It was similar in size and performance to the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, but it had a proper keyboard and better sound through the use of the GI 8912 programmable sound generator.

The 48KB RAM version, actually had 64KB or RAM, but only 48KB was normally available as the rest overlapped with the 16KB BASIC ROM. The other 16KB shadow RAM could be swapped in, and it was used to hold the Disk Operating System software for the optional 3 inch floppy disk drive.

It had a built in television modulator and also an RGB output, although it uses a rather quirky screen mapping. In LORES mode, it had 27 lines of 40 characters (each 6 pixels wide and 8 pixels high), whilst its HIRES mode had 200 rows of 240 pixels with 3 rows of text at the bottom.

It used its own dialect of the BASIC programming language Version 1.1 from Tangerine Computer Systems, which included tokens for built in sound patterns: EXPLODE, PING, SHOOT and ZAP.