onimush wrote:
I have PPU manufactured in 1988 ( UMC ua6541 ) and CPU from 1989 ( UMC ua6540 ) . They are both PAL and run NTSC games. Is it the earliest known clone?
According to
this court case report, UMC announced
their PPU in July 1987 and released it "a short time later".
But if you take a look at some clones released in Korea and Taiwan, the oldest all seems to be from 1988. The
Bit Creator 70, which seems to be one of the very first famiclone, used 1988 UMC chips. Only pics i've seen of it were for a PAL variant, so maybe an elder, NTSC model exist (this is, I believe, the only clone that had a microphone on the 2nd controller). Supposedly there may have been a BIT Corp clone using more standard parts (and featured things like a decimal mode), but it's unseen so far.