t's thanks to the community, what would you say were the hardest
obstacles while creating the cartridge?

First of all, obtaining a MAX was quite an obstacle, because as they are
quite rare and generally only available in Japan :-) Then, I would say the
next biggest problem was overcoming the differences between the MAX and
C64. They are not fully compatible - some signals are different on the expansion port, and even if they are the same, the timings are sometimes different because the MAX has a very different PLA chip than the C64. It
took us several hardware revisions to get it all right and ensure that the cartridge runs correctly on both machines.

It was also quite challenging to fit all the chips in a standard C64
cartridge case, because we settled on using only TTL chips. Designing the logic so that only two TTL gate chips were used gave us some headaches.
:-)

For a batch of cartridges we found out that we had some defective RAMs,
which escaped our testing procedures because the errors revealed only under some specific conditions. Rob volunteered to unsolder the faulty RAMs and
I still feel sorry for him about that.

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Q. What hardware will run the cartridge run on?

The cartridge will run on the Commodore MAX of course, but also on the
standard C64, SX-64 and C128 computers because the cartridge port is compatible. This enables the owners of these popular machines to enjoy all
the MAX games.

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Q. Could someone build their own cartridge, if so how would this be
achieved, I notice you have a schematic and Rom to download from the
website

I have put an Eagle PCB file for download too, so anyone can create their
own cartridge now. However, since we source cases, chips and PCBs in
Poland where they are much cheaper, the price advantage of building the cartridge on your own may not be that big.

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Q. You sell a completed version, how much is this and are they available
to order from stock or individually manufactured

The completed version is sold for $29.95 plus shipping, and we have several dozen in stock currently.

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Q. What comments or feedback have you received from the commodore
community

We had one negative comment about the quality of the product case and PCB
being only "adequate" and not top-notch. This is understandable, as we
wanted to create a cartridge for the masses, not for the classes. :-)
Apart from that, the feedback was very positive, and generally the fans who bought the cartridge love it. For many people, it allowed them to play
some of these games for the first time since 25 or 30 years, so it brings a
lot of warm feelings and nostalgia.

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Q. Is there much of a Max community especially as the hardware is so rare?

The hardware is very rare, it's hard to think of a very active community,
but I heard of people in Germany writing some new software for the MAX.
There could be probably some kind of community in Japan as it is the
country where the most of these machines are found today, but unfortunately
my lack of Japanese language abilities prevents me from checking this out.

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Q. Do you plan any other hardware or software products

We both have some other projects going on, unfortunately the lack of free
time is often hindering them. I am a huge fan of CBM-II machines so
currently I am working on a RAM expansion for them. Rob recently finished
a restoration project of a Commodore V364, also a very rare machine based
on the 264 range with built-in speech capabilities designed by Bil Herd.
With a vocabulary of more than 260 words, it is capable of saying "gurple", apparently a big deal for Commodore engineers at that time :-)

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Q. Going back to the Multimax How many have you sold

We have sold over 30 pieces so far, both on our Internet website www.MultiMax.com and on vintage computing meet-ups.

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Q. finally do you have any comments you would like to add and thank you
for your time

Thank you for the interest in the cartridge. I hope it will bring more knowledge of this rare and interesting Commodore machine to your readers.




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