Colour Board

William Stuart Colour Graphics Review

We have received independant reviews of this product from both Mr. P.Sanders and Mr. D.Jay. We reproduce both here as they do complement one another.

Manufacturer: William Stuart System Ltd.

Price: 45.00 inc. vat and p&p.

What it does: Each character block is divided into 4 pixels, either 2x2 or 1x4 (chosen by a link), making either 96x32 or 48x64 pixels on the screen. Each block can be 1 of 8 colours (red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white, black) and the whole background can be the same 1 of 8 colours. They are programmed per block as:

Background colours are programmed from 3 bits of an output port.

How it comes: As a kit of 2 pcbs (why not 1 ?). IC sockets for most of the ICs. The 2 pcbs are Colour Modulator and Graphics Generator. Instructions are clear but assume a knowledge of kit building. Two useful subroutines are included, Line plot and Point plot. One demo program as well.

What it’s like: It plugs in the aerial socket and connects to the Nascom pcb by soldering wires onto the back of the pcb; these connections break easily. Easy to set up. Colours are good, except for blue (slight ghosting). I didn’t like the background colours (hard to read characters on some colours). Resolution too low for a lot of uses, but very good for boxes around messages, bar charts, and for similar uses.

I had just fitted my Nascom 1, plus buffer board, plus 8K RAM board, plus psu, plus auto tape load board, into a Vero box and, as you can imagine, there was not much room left inside. THEN I saw the William Stuart advert in the computer mags.

The address of the company was at a place some 20 miles away, so I went along and took a look, no harm in that I thought ! Upon arrival I was greeted with a demo of the system on a 26″ colour television. It was quite impressive and when I was shown a kaleidoscope program I was hooked and began to think of how I could cram it into my computer case.