Al Alamiah (Universal) MSX computers

Al Alamiah (Universal) made several very special MSX machines aimed at the Arabic market. Some were manufactured by Yamaha, others by Sanyo. These machines supported the Arabic language very well through the special firmware and Sakhr MSX-BASIC.
They were sold in all Arab countries, from the Gulf to the Ocean. Several models have been imported to The Netherlands, because of the relatively large Arab community there, but I've never actually seen one.
Besides these computers, Al Alamiah offered peripherals, games and other software, published books and developed the best know program for Arabic MSX, the Holy Koran.

Pictures not scanned by me

Trivia Supposedly the most widespread of all, the AX170 is one of the simplest in the Arabic series. It has 64kB RAM and has the following firmware: a Calendar, a Painter and both an English and an Arabic texteditor.

Trivia The AX230 is the AX170's big brother. The main difference is that it has an additional 1Mb of firmware! As you can see, there's only one cartridgeslot on the front, while the AX170 had two. I suspect the missing slot is used internally to house the extra firmware. I would be interested in more detailed info about this extra 1Mb (or even 1MB?).

Trivia This machine (the AX330) and its bigger brother (the AX990, see below) are truly special. Fact is, the left-side slot is actually for SEGA MEGADRIVE cartridges! Besides this, they have all the features of the AX230.

Trivia This AX990 is the ultimate MSX-1 computer in the Arabic series. Besides the Sega MegaDrive (Genesis in the US) board, it has no less than 50 firmware programs! A thing you've probably noticed about this model is the empty space above the cursorkeys. Probably (I'll try to find this out) the machine this model was based on had a numeric keypad.

Trivia This is the AX350, an MSX2 machine manufactured by Yamaha. It has a built-in diskdrive, 128kB RAM and 256kB ROM with the following firmware programs: a Calendar, a Painter and a Bilingual Word-Processor. There were two versions, the AX350I and AX350II of which I do not know the differences.

Trivia The AX370, manufactured by Sanyo, supposedly came into the market with big advertising. It's an MSX2 machine with 128kB RAM, a diskdrive and the following firmware: a Calendar, a Painter, a Bilingual Word-Processor and a Sakhr BASIC programming tutorial (or something like that ^^;).