Re: 200 apple II clones confirmed

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Eric wrote:
> When I was in Korea 1984-1986 I saw dozens of locally-made clones. They
> were all variations of the II+, and some of them used 64K RAM chips. I
> think they all used off-the-shelf parts, which is why it was harder for
> them to clone the IIe (I didn't see any IIe clones while I was there).

Within Apple, the use of ASICs in the //e was seen as a powerful
deterrent to the cloning that had plagued the ][ and ][+.

> They occasionally had their own local language in the character
> generator ROM, usually along with English. They had special utility
> programs that could modify which character set was used. They sometimes
> used ROMs with modified Applesoft, but they quit doing that when they
> discovered some games wouldn't work with modified ROMs. However, they
> typically did have the lower-case mods in their F8 ROM.

That's a very innocuous change (NOPing an AND), and quite safe if
you compensate for the change in checksum in a spare byte.  ;-)

> They also had a dozen different kinds of CP/M boards, and one
> interesting clone computer came with both a 6502 and a Z-80 on the same
> motherboard.

BASIS clone??  The trick was deciding whether you wanted to look like
a BASIS or a SoftCard to software.  If you chose "none of the above"
then you had to adapt CP/M yourself.

-michael

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