Tomy Tutor Scans and Photographs

Last modify 3 April 1999.

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A rear view of the Tutor, from the owner's manual, plus a sketch of the cassette recorder, the joy controllers, the television set, and your friendly 110V house socket. (See the Incomplete Catalogue for part numbers/stock numbers.) A photograph of the actual rear layout is on the Photographs page.

Various ports are indicated with coloured arrows. Here they are:

Purple is the internal power supply. It looks rather flimsy but amazingly, since I've had it since 1983, is ridiculously reliable. Unlike a certain C64 brick supply I could mention ...
Blue is the I/O port. It is shown open here but the one on my model has a panel screwed over it, closing it off. I know of no peripherals extant that connect to it, but Tomy was talking the usual modems and printers for it.
Yellow is the joyport. Joysticks and joy controllers connect here. 9-pin DSUB but NOT Atari compatible. I found this out the hard way when I plugged the stick into my C64 and pressed the fire button. The screen went black. (Mercifully, no permanent damage, phew.)
Green is the (colour of her kind ... Pink Floyd joke, sorry) cassette interface. It's a five-pin DIN plug that terminates in two monaural 1/8" analogue minijacks, one for input, one for output, that plug into the cassette recorder. On mine they plug into the back, not the side, but the manual was apparently written before the cassette recorder was released.
Red is the monitor outputs. Alas, not separated video, so not very high quality (thus the screen shots on this site have bad clarity for reasons other than being sucky scans ;-). Audio is mono only.
Cyan is the RF output, going to your friendly colour TV set. I only have an NTSC version. Presumably there was a PAL version, but I've never seen one.

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A scan of the Tutor keyboard layout, from the manual. Coloured arrows point out keys of interest. (A note: The @ symbol next to the RT [RETURN] key is not the @ that appears on the keyboard. Their @ is more of a circle with a lower-case a in it. This didn't scan through, so I added the @, but this is just for the purists among you.) A photograph of the layout is on the Photographs page.

Green is the LOCK key, really an ALPHA LOCK key, which is itself really a CAPS LOCK key. A strange place for it, but then you really didn't use it all that much. (quickness of the eye/deceives the mind/Envy is the bond ...)
Red is not only the arrow on the shift key, but also the colour your face got when fumbling for it. Not only is it just as tough to press as the other keys, but there's only one of them, and it's so out of the way it's impossible to touch type with. Geez!
Blue is the MOD key. It switches modes in the paint program mode, and also acts as a BREAK key.
Purple is the MON key. The manual says it's for giving 'your computer special orders'. In practice, it returns you to the menu out of cartridge games and in graphics mode, it launches the monitor where you can access the GBASIC interpreter (but with a cartridge plugged in, it exits graphics mode because the cartridge is banked into that portion of memory).

For some reason there is no BACKSPACE or moral equivalent. You have to use the left cursor key to back up, and if you want to rub something out, use the space bar. Command line editing is not its strong suit.

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