CAP-X and COMP-X: How the Tandy pocket computers got a sucky Japanese assembler

The Japanese electronics giants of that era had an alterntive to MIX, in the ITRON [1] initiative, which included plans for a system-wide virtual machine to be used for compatibility purposes .. Knuths' books, while popular among Japanese computer scientists of the era, had some stiff competition in the Japanese industrial sector .. a few of the major players produced ITRON kernels with this capability, it would be interesting to research which of the personal computing toys of the era were ITRON machines in disguise ..

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRON_project

Yet people love them, especially the PC-6. It has to be the form factor.

Meanwhile, my PC-4 (Casio PB-100) was far more useful to me and they seem much more durable.

This isn't a real assembly language that has direct access to the hardware. Or even the capability to write "Hello world" (the only I/O is numbers, in either hex or decimal).

And labels are limited to 3 characters, so not much better than line numbers in BASIC! The one real advantage would be the 16-bit integer arithmetic, probably the main reason for it being faster than BASIC (which only supports floating point numbers on these machines, implemented in software on a 4-bit microcontroller).

I had one of these too, but without the manual. The "Asmbl" button was fascinating to me, but I couldn't figure out how to use it until much later when I found a scan of the manual online - you can imagine the disappointment! Figured there had to be some educational purpose behind it, but this is the first time I read about this Japanese standard.

You'll love G-BASIC on the Tomy Pyūta then, because its very primitive BASIC is indeed katakana: https://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/tomy/pyuuta/pyuuta1.html