The Salora Manager was the Finnish version of the Video Technology Laser 2001.
However, it had some differences compared to the original:
• It had a new case to match the cheaper Fellow in the more Salora-like colouring,
• The keyboard had been modified by adding the Scandinavian letters Ä, Ĺ and Ö,
• Joysticks ports were different so you could only use joysticks manufactured by Salora (many machines were hacked to use Atari-standard controllers).
The Coleco adapter was planned for the Manager too, but was propably never released. Some pre-production examples did make it out the door.
A 5 1/4" disk drive was also released in the Salora color scheme.
The Salora machines had some brief success because Salora was a well known company in Finland and people didn't really know how global the computer market was. In the end Salora machines disappeared quite quickly mainly due to lack of software and the onslaught of Commodore and Spectravideo.
During the last days of the machine they were sold at rock bottom prices. You could get a Manager + disk drive + games/programs bundle for less than the price of a Commodore disk drive!
After the Vtech fiasco Salora had plans or they actually even announced it, that they were to start distributing Mitsubishi manufactured MSX machines and peripherals under the Salora brand, but this never happened. This information regarding the MSX ordeal can be found from the Finnish MikroBitti magazine.
Please consider donating your old computer / videogame system to Old-Computers.com or one of our partners from anywhere in the world (Europe, America, Asia, etc.).
The technical information is not quite correct:
The Manager comes with 16kb RAM (not 32kb) and can be expanded to a maximum of 32kb (not 64kb)...
Sunday 5th March 2023
Scouter3D
There is actually Colecovision adapter for this machine. It''s quite rare but still fully functional piece of hardware.
Tuesday 2nd November 2021
Mikael (Finland)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v$zsjTpFR0oYQ
please help we have zx spectrum 48k and one 128k program running at 6mhz using external ram and snapper discs from velesoft site
QWERTY, 49 typewriter keys including Scandinavian letters Ä, Ĺ and Ö
CPU
6502 A
SPEED
2 MHz
RAM
32 kb (up to 64 kb)
VRAM
16 kb
ROM
16 kb
TEXT MODES
36 chars. x 24 lines
GRAPHIC MODES
256 x 192 dots
COLORS
16
SOUND
4 voices (3 voice channels + 1 noise channel) from 245 to 12500 Hz
I/O PORTS
TV/Audio (RCA) 2 joystick sockets (Salora specific) Disk drive port Tape-recorder (600 bauds) Centronics port Cartridge slot Expansion port Parallel port
