i may have found previously undocumented clone mac roms
@mavica_again PLEASE TELL ME YOU HAVE A LINK
@DosFox i found it online in an archive of some disks dumped some 20 years ago that just went overlooked. a bunch of the discs contain personal information including MacVision scans of photos of probably someone's kids. i'm trying to dissect this further with some people more familiar to it (i've found who had the disks originally) before i post files
@DosFox but, if your google-fu is good enough, you'll find it just as i did. all my work here so far was internet sleuthing and being natively Brazilian.
@mavica_again ah Sheesh, if there's anything that looks like other Unitron documentation - let me know.
@DosFox unfortunately the disks were badly damaged (full of mold, 20 years ago) and the stuff that was more interesting (source code, documentation) might be all gone. the ones that survived were mostly disks used well after Unitron's dissolution by family members, personal files and copied retail software from the US
@mavica_again ah - nothing that looks like PAL equations? 😅
@mavica_again actually they weren't.
That was the "turbo Mac" project which were separate to the original PALs
@DosFox far as i understand, Unitron only had one Mac project, the Mac512 which later evolved into Unitron 1024. the PALs were meant to go on these machines, but the project got shut down. Mac512 was supposed to be the "turbo" one, there was no other model
@DosFox beyond that, Unitron just reverse-engineered the Fat Mac down to a tee. the only thing they developed independently was this ROM that might not even be finished.
@DosFox Jecel was contracted because he offered to make it faster. This was all one project, not multiple.
@DosFox The Mac512 never properly released. Unitron offered sales before SEI (the agency that allowed sales of microcomputers at the time) granted them the possibility, landing them in hot waters aside from the whole Apple lawsuit. Production numbers of 200 to 500 have been spoken of but I highly doubt those. By 1988 the "Mac512/Unitron 1024" was still "in development". even a 200 production number would've yielded more surviving units than we have today (which i think are only 2-3 confirmed)
@DosFox for example the Unitron 1024 was brought on because of the Mac512 getting shut down from the lawsuit, and one of the ways they tried to make it work was remaking the whole case into something that didn't resemble the Macintosh. The only source i can find for that is worded to mean that this was already accomplished and presented to SEI, but nobody I've talked to has ever seen such case, some didn't even know about the attempt to save the project
@DosFox re-reading Jecel's retelling i can understand how this might be confusing: what he's referring to as the "Turbo Mac project" is just Mac512. they were still developing it and this would improve that project, the less Apple material they could release it with the better. the "Mac with separate monitor" he mentions was likely an early Unitron 1024.