The
Panasonic
formerly between 1935 and 2008 and the first incarnation of between 2008 and 2022, is a major Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation, headquartered in Kadoma, Osaka. It was founded by Kōnosuke Matsushita in 1918 as a lightbulb ...
JR-200
(Panasonic Personal Computer (PPC)) was a simple, relatively early (1983),
8-bit home computer with a
chiclet keyboard
A chiclet keyboard or island-style keyboard is a computer keyboard with keys that form an array of small, flat rectangular or lozenge-shaped rubber or plastic keys that look like erasers or "Chiclets", a brand of chewing gum manufactured in the s ...
somewhat similar to the
VTech Laser 200. It's part of the
JR Series.
Made of silver grey plastic, it had a black matte area around the keyboard area. Most of the 63 rubber chiclet keys were grey, with some (the more important) keys in marine blue, and with white control and break keys. Each of the grey keys could produce any of five inputs: Upper and lower-case letters (or numbers and symbols), two graphic characters (similar to the graphic symbols of
PETSCII
PETSCII (''PET Standard Code of Information Interchange''), also known as CBM ASCII, is the character set used in Commodore Business Machines (CBM)'s 8-bit home computers, starting with the PET from 1977 and including the C16, C64, C116, C1 ...
), and a BASIC keyword. Two keys, ALPHA and GRAPH, are used to switch back and forth between character and graphics modes. Holding down the CONTROL key while pressing any grey key produced a Basic keyword. In total the JR-200 had 253 built-in characters. 96 letters, numbers and symbols, 5 Greek letters, 63 graphical symbols, 79 Japanese (katakana) symbols and 10 music and other symbols. All symbols formed in an 8x8 pixel matrix, and the JR-200 could display 32 characters per line and 24 lines. All relevant keys would auto-repeat when pressed continuously.
The JR-200 used a very unusual 8-bit
CPU, the
MN1800A, which was compatible with the
Motorola
Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent public companies, Motorol ...
MC6802, a slightly improved version of the
Motorola 6800
The 6800 ("''sixty-eight hundred''") is an 8-bit microprocessor designed and first manufactured by Motorola in 1974. The MC6800 microprocessor was part of the M6800 Microcomputer System (latter dubbed ''68xx'') that also included serial and para ...
. It ran at a slow 0.89 MHz (according to unconfirmed information). There is also a second processor, the 4-bit MN1544CJR,
which is used for I/O and contains 128 bytes of RAM plus four kilobytes of ROM.
A version of the JR-200 called the Panasonic JR-200U was developed for the North American and European markets and was announced in January 1983.
JR-Basic
The JR-200 did not use
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...
BASIC, but its own dialect, one that was designed to be mostly compatible with Microsoft BASIC.
JR-BASIC was a greatly extended Basic, with, (for example) graphical commands such as COLOR, (which selected character color, background color and display mode) and PLOT which permitted direct addressing of the low resolution graphics mode (64×48, using
text semigraphics characters, which represented pixel blocks that used one-quarter of each character). Eight colors were available for the background and foreground use: blue, red, magenta, green, cyan, yellow, white and black. By re-programming a part of the character-set a limited high resolution graphics mode was achievable with a resolution of 256×192. The BASIC also supported on-screen editing and direct execution of BASIC instructions. the machine came with 32K of RAM, and had 30,716 bytes free for a Basic program. User memory could be expanded to 40K. JR-BASIC itself occupied 16K of ROM, while the character set video memory and I/O used another 6K.
The JR-200 ROM also contained a
machine code monitor
A machine code monitor ( machine language monitor) is software that allows a user to enter commands to view and change memory locations on a computer, with options to load and save memory contents from/to secondary storage. Some full-featured m ...
to enter and execute machine code programs.
Sound
The JR-200 was capable of producing a wide range of sounds. The JR-200 had a general purpose timer - I/O chip, with three of the timer outputs being hooked up to generate square wave tones. The Basic supported the sound capabilities with commands ranging from a simple BEEP command (BEEP 1 producing an 880 Hz "middle octave A" sound), to the SOUND (f, d) command which took two numerical parameters for frequency and duration, and the PLAY and TEMPO commands which could take multiple commands to play a tone over a 5-octave range, and played them in the background while the Basic program continued. Clever use of the three square wave voices could be used to generate a range of other sounds, such as explosions. A keystroke could be accompanied by an audible feedback signal. Audio was output from an RCA (Tulip) connector onto which an eight ohm speaker could be directly connected, but the JR-200 also had a small built-in speaker. On the back of the device there was a volume control potentiometer that controlled both the internal and external speaker.
I/O connectors
On the back of the device you could also find an eight-pin DIN connector for a cassette recorder with which you could load programs at 2400 bit/s. Then two connectors for video output, an RCA connector RF output and an eight-pins DIN connector that could output NTSC or RGB video. The JR-200UP variant outputs composite PAL and RGB. Two other connectors provided a centronics compatible printer port, (supported by Basic with LPRINT, LLIST and HCOPY, a "screen dump" command) and an expansion interface port. The expansion port connector also had signal lines for an RS232 serial connection which Basic supported with several commands, but its main use was to connect a 5¼-inch
floppy disk drive.
On its left side the JR-200 had two
DB-9 joystick connectors which could be connected to standard (Atari style) joysticks, which could be read by the Basic STICK command.
In contrast to most other home computers of the time the JR-200 did not use an external transformer unit but had a built-in, completely contained, power supply.
Reception
The computer received favorable reviews on its launch.
Creative Computing wrote "The Panasonic JR-200 is one of the nicest new computers to make the scene in some time."
References
External links
Atarimagazine article scanArmchair Arcade covers the systemJR-200 at old-computers.comDiscovering the Panasonic JR-200: programming resources
{{Authority control
Home computers
JR-200
68xx-based computers
ja:JR-200