Great Find !

From: Ethan Dicks <ethan_dicks_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Wed Apr 28 08:43:26 1999

--- Lawrence Walker <lwalker_at_mail.interlog.com> wrote:
> Doing a casual dumpster dive this eve and found a box with
>
> Vic-1520 Colour Printer Plotter. NIB including manual and cables. Unopened
> tube containing the 4 colour nibs. Dont know if they're dried out but
> they're water-based.

Huh? My 1520 uses ballpoint nibs.

Does anyone have any software for this? Somewhere on a disk, I wrote
a BASIC program to plot a function that resembles a black-hole on a
spacetime grid (and the unknown mass coordinates for Starcross), but
I have never run across any other programs for this device.

Does anyone out there have any software for it? (I don't recall seeing
any on ftp.funet.fi).

> What looks to be a 1/2 ht. 5 1/4 Apple ll floppy in a 1541 case usual All
> cable but with a different non-apple controller card inside ??

Please describe this more fully. The Spartan Mimic was "the" Apple ][
emulator for the C-64. One of its "features" was a board that sat between
the drive cables and the 1541 PCB that used relays to cut over certain
signals, and also provided for a 20-pin Apple disk connector. You could
stick an Apple disk in the 1541, read it from the Apple side, then swap disks
and read a C= disk from the C-64 side. AFAIK, the 1541 board was not
required, except perhaps as a way to tap power (i.e., the Spartan board was
essentially an Apple Disk ][ to bare-drive interface/analog board.

I was a beta-tester for the Mimic in, ISTR, 1986 or 1987. It was too little,
too late, for too much money. I did get to keep the unit. I still have the
case (empty) and the PSU (recycled into powering external SCSI disks), but
I can't seem to locate any of the innards (I think it died after a while).

My "greatest" accomplishment with it was attaching a real Apple disk for
D0 and playing Spellbreaker on the Apple at the same time as Enchanter on
the C-64, using the same keyboard and monitor, switching between the two
CPUs when one was loading the next part of the game. The documentation
described being able to write programs on each CPU that could talk through
a register window and do some multiprocessing, but I never wrote any nor saw
any for it.

Cool hardware. Dunno what you found, but it _might_ be a former part of one
of those.

-ethan

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Received on Wed Apr 28 1999 - 08:43:26 BST

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