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DAI in the French magazine “Tilt”: what a limited corpus tells

By Pierre-Yves Hurel

Disclaimer : 1. this paper is a translation of a french post previously published on my personal blog “Carnet de jeu !” (link). 2.  All quotes from French sources have been translated by me.

The DAI, the first and only microcomputer manufactured in Belgium, is a high-end personal computer, marketed since the end of the 1980s. I share here the results obtained by going through issues of a famous French video game magazine.

To accompany this dive into the early 1980s, I suggest you listen to Domestic Flight, an album created on DAI by Franci Fabbri, in 1983 (hang on).

I went through the first 26 issues of Tilt (September 1982 – November 1984) looking for mentions of the DAI. As this kind of task can be particularly time-consuming, I made a quick scan by focusing on a few types of contents: 1) in the “Tubes” section (game tests), the last line of each brief mentions the machine on which each game is published 2) in the “test bench” (“banc d’essai” in french) articles, I went in search of a more general presentation of the DAI 3) the “clubs” section in the classified ads (thanks for the advice Colin Sidre). It is therefore possible that I missed some discreet mentions of the DAI (for the anecdote, I came across an innocuous mention in issue 34, in an article on the design of Tilt’s covers).

In the end, I picked up a total of 16 articles and 4 small ads, which is extremely few and confirms that the DAI has never been “popular”, and even less in the videogame field in particular:

  • DAI presentations: 4 articles.
  • Game presentations: 5 articles (excluding game mentions in previous articles).
  • Game listings: 5 BASIC listings.
  • Software presentations: 2 articles.
  • Mentions in the clubs section: 4 classified ads.

The time distribution of the corpus shows the destiny of a shooting star of the DAI, which shone (at least in France) especially in 1984:

  • 1983: 3 mentions
  • 1984 : 16 mentions
  • 1985 : 1 mention

The DAI in the test bench

The presentations of the DAI are interesting to observe in temporality. A first article, in November-December 1983 (n°8), presents the Belgian microcomputer (“it is not a joke” – French people have a long tradition of Belgian jokes) as a competitor of the Apple II which has not yet seduced a large public, but which has forged a “solid reputation, as much for its graphic as for its sound qualities”. It is at least three years after the marketing of the machine, and its price is “slightly down” (the price is not mentioned, we will read “6700 FF” in other articles), which “places it in a good position today” while remaining in the top of the range. It praises its graphic qualities (including the C.L.I.O. software, which we will come back to at the end of the article) and sound, as well as the presence of extensions (including a “three-dimensional” joystick?). “The DAI has more than 700 programs, but very few for playful use”, the article states, without knowing where this figure comes from. Only Puzzly (we’ll come back to that too) is mentioned. Two other names to remember: Dialog Informatique, the publisher of C.L.I.O., and Multisoft, the French importer. The article ends on an optimistic note by praising “its constantly evolving game library”.

A year later, in November-December 1984 (n°17), Tilt was more critical: “Having appeared on the French market almost four years ago, the DAI has never reached the fame of its rival, the Apple. Its main handicap: a very small game library. We find almost the same description as twelve months earlier: “quite exceptional graphic resolution with 512 x 244 pixels in sixteen colors”, “very advanced synthesizer with four voices on an infinite number of octaves”, presence of a robotic arm to be connected and controlled via the keyboard, “ultra-fast” MEMOCOM microcassette reader. One begins to underline that its conception “dates a little” and that its “bibliography (…) is still very limited after more than six years of existence” (which seems to say that the DAI would have been marketed in Belgium since 1977, which seems difficult to believe at this point). The same year, the special issue n°12 specifies the real asset of the DAI: it is a “creator of images” and hopes that it “[reserves] other pleasant surprises” on the playful side.

November 1985 signs the third and last act of this trage-DAI: the Belgian microcomputer is put away, integrated in a file presenting the “fallen stars, [the] fallen computers [and the] machines with confidential diffusion.” The small article itself only quickly repeats the elements mentioned in other years: known qualities, reliable connections, surprising aesthetics, too sensitive joysticks. On the software side, the magazine stubbornly cites only CLIO and Puzzly each year and ends by explaining that its “bibliography is still very limited after more than seven years of existence.”

The game library

There are two types of content directly related to the DAI game library: tests and listings. Concerning the first, we can list four tests:

Soldier (Mediaplay, 250 FF (Tilt n°7, p.44) is apparently a strategy game from above: “A real board game where the real hazards of war disrupt strategies and where the crackling of machine guns hinders progress. In Soldier, trust is outlawed and the best man wins” (all screenshots in this article are from Tilt, whose scans are from https://www.abandonware-magazines.org/)

Duel, Dialog Informatique, 250FF (Tilt n°8 p.70) : A duel combat game in a castle, “halfway between fantasy and cloak and dagger novels”). The tester seems impressed: “The graphics are remarkable, it is a game that can be considered as one of the best game achievements on microcomputers”. The only flaw is the “jerky” movement of the avatar. It seems to be very inspired by Swashbuckler on Apple II.

Puzzly, Dialog Informatique (Tilt n°14, p.56): in a file on educational games (The “tutorials”, “studiciels” and “microdidacts” say hello to the “innovative” serious games of the 2010s), Tilt reports the case of this puzzle game with “excellent graphics”. Tables are cut into a hundred or so pieces arranged “in any direction”, which must therefore be straightened and placed.

Katuvu, Médiaplay (Tilt n°14, p.66): a little further on, in the same file, the magazine reviews this memory game that “crushes its competitors” and “developed (…) in collaboration with Alex Randolph, the king of game designers.” (I find out: Alex Randolph was a famous board game author). Images appear randomly before the software asks the player what they have remembered.


In the 1980s, it was common for games to be distributed in a written format, called “listings”: the pages of the magazine were blacked out with programming instructions that hobbyists copied, patiently, line by line, onto their machines. Example:

In the special issue n°12 of Tilt (1984), there are five games distributed in the specific BASIC format of the DAI. Unfortunately, these games are not signed and their graphics, because of BASIC, are much more limited (I only reproduce the two most telling screenshots…).

Intergalactic: This game, which places you in space, asks you to destroy the “mineral attackers that rocket from all sides using a simple but powerful laser beam” – this looks a bit like Asteroids.

Le Pigeon Agile: “You’re not a bird of ill fortune, but between the pellets and your crying babies, you’ll have your head and beak in a twist. This game, with a name that is original to say the least, asks you to “stay as far away as possible from the gun, while trying to recover the food necessary for your children’s beakfuls” and to drop seeds on them.


SOS. “Goal of the game: Pass over as many nutrients as possible while avoiding encountering the infamous being that haunts the place. Be careful and … quick.” This appears to be one of the many PAC MAN clones that swarmed in the 1980s.

Miniwar: “Goal of the game: destroy the rows of dots by dropping a projectile in order to reach the bonuses behind these rows; and thus obtain the world record.”

Long Jump: In this (Olympic) game “you are represented by a star”. The player has to hammer the shift key to run, then jump by pressing neither too much nor too little space.

Offside: graphics and sound

As Tilt wanted to be, even more so in the 80’s, a generalist micro-hobby magazine, we find mentions of graphic and musical creation software.

Concerning music, the magazine explains (Tilt n°15, p 68.) that “the music software of this computer is limited to recorded music programs acting as demonstration tapes”, with the exception of Music Tutor 2 (and therefore, perhaps, of Music Tutor 1?). He then cites various soundtracks published by (once again) Multisoft: Invention, Prelude I and Prelude II by J-S. Bach, Mozart’s Turkish March, Barrios’ five minutes of classical guitar, Mussorgsky’s Promenade, Beethoven’s Minuet, and Ragtime. “All these pre-recorded programs introduce you to the knowledge of sounds, to the musical structure as well as to the sound possibilities of this computer which did not fail to surprise us” indicates Tilt. Finally, a yellow box presents “the first disc using the DAI computer as a basic instrument”: Domestic Flight by Franco Fabbri.

A two pages insert is dedicated to Music Tutor 2 (Multisoft) further on Tilt n°15 (p. 70.). It is presented as a “music composition assistance program” which “transforms the microphone keyboard into an electronic organ” (p. 68). The software simplifies “the functions necessary for programming: note duration, note value (…)”. Tilt has “only one regret”: the fact that the software “only works on one voice” – which is surprising, since the DAI can use 4 voices.

Finally, it is within an article on “The secrets of electronic drawing” (Tilt n°12) that Tilt presents CLIO (Dialog Informatique) in more detail. CLIO stands for “Conception Ludique d’Images par Ordinateur” (Ludified Images Conception by Computer) Thanks to the “three-dimensional” (?) joystick, you can move a point of “variable size” (from 1×1 to 3×3 pixels) on the screen, which “offers great drawing flexibility. “The joystick has another lever, corresponding to the third dimension, with which you change the color of the drawings.” We also learn that the DAI is as much for the general public as for “semi-professional” and that “on this type of computer, software like C.L.I.O. becomes very powerful.” In addition, an “external card” allows “mixing your drawings with any video image”. “This software was one of the first of its kind, available on a personal microcomputer, at less than ten thousand francs.” Tilt believes that, although other software has been published in the meantime, CLIO has the advantage of being offered at 350 FF (and not a thousand FF). Another interesting element is that “you can save your work on a magnetic tape and reuse it in a program of your own. So don’t be surprised if many publishing companies create the graphics for their games using this type of program.

In conclusion: the DAI, an atypical “platform”?

Tilt finally suggests a most exciting way to understand the scope of the DAI in terms of the history of video games. As we have seen, the games he mentioned do not necessarily seem spectacular or particularly significant for industrial and commercial history – due to the very mixed success of the DAI, but also to its limited game library. Its strengths are to be found elsewhere: in the field of musical and graphic creation. Has the DAI been used by other publishing studios to create graphics for games released on other, more popular machines? The DAI has been, according to Tilt, commercialized in Belgium as early as 1977 (which is extremely early and competes with the TRS 80, the Apple II, etc.) and in France as early as 1980 at a reasonable cost considering its technical capacities, it seems to be an ideal candidate to be used as a “semi-professional” tool at a time when commercial video games are mainly made by semi-amateurs. This is a track that would undoubtedly offer a particular perspective to platform studies that wish to study a machine and its software together. Here, understanding the history of the DAI will perhaps require focusing on the intersections with other markets and other machines.

The second track is found in the club ads and is related to what I would like to put at the heart of my research on the DAI (once I have got my bearings with the object itself), namely practices. In the ads, we find traces of clubs dedicated to DAI located in Dunkirk, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, and in Montrouge, as well as in Herselt. This leads me to a more important work in progress than the one presented here: that of the numerous club publications. I am looking forward to telling the story of these cobbled-together, joyful, dense publications. Publications that also give an important place to games: the ludic uses of the DAI probably have more to do with these underground distribution circuits than with the well known names in video games. There were none of the big labels that emerged on other machines in the 1980s. The non-integration of the DAI in the video game networks that were being globalized was, without a doubt, one of the reasons for its commercial failure. This makes it, for us, an atypical platform which we must, above all, understand how it has evolved in a form of economic and… cultural autonomy? To be continued…

Corpus 

Tilt HS n°12, pages 18-19,  and from 104 to 115

Tilt n°7, page 44
Tilt n°8, pages 70 and 71
Tilt n°8, pages 144 and 145
Tilt n°12, page 65 and 70
Tilt n°14, pages 56 and 57, 66 and 67
Tilt n°15, page 68, 70 and 74
Tilt n°16 page 88
Tilt n°17, pages 88 and 89, 142 and 143
Tilt n°26, page 150
Tilt n°34, page 18

All scans are from https://www.abandonware-magazines.org/
All articles are from Tilt, a French video game magazine.

Do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions, or to inform me of other occurrences of the DAI in Tilt or elsewhere.


Recommended citation: Pierre-Yves Hurel, “DAI in the French magazine “Tilt”: what a limited corpus tells”, in: DAI-ving into the Past –
Unearthing a Forgotten Computer, https://dai.hypotheses.org/1 , 19.04.2023.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Pierre-Yves Hurel (April 19, 2023). DAI in the French magazine “Tilt”: what a limited corpus tells. DAI-ving into the Past. Retrieved December 12, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/126r8


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