritum. But such an Enterprise is just beautiful. I saw it as a teenager in a home computer magazine at my brother's CPC buddy's house and immediately had that must-have feeling. The ones that were offered are just so damn expensive.
I remember this machine being on the list of options for me to buy when I looked for my first computer, but we couldn't find a dealer, so I ended with an Atari 130XE. In hindsight... I think the 6809 Dragon machine would have been the best for me.
Congratz on your wonderful find with that computer and that it seems to work good for you. I never heard / seen of this computer before. It looks great though and I would have loved to own one too. I also think if it did come out a bit earlier (a year or two) it could have changed the computer landscape back in the day. Keep up the good work with your informative and entertaining vids. Cheers!
There is an unofficial MiSTer core for the Enterprise, and an SD card image with lots of (mainly Spectrum) games that play on it. I've rather enjoyed typing in the programs from the manuals online, it was a very capable machine for its time.
The NES was only released in two US test markets for xmas 1985. It didn't get a full US and UK release until the following year--Sept 86 for the UK. So, that didn't have any impact on the Enterprise failing at launch in 85.
I've seen one in Hungary. As a C64 C owner back then, the color scheme and the built in joystick looked rather strange to me... It was in the late 80's / early 90's.
I'll be honest, I eventually gave up waiting for this computer and eventually moved on to the CPC464, then the Amiga 500. Had it come out earlier, at a reasonable price, then I would have bought one.
Very capable machine, I always wished that my MSX1 had a better graphics like this one 😥although that doesn't affect my respect to my very own lovely MSX1 Thanks for this video and I hope you can expand more about ISBasic new features and show us what on the cassette
Atari, Sinclair, Apple, Acorn as well as some Japanese computers of the era had non-Microsoft BASIC implementations. The claim that this was the first in-house BASIC doesn’t hold.
Good video. The RAM size and addressing scheme was the real problem. If the designers would have released this device with 256K of RAM(8k or 16k addressing), 512 display colors and emphasized it's built-in networking, they would have sold a fair number. Pity for the wasted effort.
When I first saw this, like yourself, I desperately wanted one... then time passed... Got a specturm 128k... more time passed and I ended up with an ST... Such a shame, it really felt like the logical successor to the spectrum
The Amstrad CPC ultimately took the place that was destined for the Enterprise. You snooze, you lose. It's a shame because it really is a good machine. I still think the CPC would have competed though as it was a complete package. It always had that going for it.
i remember this well too, from the days when it seemed every week brought a new crappy 8 bit to the shops - tatung einstein, jupiter ace, and then this thing with that ludicrous joystick. what were they thinking?
Software is not rare at all. These computers were VERY popular in Hungary and they have tons of software running on it. I had so much fun playing on it, back when I owned it. Probably a bit too late for it's time, but for me, it was heaven on earth as we didn't have NES or any other comparable computers on the market.
Not too long ago, I had the chance to buy one of these, demonstrated working, for 50€. Yeah it was just the machine that the dude was using a random multi-charger to power on and show off but... I was told it had no software so I skipped it.
Lovely video! I too have a soft spot for this machine. I was just as drooly/excited as you were about all the write-ups in Your Computer and so on... and agonised about the delays. I bought a Camputers Lynx in 1983 which I still have today. When I was at Ocean Software, I got one that Enterprise had sent to the company for development, but they weren't using (i.e. electing not to publish any games on it) I took it home and was playing around with it in the evenings just exploring the O.S. and the various features. I feel like that was around mid-1987. I eventually put it back in the box and took it back to Ocean. It sat on the top shelf in my office after that... no-one ever touched it. Had I just kept it at home a little longer I think they would have forgotten and it would have been all mine!!! 😀
I thought the O.S. and documentation was really, REALLY professionally designed and put together. Influenced by more than one larger O.S.'s like CP/M and such. Definitely designed for future expansion and a long life. Like you said, if the machine had gotten released quicker it would have been a powerful force. Loved the industrial design too. The example you received is in amazing condition, congratulations.
Would love to see someone find Nick Toop and interview him about the Enterprise chipset.
(Right after someone interviews Bob Yannes about the SID lol)
Thanks Martin - did you ever compose or convert any music for the Enterprise? It seems on paper that the sound chip would have been quite capable in the right hands and it would have been interesting to see how far it could have been pushed.
@@TheRetroShack I think I tried out a few sound commands in the basic. It was a little like the BBC IIRC. Assembler is required for better results and I didn't have a Z80 assembler to hand. The sound quality out of the audio output seemed a little bright & tinny... can't say I really got the lay of the land on it though, didn't get my hands dirty enough
@@MartinGalway Hi Martin, just a short note to say thankyou for, along with Rob Hubbard et al, providing the soundtrack to my childhood. Your Parallax theme is a SID masterpiece.
@@sheep83 👍🙏😃
I bought a Lynx too - and got a £5 discount (£220) for cash. I bought mine in St. Austell, and replaced my 16K Spectrum with it. I got that earlier than any of the other lads at school as they ordered 48K ones. Had it for a week before I let on to my mates that I had it. These were brilliant times, so much going on, so many machines - but I too drooled over the Elan/Flan/Enterprise. I picked up a flier at the PCW show in London, was taken there by Microdeal as I was working on or had finished Frogger for the Mattel Aquarius. That was a total waste of time, £250 advance and that was it. Happy days though!
I have the same nostalgic memories from seeing all the hype in computer mags, and really, really wanting one. So good to see it demonstrated!
@Gareth Fairclough 😂 You don't want to see me try to repair a computer!
the 1980's... fast fords and 8 bit computers... pure nostalgia 🙂
Big car!!!
Nice to see you....
This computer reminds me of the neogeo of the 8bit micros
Same here! The little speaker and that built in joystick are a bit lame though, looking back.
@@ian_b 12 year old me thought the joystick was a cool idea. Present day me looks at all the ways it will fail. I think I preferred the wonder of 12 year old me.
I was part of Realtime Games Software (Tank Duel/ Starstrike on Speccy). This machine needed a software base. We met Levy back in the day, who was famous even then for offering a £20kprize to anyone who could write a chess program capable of beating him. We did some quick and dirty conversions for other software houses for twopence halfpenny. The video was so flexible, it could be set up almost identically to the Speccy (memory mapped at the same location and interleaved the same. The only difference was the attribute map, where instead of flash )on top bit IIRC), a different set of colours was used.
A few years ago I accidentally got my hands on a Enterprise 128k system. An older gentleman had to move into a nursing home home after the death of his wife. So he had to sell nearly his whole household including his computer collection. I bought some items on that auction platform. When I arrived at his home to load my stuff we chatted a little bit and he offered me some items which got not sold in the auctions. There was that "Enterprise" system with main unit, floppy drive, colour monitor and some other stuff. Never heard of that but it looked very interesting. Some keycaps were missing and we could not test it but that was O.K. I handed it over to the colleauge from the home computer branch of our museum and said "look what I found" . He then spent a lot of time to repair the cpu, the interfaces, the floppy and at least 3d printing of the missing keycaps. While working on this he came in contact with a fan community in Budapest . One of the Enerprise CEO's was hungarian and after the business in western europe stopped he went back to Hungaria and spread the rest of the stock there. We were invited to the 40 year anniversary of Enterprise Computers in Budapest. But the the government decided to close the borders.☹️ Maybe we get another chance to celebrate but so far my personal story of Enterprise Computers.😁
Thanks for sharing! Let’s hope your Enterprise story has a few more chapters to go! :)
could be true I am hungarian and had enterprise 128 in my childhood
@@TheRetroShack You ever find any images? I did online. You should be able to write the images, I'm assuming this reads from a cassette? It's just a matter of converting the images to cassette, possible. I'd give you the website I got it from, however, there's no way to share such information HERE. How are you contacted?
Having a joystick built into the case seems bizarre now, but for everyone who spent years up close mashing the ZX Spectrum rubber keys, it would have been very attractive.
Anyone who had a c64 and went through a joystick a year would think it was utterly a stupid idea ;)
Lots of joysticks had to be held down while you used them, they were a bad shape for it, and the ones with suckers were worse. I liked my late-model Atari joystick to a different design which was was nice to hold and worked very well when held on my knee.
@@GeirEivindMork What kind of trash were you buying? XP
Have you tried Decatlon on the C64 ? 😀
@@AndrasMihalyi No, but now you mention it, I can imagine the joystick-waggling! My joystick was pretty tough, but because of the way you held it, there was quite a low a limit to how much force you could apply. Aaand that makes a joystick built into the case seem _really_ stupid. I give up! 😂
@@eekee6034 The joysticks that had microswitches were quite robust. The cables broke earlier than the switches... I remember my uncle replaced the cables of my joysticks with telephone cord (coil type). They looked funny but worked 😂
As an Atari 800 owner at the time, I remember reading the Elan/Flan/Enterprise specs and thinking that, on paper at least, this was the UK machine that would finally prove superior to the 8-bit Atari. And then, after that long delay, when the computer finally arrived and I got to see it in person at my computer club (brought in by a member called Gerald who'd actually got a job with Enterprise), I was genuinely surprised at how unspectacular it was. It wasn't any kind of major leap over what had previously been available. The games (and let's face it, it's the game software that was most important to the market back then) were unremarkable and I rapidly lost interest and wandered off.
An unfortunately familiar tale it seems. People buy machines when they see the software running on it. Specs don't mean a thing if it ain't got that zing :)
Hate to break it to you, but that superior machine you were after, was already there: C64
@@turrican4d599 Except, it really wasn't that much better. Where the same game was available for the Atari and C64, the Atari version was always faster and smoother.
David levy stole all of our money from the Vega+ handheld- no love for that man whatsoever, he’s a stain on the retro scene.
16:35 - there is "shape or guide" for the connector, there are two slides on each side and a peg/stem/blop of plastic on top that is used to prevent you sliding real cables in the wrong way. Of course, its just a bad/cheap designed cable so they did not bother using this feature.
Back in the 80's I used to love wandering into a mate's house and discovering which computer they (or more specifically their parents) had opted for. There was always something different to try or an interesting system quirk to learn. I think thats why modern me has a compulsive desire to change operating system every week - its the closest you can get in the modern age.
Same here. One mate had speccy, one had Amiga (but wouldn't let you play it, just watch him play it) and I had C64. I did lust after the Amiga versions of test drive and defender of the Crown :)
Yeah, Test drive was almost unplayable on the c64 with 5 fps. Defender of the crown was great though. I play it on vice even to this day 🙂
I remember seeing this on display at the PCW show at Olympia. I tried my standard test of the time, a Sieve of Eratosthenes prime finder. The problem was that it could only work with 8 byte floating point numbers in IS BASIC, which on an 8 bit machine was crazy, and the interpreter was incredibly buggy so that, for example, if you tried to request more memory than was available it wouldn’t produce a polite error message and stop, it would crash completely. My conclusion at the time was that it was rubbish.
@ Steve Todd, I also remember seeing the elan enterprise at the PCW show at Olympia. Those were the days.
@@juxty3102 Yep, things moved incredibly quickly back then. We went from the ZX80 with 1K of RAM to 16 bit machines with 1/2 megabyte in only 5 or 6 years, and everyone and their uncle was competing to be the next big thing.
It was in all probability a prototype or pre-production unit dragged out for the show. Besides, software on cartridge, disk or tape can be easily updated and replaced, whilst firmware was often updated by replacing internal ROMs. That was something many manufacturers were guilty of after releasing a product. There's more to a system than the BASIC cartridge.
@@another3997 even with the bugs fixed it was 8 byte floats only, no integer variables, which made the BASIC slow and inefficient. BASIC was the way that most programmers interacted with the hardware of the time (assembler wasn’t something that most understood), so short of playing games on it, the machine wasn’t competitive. The hardware specs looked good, but there is a truism in computing: people don’t buy hardware, they buy software and something to run it on. There’s also a virtuous cycle: people buy a machine for the software, which means that there’s a bigger pool of potential buyers, which means that there are more developers working on the machine, which means there is more software, which means there are more buyers. There was nothing to kickstart that cycle.
“and this fills me with joy”
The reflection in the screen says otherwise 😂
Great video, and a very cool machine.
I was more amazed that it actually worked! The joy was internal! :)
I actually owned an Enterprise 64 and an Enterprise 128. My wife worked at the Welwyn factory in Bedlington (now TT Electronics) where they manufactured these for a while. Staff were given huge discounts on them which is why I ended up with two! I also acquired copies of the Operating System documents and full circuit diagrams which were indispensible when I began programming the machine in Z80 machine code and adding joysticks, colour monitor, etc. Sad to say, I gave everything away to a friend when we moved house 19 years ago, but I'll always remember how these machines vastly improved my programming skills.
Strangely enough, I programmed a complete Connect 4 game in Z80 machine code with sprites and sound using code I built after reading David Levy's 'Computer Gamasmanship' book. This taught me a lot about MiniMax theory and evaluation functions. I amazed myself by not being able to beat my own game on it's highest level!
BASIC with built-in word wrap, now there's something I've never seen before. I hope there was some way to disable that.
I worked at a plastics design agency. We were presented with one of these computers as there was a request to produce some plasitc shells around some expansion PCB's and also a need for a mouse design. Computer mice were VERY new then and some were absolute position type using rotary tyre rheostats running onto a mouse ball (rubber coated large ball bearing) and the more popular ones were the light encoder ones also running onto a mouse ball. The project did not go well, I think it sort of fisseled out. I remember one guy quoting a comment in a computer magazine of the time that said (ironically) 'you might as well be writing software for the Enterprise' so I guess it was already on it's way out then.
It was finding an EP64 in a muddy field in 1998 that started me collecting. It had a yellow post-it on top saying '£3' and there was also a big muddy footprint. I realised that if I could get one of these I could get pretty much everything I'd been lusting after as a teenage reading Your Computer, Personal Computer News etc. When I came down to Cambridge for work I met up with Nick so he could look at my Acorn Atoms, as thanks I gave him that Enterprise that started me collecting, an excellent moment :) Excellent video! Cheers, Adrian @ Binary Dinosaurs.
Thanks Adrian - glad you enjoyed it!
I remember reading about the Enterprise at the time too, and the look and design of the case has always fascinated me, especially the joystick. Thanks for telling us about the history of this computer and I look forward to other installments.
A cool feature was how easy it was to write OS extensions that were automatically exposed in whatever language you were using, accessed simply by starting the command with a colon. In a few lines of assembler I wrote a little command that printed out colour-cycling text like the effect in Eugene Jarvis' Defender arcade game. I was - and still am! - a massive Jeff Minter fan so it had to be done. /edit - and, by extension, a massive Eugene Jarvis fan as well, natch!
One thing people seem to forget is that you can't just compare the Mhz of a 65xx vs. a Z80 or 68000. The Z80 and 68000's generally takes twice the cycles to access memory and will score in benchmarks only slightly better than a 6502 clocked at half their speed.
I love the aesthetics of the early UK computers, and this one is beautiful. In the US we mainly had the industrial case designs, and while they were well made, the UK designs like this have so much more style.
Might be being a bit hard on the US there :). TI/994a, CoCo, TRS-80 - there were a few beauties :). Nothing as nice as the Enterprise though ;)
The Enterprise reminds of a modern video editor keyboard with all the colorful keys. heh
Your videos are absolutely wonderful. Little love letters disguised as short form documentaries. Your passion is evident. Bravo!
Glad you like them :)
I'm pretty sure I saw one of these in a store back in the mid 1980s when my dad and I were shopping around for a computer. He was adamant that we buy something educational for me and not just a game console, so when he saw the joystick built right into this one he immediately said "not that one" and we moved on. It stuck in my head because since then I've only ever seen one other computer (a Spectravideo I think) that had a joystick built in.
I remember tracking this computer at the time as it was called the Elan, the Flan, the Enterprise. Months turned into years. By the end it was scarcely worth buying.
I got one if these boxed at a farm sale in the late eighties. Eventually sold it to someone from Hungry because they had one when they were a kid and apparently this is where quite a lot of them went when the company folded. Was sad to sell, but needed the dosh. Still have my trusty Memotech MTX though, (just in case someone tries to accost me at my desk).
I’m from Hungary. Had one as a kid. Loved it. In Hungary it had a lot of book and programs for.
There's a fascinating article on The Register about the history of these and what went wrong - I seem to recall that something went badly wrong with the development of the larger memory models.
I knew nothing of this computer.
And you're right - it is GORGEOUS.
Thank you.
☮
Glad you enjoyed it :)
I first noticed this machine in a table which appeared in Your Computer (I think) as 'Elan Enterprise' shortly prior to Christmas '85. I knew I was getting an upgrade to my computer at the time (a 16K ZX81) and my jaw dropped when I saw the specs; particularly the resolution. I was a young kid though (age 10) and was getting a new computer for Christmas; the next machine down in terms of specs at the time as far as I could see was the C64 so my parents got me one of those. I still love the Enterprise, but the C64 is what I grew up with and I gotta love that.
I seem to remember going to a computer shop after it *was* released and being told that because you couldn't get more than one basic statement on a line at the same time, it was 'just like the ZX81'. Since I knew the BASIC was fully procedural and had data statements, I thought he didn't know what he was talking about. All I've found out about IS-BASIC since has only reinforced that view. I can't help but wonder how many other computer shop operators did the same; it can't have helped!
You can use a tape emulator software on Windows to load some stuff. It comes with some games ported over from the Spectrum. And I made myself some more tap files with CPC ports based on the disk versions where this worked. I also made a label for the cartridge. Let me know, if you are interested in any of these.
Very interested :) Drop me an email :)
@@TheRetroShack Will do tomorrow...
I am an American and had never hear of the Enterprise computer before, so I found your video very interesting and informative.
I had to laugh at your video cable connector being labeled lower case "up" in a san-serif font. It could just as easily be read as "dn". I have seen boxes labeled the same way, and it cracks me up every time.
I followed the whole saga but it was pretty obvious early on that once the delays were factored in events would overtake their vision. That built in joystick didn't help either. If they could have got that Z80 running a bit quicker maybe those extra clock cycles could have been used to enhance some of those Spectrum titles and make it an attractive upgrade. As it was most of us were running ST's and Amiga's by that time and weren't looking to take a step back.
Yep - a real shame as I really, really wanted one back then!
I don't know why but whenever I look at this machine it reminds me of The Brittas Empire!
Remember seeing this at a the first computer show I went to held in the Barbican Event Centre it look amazing the brochure promised so much their stand was stacked with people trying to get a view of the machines. Unfortunately couldn’t afford and got a C64.
I remember seeing that pic of the two-tone grey version (in Your Computer I think) and thinking it looked really smart. Not so keen on bright colours!
Personally, I prefer the more business-like look too - same with the Schneider machines vs Amstrad.
I remember seeing this computer in computer mags back in the 80s and my dad was very keen on getting one but bought a BBC Micro in the end. Good to see a production one.
I wonder about those proprietary "ports", given that most bought there were a lot of crossovers in peripherals market due to shared (at least) physical dimensions the price of them kept low. If you bought into the Enterprise in 83, you would be locked in to a smaller peripheral market and less ability for friends to bring their own joystick. I get that it was mostly a cost-cutting measure rather than an Apple-esque attempt at creating an exclusive market for their own peripherals.
The most tantalizing part of the boxes promises is the "Networking" one, that could have been the killer feature if implemented smartly and properly utilized.
It was called damp proof course as you rightly say. Shortened to DPC as they were worried about the ideas and design being nicked or plagiarised
When it was announced I desperately wanted one, and remember frequenting visiting my local business computer store to see if it had become available. In the end I got an Amstrad CPC464, which had the advantage, in addition to being available, of coming with a colour monitor and built in cassette.
At the time of me being what 14?15? I wanted a home computer, I liked the look of the C16/64 and the spectrum (my mates had them), but, my Dad being my Dad said "If I get you one, you'll have what the schools have" so, had the Beeb Model B. 'Miffed mode' fully engaged... Until I started collecting the weekly magazine "Input" (collected all and got all 4 binders - yay!), and my Dad (as he was working in the PC industry, bringing home PC XT's & AT's, bought a 'Viglen PC kit' for the Beeb, he also fitted two 5 1/4 floppies, one being a 360Kb and the other a 720Kb. I also managed to get 'Software cassette ripping software' to transfer my tape games to disk (handy) which made my life easier. I also loved playing 'Elite' and even managed to get the complete cheat list to load myself up with mucho credits, top weapons and defences, bought myself some chewing gum and.. "Kicked ass" hahaha.... Ohhhh them were the days... My Dad STILL to this day has the Beeb in his loft with all the stuff for it, might dig it our at some point, and give it a try.. 🤔👍😉 😎🇬🇧
How do you resist getting that Beeb down and using it?? :) :)
@@TheRetroShack Coz it's 250 miles away from me (I'm in Grimsby, my Dad is in Southampton) lol 😋
really interesting machine, I believe the scene is very much alive and well in Hungary where a lot of them ended up in schools and became popular.
Looks like you could probably use an IDC card edge connector to build your own scart, I did something like that for the Atari Jaguar which also has an edge connector on the back for RGB.
The Enterprise was/is my favourite computer. My father sold them from our basement - he also sold NewBrain, Memotech, SpectraVideo, Atari ST, Bondwell and more, but the elegance of the Enterprise beat them all. The joystick works very well in the text editor, e.g., control and a flick of the joystick to go to the beginning or end of the line. You didn't show it in your video, but it supports the 672x256 graphics mode which translated into 84 columns (and 28 lines, I think).
I did all my homework on the Enterprise, printing the result on my trusty Mannesmann Tally matrix printer - unless the teacher accepted the text file on Enterprise cassette tape - a few did!
Later I got the EX-DOS floppy drive adapter, which used an almost MS-DOS compatible disk format. The adapter accepted any Shugart interface floppy drive, so I used the same double sided drive from Cumana (sold as an accessory for the BBC, I think) for my Enterprise and for my Atari ST (520 ST came with a single sided floppy drive - I don't think Atari sold double sided drives until much later).
There aren't two tape ports though, AFAIK. If you think of the REM 1/2, it is remote control, ie. to stop/start the tape motor.
I wouldn't have traded my c64 for that back in '84. ;) But looks like a nice computer. probably solid for serious tasks.
I remember doing a project involving Enterprise when I was a kid in junior school. I think we had to write to companies asking for brochures and other promotional materials and Enterprise was the company I wrote to. I don't know if it was some stealth marketing from the company or the teacher just picked out a number of companies but I remember getting some pretty nice brochures. I have pretty much no memory of seeing anything to do with Enterprise after junior school. My gran bought herself a ZX Spectrum and we followed her down that path so I think I was pretty blind to any other offering.
Given the number of joysticks (and keyboard membranes) I went through as a kid with a zx spectrum, I hope that joystick was easily replaceable.. =)
The joystick itself was easily losable! IIRC it was green for the 64k and grey for the 128k.
Very nice video, thank you. Please let me note that no, Enterprise could not just load ZX Spectrum software as it is. There was an optional ZX Spectrum emulator hardware available for the purpose. But Enterprise could work in such an attribute graphics mode what the Spectrum used, so it was not too hard to port game binaries from Spectrum to Enterprise.
Yep, and those Spectrum Emulator cartridges are rarer than a five legged unicorn it seems!
Ah the memories.. I was fortunate to have both the 64 and 128 in my house as kid.. Both were given to my brother by Enterprise Computers to develop games for the system. I just loved the look of these machines, but as a 8 year old at the time I was pretty busy learning and gaming with my Dragon and Speccy.. I say mine.. again the brothers dev machines, so they did not really get a look in... . I have both of them still, along with some carts given to my Bro by the company, which I presume are really rare. great vid as always.
Very nice!
I love how the spacebar is listed as a feature! Definitely a leap over a regular ol' space button.
Remember seeing those at computer shows - think it was nicknamed "The Egg Flan" - I do remember having a play with one at one of the shows at Olympia back around 1983. Fun times.
8:25 - the 8-bit Ataris were able to mix different graphics modes on a single screen way back in 1979 :)
Yep, and the Amstrad CPC could do it too :)
@@TheRetroShack The Amstrad CPC didn't have a raster interrupt like the C64, or Display List Interrupt like the A800 - the multi-mode was implemented with very careful timing. Extremely clever developers.
Had totally forgotten about this machine. So great to be reminded.
8 bit Ataris never caught on in UK?
They were popular in Europe at least. Even longer than they were in the US. The later models like the 1040 really caught on with early electronic music folks.
Oh whoops that was 16 bit, forgot.
I do take issue with saying 4 channels of 8 bit is better than 3 channels of 12 bit.
12 bit audio is almost indistinguishable from CD quality in a lot of cases.
8 bit sound is not!
Also that is doubtless a VHF channel selector.
Ah, well the 1040 was a 16-bit machine :) The ST's were very popular in the UK - it was the earlier 8 bit machines that didn't really make a massive impact.
Atari hardware and software pricing was kept absurdly high for far far too long allowing the C64, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC become the lead formats.
No turbo loaders made cassette loading a mare..
Developers wrote for the common denominatior which was the 48K machine.
I had an 800XL, loved it but software was so scarce I had to move onto the C64
Graphics
edit
Enterprise has four hardware graphics modes: 40-column text modes, Lo-Res and Hi-Res bit mapped graphics, and attribute graphics. The OS offers 80-column text via high-resolution graphics mode. Bit mapped graphics modes allow selection between displays of 2, 4, 16 or 256 colours (from a 3-3-2 bit RGB palette), but horizontal resolution decreases as colour depth increases. Interlaced and non-interlaced modes are available. The maximum resolution is 640 × 512 pixels interlaced, or 640 × 256 pixels non-interlaced. These resolutions permit only a 2-colour display. A 256-colour display has a maximum resolution of 80 × 256. The attribute graphics mode provides a 320 × 256 pixel resolution with 16 colours, selectable from a palette of 256.
Footage of R Type at the end is from a modern conversion from Easter Egg. It was released on Amstrad in 2012 and then made it's way over to the Enterprise
It's an incredible piece of work isn't it?! I think this, along with the recent port of Sonic to the C64 are just real indicators of how much developers have learnt about these machines over the years!
@@TheRetroShack A nice improvement over the original rushed conversion. Might I suggest Pinball Dreams, Red Sunset, Sword of Ianna, Puzzle Bobble, Zelda ( yes that Zelda 🙂 ) and Alcon 2020 on Amstrad as well. Sonic on C64 looks very good. Sonic on GX4000 is in development
Oh wow I had forgotten about this. I remember the design really stood out and the colours and key styling and joystick. Awesome looking.
And I’m remembering again how exciting this time was. I devoured computer magazines constantly and was fascinated at all the new systems and personalities.
I mind seeing this in an electrical shop one time, another victim of the 80s home computer tidal wave. To many companies trying to cash in on the market but a lack of power or software was the nail in the coffin.
Interesting, I actually have an Enterprise 128 in the attic. I didnt realise there was a 64 version. The things we learn...
Thanks for this fascinating video. The account of your experiences and recollections from the 80s almost exactly mirrors my own. I was very excited by the Enterprise and read all about it in the press, yet never saw one in real life. Your video tells me various interesting things about the machine’s background that I didn’t know before (or didn’t recall, anyway!). But the one burning question that still isn’t answered, and to which I’d still like an answer, is: what really went wrong? What were the reasons for all those product-killing delays?
For me, this is one of two machines that I really coveted in the 80s, and that failed when they deserved to succeed. The other one is the Memotech MTX series. It’s intriguing that both machines have some Sinclair/Acorn connections, and that the both had the ability to run Spectrum software. Seemingly the appeal of access to the Spectrum software library (which must have seemed a really important bonus to the makers) didn’t matter as much to the public as might have been expected. Recall that a similar set of circumstances applied to the SAM Coupé a little later; though that did, I think, have a little more success than the Memotech or the Enterprise (albeit not much).
Very narrowly missed out on one of this this week on ebay due to being on holiday. its a machine I always wanted but its bitter sweet knowing that Levi was at the helm.
I have a Sixty-Four in stock ... with a totally destroyed keyboard layer. Thanks for sharing !
Oh no! I hope you get it fixed! Thanks for watching :)
@@TheRetroShack Unfortunately the Sixty-Four is not a Sinclair Spectrum. For those brand new keyboard membranes are available - but I don't know of any source for the Sixty-Four. And it is not that easy to make your own.
@@wacholder5690 You might want to look up the mechboard64 - might be just what you need :)
Ah, the elusive Enterprise. With the all this ELAN, FLAN crazy stuff. I remember vividly reading about it but never seen it in person.
I remember the ads for it. I drooled over them. It was so incredibly cool (and beautiful).
Thanks for the history lesson. I’m interested to see what you do with this in future episodes.
I love the way that marketing materials for machines of the era often mentioned having a space bar as a feature!
It's even more perplexing that some computers came without one.
I will see if I can add some more back story. The delay was due to the company that made the chips deciding to move to another fab. They took a long time to make the parts as they were new setting up.
The specifications of this computer remind me if the Tandy Colors Computer 3, released in 1986. The Coco3 had a MMU chip and could address up to 2 mb through 8 kB page banks. Graphics résolution and colors were also comparable. 640x225 in 4 colors, 320x225 in 16 colors (from a palette of 64). Processor was a 6809 running at 1.6 MHz. It had only moderate success since it was considered undepowered when it was released.
I remember seeing the machine once in a computer shop, but it's something I don't know much about. Intrigued by its sound capabilities.
Brilliant! Literally. The colors and video look fantastic. I don't know what a scarp cable is, but that's the ticket. Too bad it didn't come out in time to compete more fairly. All good wishes.
SCART cable.
Owned one of these, briefly. A massively capable micro but by the time it arrived comparatively few people gave a damn about the BASIC or the raw capabilities - it was all about software on the shelf, and the Enterprise just never had that. Sold it once I got my mitts on the Amiga 1000 (which is still upstairs :) )
It didn't help that the Enterprise was meant to represent a major leap forward in 8-bit computing power, but there was no evidence of that in the available software - the graphics and sound capabilities looked and sounded barely any different to what already existed in the higher-end 8-bit machines.
The Spectrum wasn't 8 colours, it was 15. It had 8 colours, but 7 of them could be set to 'bright'. You could also set the other colour, black, to bright, but for some reason this still gave you black, not grey.
And you have not idea how long I beater with myself over putting 8 or 15 colours on that slide :)
I loved the looks of this machine ever since I first saw it on the cover of a 1983 _Your Computer_ magazine. Especially liked the font on the keyboard, the ribbed joystick base and the colours.
Many of these machines ended up in Hungary and apparently in Egypt, where I assume you bought it from, ammiright?
Even more rare: a Spectrum emulator cartridge for this machine!
I did drool over this machine too...and the Memotech too, back in the day. Could not afford one and ended up with an Oric 1 later upgraded to Oric Atmos. Still have my Atmos in original box and receipt...
In my opinion, the Oric Atmos is one of the single most beautiful micros ever made!
If Enterprise had managed to release it only 1 year late, bundled with the Spectrum Emulator (or at least it being a cheap "option") then this machine could have been huge. But the Atari ST kind of rocked the home computer market (the Amiga while technically superior was initially expensive until the cheaper models came out) and suddenly became the one to have. The Spectrum and C64 carried on under their own fame and momentum for a surprising number of years, but 16 bit once used was impossible to go back from!
I saw one in action at a computer fair back then. Its main feature you did not mention was the graphics ASIC chip. It functioned like an early graphics card, making it able to display 2D and 3D graphics much faster than any computer near it, except maybe the far more expensive Amiga. Due to the slow development of Intel and AMD CPU's, however, we are now in a phase were fast graphics on slow computers are the norm again! It had a few features I did not like so much - the slow and by then already outdated CPU, the rubber membrane instead of springs under the keyboard (though it was better than the mechanical keyboards back then with their extremely long travel and, in cheap computers, tendency to get stuck).
Great Video, thanks so much.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Never heard about that one! Thanks for the interesting heads up!
Glad you found it interesting :)
Nice video! One thing though, the STs sound chip doesn't have any filters or ring modulation. It has to be done using software tricks.
I remember when rumors about this machine started poping up - we were all SOOOOOO excited...
...and, then nothing happend???
We waited and waited, and eventually we lost interest - can't even remember that it was actually released???
wooow, lovely Enterprise 64. My dream machine... like you I had a Atari ST after my BBC. I heard that in some east europe country, some people used them a lot longer and did lots of demos
An Enterprise 64 or 128 is a dream for me. I like such strange computers. I have a Bit 90 (the 60 unfortunately not), a C65 and also a Meritum. But such an Enterprise is just beautiful. I saw it as a teenager in a home computer magazine at my brother's CPC buddy's house and immediately had that must-have feeling. The ones that were offered are just so damn expensive.
I remember this machine being on the list of options for me to buy when I looked for my first computer, but we couldn't find a dealer, so I ended with an Atari 130XE.
In hindsight... I think the 6809 Dragon machine would have been the best for me.
Congratz on your wonderful find with that computer and that it seems to work good for you.
I never heard / seen of this computer before. It looks great though and I would have loved to own one too. I also think if it did come out a bit earlier (a year or two) it could have changed the computer landscape back in the day. Keep up the good work with your informative and entertaining vids. Cheers!
Thanks very much!
There is an unofficial MiSTer core for the Enterprise, and an SD card image with lots of (mainly Spectrum) games that play on it. I've rather enjoyed typing in the programs from the manuals online, it was a very capable machine for its time.
I can't help but think the internal joystick would've led to disaster if you gave that to a kid.
It would break in literally seconds...
The NES was only released in two US test markets for xmas 1985. It didn't get a full US and UK release until the following year--Sept 86 for the UK. So, that didn't have any impact on the Enterprise failing at launch in 85.
I've seen one in Hungary. As a C64 C owner back then, the color scheme and the built in joystick looked rather strange to me... It was in the late 80's / early 90's.
Had one back in the day, can't remember what happened to it. I think my parent's "disposed of it" when I left home!
Rudyard Kipling claimed that the saddest words, in the English language, is the phrase, "What might have been.....".
This is a good example.
I'll be honest, I eventually gave up waiting for this computer and eventually moved on to the CPC464, then the Amiga 500. Had it come out earlier, at a reasonable price, then I would have bought one.
Hello, quick question, from that monitor port, it output composite, svideo or RGB? Maybe i mised this information.
I remember seeing them displaying pre-production units at a computer show ( pcw show I believe ), wanted one too
Very capable machine,
I always wished that my MSX1 had a better graphics like this one 😥although that doesn't affect my respect to my very own lovely MSX1
Thanks for this video and I hope you can expand more about ISBasic new features and show us what on the cassette
Atari, Sinclair, Apple, Acorn as well as some Japanese computers of the era had non-Microsoft BASIC implementations. The claim that this was the first in-house BASIC doesn’t hold.
It appears the claim is based on being the first independent home computer basic that aligned to the ANSI standard.
Good video. The RAM size and addressing scheme was the real problem. If the designers would have released this device with 256K of RAM(8k or 16k addressing), 512 display colors and emphasized it's built-in networking, they would have sold a fair number. Pity for the wasted effort.
Enjoyed the vid - you should also compare things like hardware sprites and hardware scrolling when comparing specs
When I first saw this, like yourself, I desperately wanted one... then time passed... Got a specturm 128k... more time passed and I ended up with an ST... Such a shame, it really felt like the logical successor to the spectrum
The Amstrad CPC ultimately took the place that was destined for the Enterprise. You snooze, you lose. It's a shame because it really is a good machine. I still think the CPC would have competed though as it was a complete package. It always had that going for it.
That thing is like today's coloured terminal setups like oh-my-zsh and syntax highlighting. That thing is why that looks like it does
i remember this well too, from the days when it seemed every week brought a new crappy 8 bit to the shops - tatung einstein, jupiter ace, and then this thing with that ludicrous joystick. what were they thinking?
Any chance of a follow-up video where you put BASIC through its paces? Also, I'd like to see more of the software library for this machine. Thanks!
That's the plan :)
Software is not rare at all. These computers were VERY popular in Hungary and they have tons of software running on it. I had so much fun playing on it, back when I owned it. Probably a bit too late for it's time, but for me, it was heaven on earth as we didn't have NES or any other comparable computers on the market.
Its one of the few machines I have never seen in person or even messed with at all
Not too long ago, I had the chance to buy one of these, demonstrated working, for 50€. Yeah it was just the machine that the dude was using a random multi-charger to power on and show off but... I was told it had no software so I skipped it.
Oops! I'm finding there's a load of stuff out there although it's of very mixed quality.