
Clones of the Apple II - jamesbowman
http://tedium.co/2017/05/04/apple-ii-clones-franklin-vtech/
======
TD-Linux
I still have my grandparents' Franklin Ace 1200. It's actually quite a beast
for an apple II+ clone, fully loaded with 64k of RAM and two disk drives. It
also comes with the fastest CP/M card available. Unfortunately, it uses the
capacitive Keytronics keyboard, which was a rather tedious repair when the
foam degraded after 40 years. Its serial card is too old to be compatible with
the Super Serial Card, and has a bit of a funky ROM, so I had to write some
custom scripts to bootstrap ADT, and hack ADT itself to support the card:
[https://github.com/tdaede/franklin-tools](https://github.com/tdaede/franklin-
tools)

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__david__
I had an Apple ][+ clone. It wasn't a brand name one or anything, it was
purchased as just a logic board with no parts. I guess you could think of it
as a bootleg PCB. My dad brought it home one day and said, I'll show you how
to build this and when you're done you'll have your own computer. I still have
it :-).

~~~
LordKano
Your dad sounds like he is/was an interesting guy. I try to build memories
like that with my children.

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bootload
_" Surprisingly, it wasn’t a PC clone-maker that forced the question, but one
making Apple II machines."_

There were far more cloners than mentioned in the article. My second computer
was a Apple][e clone shipped in parts from South East Asia mixed in a
consignment from Rockwell Collins.

The cost, that magical $2000 dollar mark.

The parts were re-assembled and that's what I used from High School into my
early Uni days until I started using PCs, punchcards and Vt100/Mainframe to
learn programming. With a Z80 card, 80 Column card money was made off this
machine spitting out resumes via a dot-matrix printer and a large supply of
spooled paper. If I remember correctly the shell was a direct clone of the 2e
chassis. The operating system was a direct clone. Most of my software was
cloned and that's were I learned how to program 6502 machine language to
interface with hardware. [0]

Reference

[0] Marvin L. De Jong, _" Apple II Assembly Language"_
[https://www.amazon.com/Marvin-L.De-
Jong/e/B001H6SRHE/ref=dp_...](https://www.amazon.com/Marvin-L.De-
Jong/e/B001H6SRHE/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1)

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rbanffy
Growing up in Brazil, my first computer was an Apple II+ clone made by CCE. It
looked a bit like the Franklin and had a couple interesting enhancements (like
being able to switch between a more NTSC-like mode and PAL-M) over the II+.

My first actual job was programming educational games for the platform.

Apple II+, //e clones were popular machines in Brazil, with at least a dozen
local manufacturers (the US-sponsored dictatorship prohibited computer
imports). They were largely superseded by MSX machines at the home and PCs at
the office.

~~~
dep_b
I still have a Atari 2600 clone from Brazil with some very nonofficial looking
multicartridges for it. Seems to be late '80s though, long after Atari stopped
making them.

~~~
ido
According to Wikipedia Atari manufactured the 2600 till 1992!

~~~
paulmd
Older consoles often get used in developing countries for quite some time
since they're much cheaper (typically at least one console generation longer
than the US).

IIRC Microsoft only shut down Xbox 360 production very recently, because it
was still selling well in South America. The Playstation 2 had a similarly
long lifespan, I think production was just shut down a couple years ago.

~~~
ido
Also the Atari 8 bit series of computers (introduced 1979) was selling in
Eastern Europe well into the 90s.

~~~
rbanffy
They were great game machines. They had no SID, but the graphics were way
ahead of what you could do with a C64.

------
tombert
I actually have always wondered what the "alternate universe" would be like if
Franklin had won the case. Do you think that software patents wouldn't be
abused? Do you think another kind of abuse would form in its place?

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kazinator
I had a Hong-Kong made II+ clone which reported itself as "V.S.C. 1203" on
power up (top line of the screen, where you'd see Apple ][+ in an original).

Only meagre Google result for searches related to this:

[https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/200492012/](https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/200492012/)

This is apparently a digitized archive of some 1984 issue of a newspaper from
Burlington, Vermont, in which a classified AD mentions an "Apple II Clone made
by VSC" which might be the same manufacturer.

[https://books.google.ca/books?id=uC8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA9&ots=IF...](https://books.google.ca/books?id=uC8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA9&ots=IFVy0E5mpw&dq=%22VSC%22%20%22Apple%20II%22&pg=PA9#v=onepage&q=%22VSC%22%20%22Apple%20II%22&f=false)

InfoWorld 1983, full page ad by some company lists a VSC-002 Apple II clone.

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pandaman
The USSR had Apple II clones called "AGAT". I don't think they had been used
outside "computer classes" in schools. The only original software I recall had
been a Russian keywords educational programming language so I figure there had
been no industrial applications intended for them.

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drewg123
My first computer was a Franklin Ace 1000.

Up until he died in 2005, my Dad still used it for printing address labels,
and for running software he'd written in BASIC. I finally had to get rid of it
when I moved house a few years back.

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nwatson
A high-school friend and I sold some GraFORTH animations to dealers of the
MicroEngenho I [0] Apple II clone in Brasília in 1982/1983\. They were crowd-
pleasers and attracted lots of attention at trade shows. GraFORTH was awesome,
I used it to explore math, did floating-horizon hidden-line f(x, y) plots
before I knew it was a thing.

[0]
[https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_Microengenho_I](https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_Microengenho_I)

------
orionblastar
When our Commodore 64 died, I wanted an Apple II or clone to replace it.
Instead my father bought a Commodore 128 and 1571 drive. I had my eye on an
Apple IIc because I had a friend with it. Franklin Ace and Laser 128 models
were available as well.

When I went to college in 1986 I bought an Amiga 1000 from Commodore with the
PC Transformer 5.25 inch floppy drive. It had the C64 and Apple II emulators
but for college I focused on DOS and the PC emulator.

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zoom6628
I did ERP (Fact ERP from New Zealand company Fact, later acquired by Geac and
then Infor) implementation at VTech at the end of the 80's at their HQ in
Taipo district in Hongkong. Later bought a Laser 128 from them to play with.
Had always wanted an Apple II after learning to code BASIC on one at high-
school in late 70s. Great memories reading this article.

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joezydeco
Don't forget the Bell & Howell Apple ][, the "Darth Vader" model:

[http://shrineofapple.com/blog/2011/11/15/apple-ii-plus-
bh/](http://shrineofapple.com/blog/2011/11/15/apple-ii-plus-bh/)

~~~
mrbill
Which is explicitly mentioned in the article along with a link to someone's
YouTube video of theirs, in high-contrast white on red text.

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protomyth
Before the big Apple IIe order, my high school bought one of the Franklins.
For all the trouble, they didn't any money if time counted. It glitched a lot.

It would have been an interesting history, if instead of cancelling the II
line, Apple had kept shrinking it and reducing its price.

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jecel
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apple_II_clones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apple_II_clones)

------
amelius
They forgot to mention:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT_2020](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT_2020)

