SV-318

The SV-318 was the basic model of the Spectravideo range. It was fitted with a chiclet style keyboard, difficult to use, alongside which sat a combination cursor pad/joystick. This was a curious disc-shaped affair with a hole in the centre; put a red plastic 'stick' in the hole and you had a built-in joystick, remove the stick and it was a directional arrow pad for word processing etc. This machine also had only 16kb of user RAM (plus an additional 16kb of video RAM), which limited its usefulness, though this could be expanded via an external peripheral box.

This machine was basically identical to its big brother the SV-328, the only differences being in the keyboard and amount of memory. The ROM, expandability, mainboard and case of the two machines were identical.

Reference to the operating system Microsoft Extended BASIC is not to be confused with MSX BASIC, although some marketing at the time claimed that Microsoft Extended is what MSX stood for. The SV-318 is not fully compliant with the MSX standard.