SciSys Caravelle (1985) RARE

SciSys-W Ltd was a Hong-Kong based company, founded by Eric Winkler in 1978. The company was associated with Novag to develop new chess computers. However, Many problems occured between Peter Auge (Novag) and Eric Winkler: they stopped their collaboration after few chess computer development. Winkler renamed the company Saitek in 1987.
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CHVL
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Location: Los Altos, CA
Full Name: Maurice M Ohayon
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SciSys Caravelle (1985) RARE

Unread post by CHVL » Sun Dec 05, 2021 1:01 pm

The SciSys Electronic Chess is an ultra slim table computer, very attractive by its red playing surface, its reduced dimensions and its light weight: a true portable computer, still having a good size.
It has 8 levels of play and a long battery life.
For more details, click here

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The MK10 Microchip is not the same than the one of the Caravelle.
Microchip:
- version 5G3 for the Caravelle (1985)
- version 5G1 for the MK10 (1985)
Is this new version of the microchip (5G3) specific to the Caravelle or only an upgrade done for all the MK10 series? In my discussion with Eric Belot, we discover that his Caravelle had a version 5G1 of the microchip... More confusing is that the 2 versions of the microchip were done in 1985. It would be interesting to know if the MK10 with the version 5G3 were made...

The Hitachi HD44868 is a single chip microprocessor in a 4 bit architecture.
This CMOS 4-bit single chip microcomputer contains ROM, RAM, I/0 and Timer/Counter in a single chip.
The HMCS47C has an efficient controller and arithmetic function.
This CMOS technology provides to portable microcomputers a long life battery (more than 1000 hours according to SciSys).
Made specifically for company application (in this case SciSys), it is almost impossible to know the content of the ROM.
No documentation on the versions of the application made for SciSys was found.
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Characteristics of the Caravelle
- SciSys, 1985 (versus 1984 for the MK10)
- Program by Craig Barnes, Julio Kaplan
- Table top chess computer
- Microchip Hitachi HD44868 version 5G3 (versus 5G1 for the MK10)
- 0.6 MHz
- ROM 5KB
- RAM 80 bytes
- Pressure Sensory
- 16 edge LEDs
- 8 levels of play
- Size: 24cm x 24cm x 2cm (versus 23.8 x 23.8 x 2.0 cm for the MK10)

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