Great Find !

From: Lawrence Walker <lwalker_at_mail.interlog.com>
Date: Sun May 2 12:30:40 1999

On 28 Apr 99 at 6:43, Ethan Dicks wrote:

> --- 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.
>
 I never opened the sealed tube of nibs. The specs in the manual said it was a
water-based ink.

> 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).
>
 There was a bunch of BASIC program examples in the manual.

> > 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.
>
 It's mounted in a standard labeled C64 1541 case. Everything else is stripped
out. Obviously a kit. The 20 pin connector is connected to a small 1 1/2" by
3 1/2 ' board which supplies power, control and data connections to the bare
drive. The drive has the Apple latch and an activity lite. The only identifying
mark is FDC525 which is obvious. There are 4 mounted chips, the most
significant an 18pin MC 3470P 8237.

> 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
>
 Could be something like the Mimic. I'm going to dig out one of my A-lls and
give it a try with a Disk ll card and a C64 disk. Cautiously of course. If it
requires a C64 card it'll go in my " awaiting...." bin

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lwalker_at_interlog.com

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Received on Sun May 02 1999 - 12:30:40 BST

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