Brother WP7550j+ Software

[Raven]

This machine is a word processor by Brother, which comes with a 14" monochrome CRT (the main reason I got it at $15, I needed more of these and the machine is really just an added plaything...) and built-in software, as well as a 1.44MB floppy drive. This floppy drive reads DOS format, as I have written to a floppy I had laying around with normal FAT12 on there.

I was wondering what sort of machine this is technically, (I figure it's not X86, heh), and if there's any sort of DOS for it, or perhaps a site with third party software (games or something), as there's a way to load it with the built-in software.

A quick google-about revealed little.

Thanks!

 

[Chuck(G)]

I've got a WP3550 here--and I've seen quite a few other models. Mine's got the 240K (some used 120K) 3.5" proprietary (GCR) format floppies. Curious thing is that the filesystem is definitely FAT+DOS-like directory. It wasn't too much of a software stretch for Brother to incormporate a "normal" diskette drive.

AFAIK, the CPUs are all x80 type. An 8088 would be overkill. Most have add-on applications, such as a spreadsheet. Some use files with .EXE or .COM extensions, but they're not the generic CP/M or MS-DOS format internally. You're pretty much stuck with the ROM running things unless you really want to rewrite all the code. Since there's not a lot of docs on the internals of these things, that would be a labor-of-love time-consuming job. Somehow, I can't get all hyped up about a typewriter.

Even a Z80 might be overkill for the application--the Smith-Coronas used 8051s.