[Coco] First MC-10 game cart ever?

[Bill Loguidice]

It was a product that suffered from poor timing, with ultimately no place
in the market. Like several other manufacturers, It was indeed Tandy's
response to the success of the Timex Sinclair 1000. Unfortunately for Tandy
and those other manufacturers, the success of the Timex Sinclair 1000 was
short-lived. Sure, people wanted low cost computers, but not low cost
computers that were significantly compromised.

In terms of timing, by the time the MC-10 hit the market, the CoCo's price
was already within range of it, and of course Commodore was already in full
domination mode with aggressive pricing on the C-64, which pushed almost
every other low end computer straight out of the market.

Of course, all of that applies to North America. The market factors in
places like Europe, Asia, and South America were rather different, but not
different enough to allow for significant new players on the low end by
1983/84.

========================================================
Bill Loguidice, Managing Director; Armchair Arcade, Inc.
<http://www.armchairarcade.com>
========================================================
Authored Books
<http://www.amazon.com/Bill-Loguidice/e/B001U7W3YS/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_1> and
Film <http://www.armchairarcade.com/film>; About me and other ways to get
in touch <http://about.me/billloguidice>
========================================================

On Wed, Aug 10, 2016 at 12:14 PM, Francis Swygert <farna at att.net> wrote:

> Date: Tue, 9 Aug 2016 16:15:40 -0400
> From: Arthur Flexser <flexser at fiu.edu>
>
>   What did Tandy see as the MC-10's niche, if not as a game machine?  Did
> Tandy release any non-game
> cartridges for the machine?
> ===================================
> IIRC the only thing Tandy made for it was the 16K expansion. It was
> intended to be an inexpensive beginner/learning machine, in competition
> with the little Sinclair ZX-81/Timex-Sinclair 1000. The ZX-81 only had 1K
> RAM, the TS-1000 2K. The MC-10 doubled that to 4K. The problem was no
> aftermarket support. That is what made the Sinclair and Timex computers
> longer lasting. According to a Wikipedia entry on the TS-1000:
> "A shortage of the memory expansions coupled with a lack of software that
> would run within 2 KB meant that the system had little use for anything
> other than an introduction to programming. ...  Over time, the TS1000
> spawned a cottage industry of third-party add-ons designed to help remedy
> its limitations."
> Since the TS-1000 could use ZX-81 soft and hard ware directly with few (if
> any) software mods, and Europeans had less money to work with, it was more
> popular "over there". Here the CoCo2 and C64 wasn't that much more than the
> MC-10, especially after the home computer price wars started!.
>   Frank Swygert
>  Fix-It-Frank Handyman Service
>  803-604-6548
>
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