Microbox 3 and Microbox 4

Microbox 3 and Microbox 4 (Phoenix / Image-10)

Fedor Steeman found my Microbox page and asked me if I knew anything about a Microbox 3. I didn't, but I put him in contact with David Rumball and I also asked David about it.

From David:

The MB3 did indeed exist and was based around the Motorola "RMS" chipset however the chips were
cancelled and so only a few MB3s were ever made. Instead I designed the MB4, AKA Image-10, a
68K based computer which used the Intel 82786 GDC.

Attached picture of Image-10 advertisement

I've managed to dig out some information about the MB3 for him and this is now on Dropbox, I'll
send you a link. Apparently he is presenting on a show this weekend (http://cocotalk.live/).

Link to CocoTALK on YouTube. All 4 hours 55 minutes of it. You might want to skip to about
an hour in.

I'll also be putting information about the hardware and software of the MB2 on Dropbox.

I was forced to quickly redesign the MB3 after the RMS cancellation and this became the "Phoenix"
AKA MB4 AKA Image-10 (late 1986). The RMS devices were replaced by and Intel 82786 graphics chip
which gave vastly improved graphics performance (hardware windowing and acceleration), the processor
was the 68010 and the peripherals were more or less the same although I added a Transputer link
interface (I was heavily into the Transputer at the time). The same OSs were ported again to the
Image-10. There was a variant of the Image-10 which was used by a company called Visual Data Systems
for interactive video.

From Fedor's talk: The Microbox 3 is a colour graphics computer designed around the 68000 (or 68010) processor running at 8MHz and Motorola's Raster Memory System chip set. It offers 40 different screen modes, with resolution ranging up to 640 by 500 pixels, plus features such as a 4096-colour palette, eight re-usable sprites and a virtual screen of up to 512K in size with smooth horizontal or vertical scrolling.

2023-07-30: Someone posted these pics of the RMS prototype to facebook but then the post disappeared again.