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MC-10 Micro Color Computer

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Home / CoCo Relatives - MC-10 Micro Color Computer

The Radio Shack TRS-80 Micro Color Computer (also called the MC-10), first made available in 1984, was a small home computer in the era's typical "combined computer and keyboard" form factor. Tandy intended it to compete with the Timex Sinclair 1000, the low-price leader in US home computers at the time.

Despite sharing the "TRS-80 Color Computer" branding with the CoCo, and using the same Motorola MC6847 Video Display Generator (VDG), the MC-10 had significant differences with its bigger and older sibling, most notably in having a weaker and cheaper Motorola 6803 CPU rather than the CoCo's famously brawny 6809. As a result, the two computers did not have full cross-compatibility, requiring at least some conversion/translation to be able to run each other's software, if at all.

The MC-10 did have the same cassette port used by other TRS-80 computers (such as the CoCo, the Model I/III/4, and the Model 100/200/102) and could use the same cassette cable (Catalog Number 26-1207) and computer tape drives they did, including the CCR-81, CCR-82, CCR-83, and others.

The MC-10 also had the same 4-pin DIN serial port used by the CoCo and could use any CoCo-compatible printer or modem. Still, when launching the MC-10, Radio Shack also introduced a printer that, while CoCo-compatible, was intended especially for the MC-10's presumably cost-focused customers: the TP-10, a small and cheap ($99) thermal printer using 4⅛" wide paper, which printed text at the exact 32 character line length provided for by the VDG the CoCo and MC-10 used. This printer was confined solely to CoCo and MC-10 use because - alone among Tandy/Radio Shack printers during the CoCo's run - it ONLY had a serial port (and the CoCo/MC-10 4-pin DIN variety at that), cutting costs by omitting the then industry-standard Centronics parallel printer port.

The only MC-10-specific (non-CoCo) accessories Radio Shack offered were:

  • Catalog Number 26-0529 ($4.95) an MC-10 dust cover (note: Cat # sometimes shown as 26-529 per Radio Shack's occasional practice of skipping 0 in a catalog number if it was the first digit in a segment)
  • Catalog Number 26-3013 ($49) a 16K RAM expansion plug-in bringing total RAM to 20K, up from the stock on-board 4K.

Although the MC-10 was "cute" and cheap, it was not well-suited for children because it had neither joystick ports nor a cartridge slot (although an enthusiast project has been able to use the expansion slot as a de facto cartridge port; see the Zippster Zone section below). It was instead primarily aimed at electronics hobbyists (one of them had an MC-10 team up with a CoCo to control a robot derived from Radio Shack's popular Armatron robotic arm [1]) and first-time computer buyers who wanted to learn to program. Accordingly, its version of BASIC was powerful and its small keyboard enabled entire commands to be entered with minimal keystrokes.

While the MC-10 arguably made sense when Tandy began the project, the computer landscape was changing particularly rapidly at that time (even by the overall historical standards of that industry), so that by the time the MC-10 actually came out, the market had already changed due to various factors such as video game crash of 1983 and the Commodore-driven price wars driving the price of mid-range home computers down much closer to the low-end MC-10's price point. With those pressures and a weak lineup of officially released software at time of launch, the MC-10 sold poorly; Tandy almost immediately gave up on it, releasing no new software or accessories and slashing the price to clear out the existing inventory.

The MC-10 was discontinued in 1985.

Articles

MC-10 Previews and Reviews

Y=Year, M=Month, P=Page
Title Author Magazine Y M P
The Pipeline: MC-10 Staff The Rainbow 83 07 164
REVIEW$: TRS-80 Micro Color Computer Tim McFadden, Doug Kelley The Color Computer Magazine 83 08 88
Reviews: MC-10 Computer Don Scarberry Basic Computing 83 08 93
Technical Review: Kid CoCo is no Lightweight Dan Downard The Rainbow 83 08 174
CoCo Bits: The MC-10 Color Computer John Steiner Micro 83 09 20
Reviews: Model MC-10 Micro Color Computer Beve Woodbury 80 Micro 83 09 38
Review: The Mighty Mite MC-10 John S. Cullings HOT CoCo 83 09 66
The TRS-80 MC-10: Too Little, Too Late, for Too Much? Owen Linzmayer Creative Computing 83 10 39
Review: Tandy (MC-10 and TP-10) Kathleen Peel Your Computer 83 10 68
BenchTest: Tandy MC-10 Surya Personal Computer World 83 11 144

Other Articles

Title Author Magazine Y M P
Talk Together William Barden, Jr. The Color Computer Magazine 83 09 49
Custom Color Dennis Kitsz The Color Computer Magazine 84 09 78

Accessories

Tandy/Radio Shack MC10 Disk Drive

Software

  • Official Radio Shack Software
Catalog Number Name Genre Price Notes
26-3360 Micro Color Checkers Game $8.95
26-3361 Micro Color Games Pack Game $9.95 Lunar Lander, Breakout, Hangman, Pong
26-3362 Micro Color Math/Design Package Math, Graphics $9.95
26-3363 Micro Color Pinball also called Lost World Pinball Game $9.95 Requires 16K RAM module. Dinosaur theme
26-3350 Micro Compac Telecom $29.95 Requires modem and serial cable
  • Third Party Commercial Software
Title Genre Publisher Price Notes
The Handicapper (Thoroughbred) Horse racing betting guide Federal Hill Software $24.95 Could be bundled with with harness version for $39.95 total
The Handicapper (Harness) Horse racing betting guide Federal Hill Software $24.95 Could be bundled with Thoroughbred version for $39.95 total
World Capitals Education Parallel Systems $11.60* *"Free" w/ order of 20 or more blank C-10 tapes at 58¢ each
Humbug Debugging / monitor app Star-Kits $29.95 All three Star-Kit apps also offered as a $55 bundle
RemoTerm Remote terminal hosting Star-Kits $19.95 All three Star-Kit apps also offered as a $55 bundle
CommTerm Telecom Star-Kits $19.95 All three Star-Kit apps also offered as a $55 bundle
The Nuclear Survival Program Game (?) Moses Engineering $7
The Home-PAC™ Various Simplex Software $19.95 20 "educational, graphics, recreational, home finance and utility applications"

External Resources

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