maple "mavica" syrup [6502] @mavica_again@computerfairi.es

@DosFox I can tell you the Mac512 project was never legally commercially available. SEI never approved the project. And I'm actually in Brazil, so.

@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.

@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 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 Jecel was contracted because he offered to make it faster. This was all one project, not multiple.

@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 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 those were contracted out to Jecel:

http://www.merlintec.com/lsi/mac512.html
http://www.merlintec.com/download/unitronreport2and3.txt

@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

@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.

@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

@colinstu these?

i'm seeing more and more "cyberdecks" that 15 years ago would've just been called netbooks

i used to be more creative. wonder what happened to that

i also bought picotron and i am probably not going to make anything with it 😔

i wanna do pico8 stuff... it just feels quite daunting with how many impressive stuff has already been done with it. i tried making a little sunset scene a few years ago and it looks like crap! i know you shouldn't compare yourself to others but my circuits are just wired that way.

i actually found two roms, one larger than the other, but so far i can only get the second one to do this

development documents. this mentions the rom is for both models ("Mac512/Unitron 1024") but i don't think the sources in them are complete

the source i found has several floppy images, but also some folders that seem to be from different floppy images destructively extracted into a FAT type system so some of it might be lost

i can only find the "Unitron 1024" mentioned online in two places:

one is in a posthumous legal study of the Mac 512 case in which it's mentioned as an addendum

the other is a supposed MAME driver for which any rom i've found are just... mac plus roms.

this is a screenshot that i believe to be from the Mac 512 retail ROM (it says "Insert the initialization disk" in Portuguese). in trying to locate this ROM (the only known dumped Mac 512 ROM is actually the Mac Plus copy) i accidentally found the Unitron 1024's instead.