The Thomson computers are the French home computers of the 1980s. The range opens in 1982 with the TO7, shipped with a light pen and a BASIC cartridge, then splits into two families: the MO range (MO5, MO5E, MO6), cheaper and aimed at the general public, and the TO range (TO7/70, TO8, TO8D, TO9, TO9+), better equipped. Both share the same Motorola 6809 CPU and a characteristic display, whose famous limit of two colors per block of eight pixels gives Thomson games their recognizable look.
Their history cannot be separated from the 1985 "Informatique pour tous" plan, which equipped tens of thousands of French schools with MO5 and TO7/70 machines. A whole generation of pupils discovered programming on them, in LOGO or BASIC, with the light pen and the cassettes of the educational catalogue.
On the gaming side, the library is mostly French: Infogrames, Loriciels, Cobra Soft and Chip published dozens of titles on the MO5 and TO8, often converted from other 8-bit machines. Production stopped at the end of the 1980s, but the preservation scene is still very active, and the SAP disk format, created for these machines, was born there.
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Libretro theodore | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
Libretro Theodore is the only emulator for this system, and it is available on every board. A single core emulates the whole Thomson 8-bit range — MO5, MO6, TO7, TO7/70, TO8, TO8D, TO9 and TO9+: there is therefore no system per machine in Recalbox, but a single thomson system covering them all. The emulated machine is inferred from the type of file being launched, and can be forced from the core options when a program requires a specific model. Netplay is available on this system. RetroAchievements are not supported. CRT output is handled.
A keyboard is mandatory on this system: Thomson computers boot into a menu or a BASIC prompt, and loading a cassette, like most games, goes through keys. A pad is recommended as a complement for action games.
No BIOS is required for this system: the ROMs of the various machines are built into the core.
Put your games in:
/recalbox/share/roms/thomson/
Supported extensions: .fd .k7 .m5 .m7 .rom .sap .zip .7z
A few pointers about these formats:
.k7 is a cassette image, the most common medium on the MO range;.fd and .sap are floppy disk images — the SAP format, specific to the Thomson scene, preserves protected sectors and remains the most reliable one for commercial games;.m5 and .m7 are cartridge images, respectively for the MO range and for the TO range;.rom is a generic cartridge image;.zip and .7z archives run without being extracted.The file extension steers the core towards the right machine: an
.m5cartridge boots on an MO, an.m7cartridge on a TO. If a game refuses to start or displays badly, force the model in the core options before looking any further.
Recalbox ships with one Thomson game: Mission: Liftoff. The full list of included games is on the Included games page.
Also have a look at the Thomson MO/TO guide for game preparation, configuration and system-specific tips.