The Apple II was made in great numbers, as was the Commodore 64. But the Mimic Spartan? It was a weird Apple II clone that you needed a Commodore 64 to use. [ARC Javmaster] has found one of these obscure machines and has set about bringing it back to life. Check out the video below.
The story of the machine has been told online by one of the developers on the project, one [Brent Marykuca]. Basically, the Mimic Spartan was an Apple II clone that was intended to take advantage of a C64 as a host machine. It came in a beige box with a bunch of edge connectors and cables sticking out, and you were intended to nest it on the back of your C64 so it could hook up to all the ports. Then, you could use your machine as a C64 or an Apple II, or sort of… both… and even exchange data between both machines in some limited ways. There are also a few details of this obscure machine that have been collated by [Mike Naberezny], who is seeking the original disk that shipped with the machine when new.
It’s early days yet for [ARC Javmaster]’s efforts to restore the Mimic Spartan. Thus far, it’s had a clean and basic test. It was able to display a short line of text on a display before ceasing activity. A full boot hasn’t been achieved just yet, but we can’t wait to see where the resurrection efforts go next.
Back in the day, there were all kinds of Frankenstein computer cards that effectively put one kind of computer inside another. These days, you can condense an entire retro machine down to run on a single microcontroller.
[Thanks to Stephen Walters for the tip!]
It’s amazing what not having keyboards available for the equivalent of $1 US ( in 1977 dollars) did to the market. Have to use a whole system as a keyboard! Truly a hack!
I’ll look into it and see what other parts it may be using, CPU etc.
Separate CPUs. But it hacks into the C64 disk drive in a fairly invasive manner.
What kind of keyboards, dumb keyboards or ASCII keyboards?
I’m asking, because there was a moment in time in which people built terminals using ASCII keyboards and character generator boards+CRT monitors..
It was what really set commodore in a good light when the Vic 1001 was first released in Japan. Sinclair and Apple had these horribel membrane keyboard.
To be fair, the Japanese had these chiclet keyboards, too.
For example, let’s take the original Sharp MZ-80K.
It had a poor calculator keyboard, just like the early Commodore PET 2001.
But soon the switch (pun intended) to typewriter keyboards happened.
MZ-80A/B/C and MZ-700/1500 had real keyboards.
So true, those were truly awful, I remember them
I was thinking the Franklin Ace 1000. I converted them into apple II’s with a custom memory controller. I was told that was impossible but I converted at least three with a 100% success rate.
I came by a Spartan and look forward to see what can be done to rescue this incredible hardware.