A bizarre Commodore 64 peripheral, a mime, and some pretty bad ads

orionblastar

>Before later joining Apple as a senior engineer in the early 2000s, Brent claimed that, “the president of the company wrote himself a big cheque from the payroll account and took off for South America.” His claim is quoted as fact all over forums and blogs that are still live today, despite the final four words of his story: “according to legend, anyhow.” Seems legit. A friend of mine in 1984 bought an Apple //c instead of a Commodore 64 and Spartan, because the Spartan had compatibility problems with Apple ][+ software. Also you needed to mod the 1541 drive with the DOS card and press F6 to switch between Apple and Commodore modes. A good way to mess up disks.

Malic

I remember seeing ads for this back in the day. It is so much worse than I imagined.

badc0ffee

Love it. I wonder if they could have made the disk support work better by producing an interposer board to turn the (much simpler) Apple Disk II drive into a 1541, rather than butchering a 1541 to go the opposite way. Adrian Black found that the 1541-compatible Enhancer 2000 was essentially that, right down to having a pin-compatible Disk II style interface internally. He tried using a real Disk II with the Enhancer's logic board, and had some success using it as a C64 drive: https://youtu.be/zGm5Jvo571g?t=5780

gwbas1c

The Spartan keeps smelling worse and worse as the article goes on: First, it points out that the ads came out before the thing was even built: I know there's good reasons for companies to gauge interest before investing in a product; on the other hand, they didn't "know what they were getting into" or that they were going to screw up the timing of the product. Next, it points out that the lead engineer was a teenager. This project is way to complicated for a bright kid. It implies that the company didn't have the budget to build what they wanted to build. Finally, the coup-de-grace in the article is the description of the owner's management style. A draconian guy who fired people on a whim and made people clock out to poop. It's no wonder the only constant engineer was a teenager; they probably didn't know any better than to jump ship.

jmcgough

Have to wonder where they got the mime. Was it a friend? Someone who worked there? I can't imagine the founder would actually pay a professional mime.

greenbit

3/4 of the way into that, they casually let drop that the lead developer was a teenager ? Seems like that might be the most interesting aspect of this

jakzurr

Hilarious. "Don Quixote would have loved it." I do to. :P