A new BBS is online, running on real Apple II hardware and accessible via Telnet (one user at a time). Check out The Age of Reason BBS, running GBBS 1.3j (wow, that’s going waaay back) at: telnet://aor.retroarchive.org
The board doesn’t yet support the telnet “will echo” negotiation sequence, ssoo yyoouu”ll ggeett dduupplliiccaattee cchhaarraacctteerr ssttrriinnggss unless you use a telnet client that can deal with that. Gene, the SysOp of AoR BBS is a regular on A2Central’s IRC (in case you need help).
While perusing eBay (something a lot of us probably do frequently) for Apple II stuff, I came across this auction for a Mockingboard clone. The card is intriguing, because the seller says it’s homemade, and it has a URL printed on it. Is someone making new Mockingboard clones in South Korea or is this something left over from years ago? The URL is hard to make out, but thanks to eagle-eyed Tom Greene, we now know it’s http://cafe.naver.com/appleii; which appears to be a retrocomputing site that’s almost entirely in Korean. It’s worth puttering about the site, even though there isn’t much English content. There are interesting pictures of Apple II computers and Korean clones in some of the links.
If anyone knows anything about the Mockingboard clone, and if it’s something that’s going to be available in quantity, please drop us a line! We’ll post it here as an update.
Update: Wow — check this pic out! (Thanks Antoine Vignau for sending the link)
Henry Courbis of ReactiveMicro was able to have some of the site translated:
“It took me 16 months to make this design. The 6522 chips had some problems and the 6502 had 8 defective chips. In the picture the 4 pieces on the left don’t work. The rest do.”
He made 14 pieces that work and gave 2 pieces to someone named ‘frankeoh’.