Spartan Mimic (was Re: I hate doing this - Mimic guess where)

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 12:08 PM, Sellam Ismail <sellam at vintagetech.com> wrote: I used to have one, too. I got a pre-release unit for testing. Not sure what happened to it. Have the manual, have the plastic shell, but inexplicably (for me, at least), no boards. I think somewhere I must have a 1541 on a shelf with the Apple II disk board (it wedge into the C= drive case between the regular "DOS board" and the drive mechanism, and provided an Apple II 20-pin drive connector so you could just plug it right into any Apple II disk interface, brand-name or clone. It was an interesting beast, but IMO came to the market a bit late and a bit expensive for what you got. It did work. I ran lots of software, especially games, on it and I don't recall any huge problems (maybe a few minor ones). It has its own 6502 and ROMs and video circuit, so really, it's an Apple II clone with a built-in video MUX and disk mux that borrows a few things (like the keyboard) from the "host". There were keystrokes to switch which "personality" owned the video output and disk and listened to the keyboard, but as long as both CPUs weren't trying to simultaneously do disk I/O, their code kept running. I used this implementation "feature" to do an interesting thing - Infocom games run from RAM except when they need to read in new code and text from the floppy. In particular, they don't do disk I/O while waiting for the user to type more commands. I booted up one side (probably the Apple first) and started, say, "Enchanter", then once I scrolled through the text to the first prompt, replaced the Apple "Enchanter" disk with a C-64 "Sorcerer" disk and started that game. Once that game rolled through all the text to the first prompt, I swapped disks and active CPUs again and could alternate play from one machine to the other. If I'd had the money at the time to afford a dedicated Apple II drive, I could have made _that_ its Drive 0 and not swapped disks, just keyboard and video. It was still a fun way to abuse the system. Once Apple IIs started getting really cheap (by the time the GS was out, not many people wanted a crufty old II+ anymore), I got one of those and shelved the Mimic. I wish I knew why I removed the mainboard and what I did with it. They didn't make very many of them so I doubt I'll be able to replace it. I do have the original docs and Apple-side disc for it. At some point, I should probably make an archive of it since someone is probably interested in them. -ethan