SVI 318

Spectravideo home computer (and my first computer!), based on the way-too-common Z80A processor.

It was closely related to and compatible with the popular SVI 328 (see that node for technical details), but it had only 32 kilobytes of main RAM (as opposed to 328's 64 kb).

It also had a rubber keyboard (Sinclair Spectrum style) and instead of cursor keys, it had a joystick built on the keyboard...

I remember one weird thing about the BASIC language (made by Microsoft, of course!) - the error messages included "Unprintable error" (code 21, unless the search engines have tricked me). Absurd? Yes.

(This message is not as absurd as it seems - The BASIC had a crude exception handling mechanism in form of ON ERROR GOTO XXX, and this message is printed if user triggered error condition with ERROR command, there's no error handler and the code isn't reserved by BASIC.)

The computer's real name was Spectravideo SV-318 (SVI was only used later, in the MSX era) and it had the same expansion capabilities as its big brother, the SV-328. With the addition of the SV-601 or SV-605 expander, it could use floppy disk drives, modems or even 80-character displays.

The games for both the 318 and 328 models were, for the most part, distributed and made by Spectravideo, the Finnish importer company Teknopiste being one exception.