Vaporware???

[Terry Yager]

Anybody know anything about a device called 'PC-Ditto II'? Yes, I googled it, and found some info which seems to pertain to this:

http://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n10/billtealadvantgarde.html

http://www.atarimagazines.com/startv4n12/pcditto2.html

http://www.atarimax.com/freenet/freenet_material/12.AtariLibrary/3.TimeCapsule/showarticle.php?202

http://www.atarimax.com/freenet/freenet_material/12.AtariLibrary/3.TimeCapsule/showarticle.php?14

According to this article, the product was never shipped (see the last sentence under 1989):

http://www.zophar.net/articles/art_14-3.html

If I had to guess, I'd say a PC emulator is probable. The main chip is a NEC V30 CPU, but the EPROM on mine has a (handwritten) label which reads 'C64SX Kernel ROM', so this version is prolly not for the Atari.

Any other clues...anyone...?

--T

[chuckcmagee]

That one review states "July 1990" and he talks about putting one into his ST1040 and other users having problems getting the shielding back into place --- all of which implies that the product did indeed "ship", at least for some months at a min.

So, seems like intensely congealed vaporware to me.

[Terry Yager]

I tend to agree, there are several references to people having them in-hand.
It was (is?), however, a common practice for manufacturers to send out 'samples' of thier product to major reviewers a few months ahead of the product's 'official' release. This was not always A Good Thing for the manufacturer because sometimes these pre-production samples didn't quite have all the bugz shook out, and the review would go Bad if the writer had problems with it.

--T