A home computer system manufactured by Multitech (now called Acer) in Taiwan starting in 1982. It was also known to be released in Finland, France, Spain, United Kingdom, the USA. The "Spanish version" contains poorly translated documents in Spanish, but no Spanish is used by the hardware or official software. MPF was short for Micro Professor. The system used the same MOS Technology 6502 CPU as the Apple ][. It was advertised as being partially compatible with the Apple II. This compatibility only reliably extends to games and applications programmed in Applesoft BASIC. Furthermore, the keyboard hardware was mapped to an entirely different memory area. If an Apple][ game expects keypresses it cannot not function on an MPF II (the vast majority of Apple][ games). However, typed text input works fine. BASIC programs using PEEK, POKE, and CALL statements might make the program incompatible as well. Hobbyist were eventually able to create custom BIOS chips that allowed full Apple ][ compatibility. It had two keyboards. A 49 key one that resembled a large calculator pad was built-in. And optional 57 key rubber keyboard was also created. Some packages shipped with the 57 key one also, making it the only? computer to ship with two keyboards? It was somewhat successful in Asian due to being designed primarily to display Chinese characters and color graphics when no other affordable systems of the day could easily do either. Characters were done in graphics mode; there actually was no text mode. Text from other languages were also translated into graphics. It had no built-in drives.




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