
This is a letter I received from a kind former employee of TMQ.
TMQ made several very nice pieces of software for the Panasonic JR-200U.
Unfortunately, my emulator does not emulate the features needed
to run these games well. -- Emucompboy

====================================


I may have the specs, mostly Japanese, with some English translations 
here and there, buried in a box somewhere. Then again, maybe I don't. I 
think I even have source code to some of the games on 360K 5.25" 
floppies 
that are 18 years old (probably unreadable today).


James,

I will try to look for what I have, but it may take a few days. Don't 
count on me coming up with anything, but if I do I will let you know. 
If 
you don't hear from me, I may have forgotten so just e-mail me and 
remind 
me. What exactly do you want? Are you in the Bay Area?

Here are some random remembrances:

- I first got my hands on one in late 1982. The first ones TMQ received 
had a dual English/Katakana keyboard. Later we received prototypes with 
just an English keyboard.

- It was a 6800 family processor, 32K of RAM, 4-voice sound, character, 
"hi-res", and low-res graphics mode. Cassette interface, and serial 
port. 
The screen had a programmable border color (one of 8 colors). I don't 
remember the speed, but I think it was between 1 and 2 MHz, faster than 
my KIM-I and Apple II (both 1MHz 6502 machines), and with a better 
processor. Those were the days!

- Panasonic even developed a 3.5 disk drive system and DOS for it, but 
that never shipped. They showed it to us, but wouldn't let us keep it.

- TMQ negotiated contracts with both Disney and Panasonic to develop 
software for the machine, for the U.S. release.

- We did original games in 680x assembly language using the Avocet 
cross 
assembler under CP/M. We used an Apple II with a Microsoft Z-80 card: 
You 
needed CP/M to do anything in those days, because that's where the 
tools 
were -- kind of like you need UNIX in today's world to do any software 
development :-) But at some point we switched over to a Z-80 card on an 
IBM-PC, and ran CP/M on the PC.

- The cross assembler generated Intel Hex format output (an ASCII-Hex 
representation of the code), and I wrote a small loader on the JR-200 
that parsed the Intel Hex format assembler output as it was downloaded 
via an RS-232 serial port, and then would execute it. It was fun 
bootstrapping the loader, that initially had to be entered by hand in 
hex, before being saved to tape. It also didn't work for the first 
several days, and I had no idea why until I discovered that the serial 
card on the Apple II was flakey, and once I pushed in the loose chips 
into their sockets, it all worked.

- We really strived for quality -- hired an artist and were the first 
to 
do good animation on the machine. That was a cutting-edge thing to do 
in 
1982. Back then, graphics were often done by the game programmers and 
it 
usually looked like it too. I remember one of the Panasonic executives 
being very complementary and at the same time slamming one of the other 
companies they contracted with because they just did some simple Basic 
games using the low-res graphics modes. They were straight ports of 
TRS-80 character graphics basic games, that were an insult to develop 
on 
this machine.

- I wrote the "hi-res" animation engine used in most of the TMQ games. 
It 
was more than a simple blit because it involved changing the character 
set graphics, and of course had to be very fast.

- The low-res graphics mode broke up each character into a 2x2 block. 
So 
for the 32x24 characters (I think), you had a resolution of 64x48 in 
low 
res mode. I think each low res pixel could be any one of the 8 colors - 
black, white, red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow. We never 
used 
the low-res mode in our games.

- The sound was the sum of four (I think) frequency generators, but 
they 
were just square waves. So it was far from MIDI, but lots better than 
something like an Apple II -- you could program it to play chords 
without 
CPU intervention to sustain each note.

- Disney contracted with a musician, forget his name, but if I recall 
correctly he was one of the members of the group Sha Na Na. He knew the 
limitations of the hardware, and wrote custom music just for the Disney 
games.

- Panasonic actually had a very cool Music editor. It allowed you to 
see 
your notes graphically as the Music score was edited and displayed on 
the 
screen, and I think it actually played the notes as well. This was back 
in 1982/1983!

- The Disney game titles for the JR-200 were (to the best of my memory) 
"Dumbo Flies Home", "Winnie the Pooh's Luck Letter Game", "Pinochio's 
Whale of a Tale Adventure", a Snow White game "Dwarf's Dilemma", 
"Queen's 
Revenge", and others that I can't recall. There was a lot of concern 
about the title "Queen's Revenge" because after Disney came up with the 
title they discovered it was a slang term being used for what was then 
a 
recently discovered disease called AIDS (I don't recall if the title 
got 
changed). Oddly enough, I have never heard that slang term used, except 
by Disney when they explained that they may change the title of the 
game.

- The Panasonic titles for the JR-200 are even more vague in my mind. 
One 
of them was "Mischievous Mansion". Another one had a snake running 
around, but I forget what it was called. I liked that game. It was in 
some ways more fun than games we have today.

- Great story about "Winnie the Pooh's Luck Letter Game" -- It 
generated 
random sets of four letters and the player needed to match a letter in 
a 
floating balloon with a letter elsewhere on the screen to spell out 
words. Since the letters were generated randomly (using a 24-bit random 
number generator published in byte), any combination of letters in the 
balloons could show up. One day I was testing the game and the letters 
that came up were 'C', 'U', 'N', and the letter 'T'. I did not think 
this 
was appropriate for a childrens' game. I spoke with the game designer 
at 
Disney, and I said I can solve this problem: Just give me a list of 
four 
letter words that you don't want to show up, and I will toss out any 
letter set that forms one of those words. She was very embarrassed, but 
asked her colleagues to help her come up with such a list. She told me 
that they came up with many words that she had never heard of, many of 
which had more than four letters (people were trying to be extra 
helpful). She was a very nice sweet innocent soft spoken person, and I 
could only imagine how red her face was when we talked about this. She 
mailed me the list, but refused to send it to me on Disney Stationery 
(it 
would probably be worth something if she did). From that point on the 
game never randomly generated a bad set of letters again.

- The graphics were, I think, 32x24 characters, from a completely 
programmable character set of 256 8x8 characters. So instead of bit 
maps 
of letters, you could do elaborate bitmapped graphics, and each 8x8 
block 
could have a foreground color and a background color.

- I wrote a graphics editor that allowed our artist (who was really 
good) 
to  essentially do bit mapped graphics on the machine. There was a 
limitation that he could not exceed 256 unique characters. Each time a 
pixel was changed on the screen, the editor first looked if the 
character 
in the new "8x8" block matched an existing character, if it did, it 
reused it. If not, it modified the current character if it was not in 
use 
anywhere else or if necessary it took another character from the pool. 
I 
also allowed the artist to enter an "info" mode that showed the number 
of 
characters used (when it did this, it needed to actually put numeric 
characters into the character set, so when in this mode the graphic 
itself might actually be altered).

- I was told we were the first ones to actually program the machine to 
do 
bitmap animation. We had "Dumbo" flying around on the screen with 
8-step 
animation for flying left, 8-step animation for flying right, and 
4-steps 
for turning left to right/right to left. All artwork (done by a 
non-Disney artist) needed to be Disney approved. Since it was a 
character 
based system, to do animation you needed to reprogram the characters, 
and 
do it fast enough (assembly language required), no one had done bitmap 
animation before on the JR-200. The folks at Panasonic were impressed. 
I 
was told that the engineers in Japan who designed the machine were 
amazed 
we made the JR-200 do such smooth high-quality animation, and didn't 
think it was possible before they saw it. We just did what needed to 
get 
done, and only later we found that it was thought to be impossible!

- I also came up with a copy protection scheme (not that I am proud of 
that).  Details are hazy since I did it back in 1982/1983. The problem 
we 
had to solve was that you didn't want people to load the game into 
memory, and save it out to another tape to give to someone else. The 
way 
the built-in tape loader worked, you could provide data blocks that get 
loaded. There was a trick I discovered by disassembling the ROM's tape 
loader, that if you load data into a few bytes in memory that the 
loader 
itself used for its state information, you can change its behavior and 
have it load a small program that would then execute automatically and 
that would then load the rest of the tape and start executing, without 
the user getting the command prompt again to save the game to tape. It 
was a cool hack.

- We also did a special project to make a JR-200 using a touch screen 
display be a controller for a video conferencing system in Panasonic's 
headquarters.

- We also did a custom JR-200 game for a company in the auto paint 
sealant industry. It was an "attraction" for their booth at a trade 
show.

- Looking back on it, we did a hell of a lot of work for that time in 
the 
computer industry, and it was a great experience. We did our own tools. 
The music was well done. The graphics were great. The games were well 
designed (storyboards and all) and very playable. Also, the working 
relationship we had with Disney and Panasonic was fantastic. Everyone 
was 
top notch.

- After working on the machine for a year or so, Panasonic finally had 
their U.S. launch, and then killed it a few days later and donated the 
machines to children with muscular dystrophy. I don't know if they 
decided they didn't want to compete with the Commodore 64 and the Apple 
II, or they felt that the PC clone industry was their future.

- I still have one of the original boxes for "Dumbo Flies Home". I 
don't 
know if a single copy ever shipped.
