Cheetah Marketing

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Cheetah Marketing is a United Kingdom-based company that created hardware peripherals and software for home computer systems during the 1980's.

Based in Cardiff, Cheetah was run by the Jacobson brothers, Howard and Michael.

The company originally produced joysticks for the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum computers and later branched out into music peripherals and stand-alone musical equipment for price conscious home users.

Among their offerings were the SpecDrum (a sample-based drum machine), a sound sampler, a MIDI interface and a range of music keyboards.

They also made a joystick that looked like a mouse that looked like a tortoise.

Other joysticks and peripherals included the Cheetah 125, Cheetah 125 Plus - with a rotating stick and programmable extra button, Mach 1, and the RAT - an infra-red joypad.

[edit] Trivia

Cheetah also produced a special two-button joystick called the Annihilator for the Commodore 64 Games System console, adding a second independent fire button to give extra control methods.

The Charactersticks range had a basic base with a different shaped "grip" based on various licensed characters - these included Bart Simpson, the xenomorph from Aliens and Batman.

Cheetah sticks often came with two separate 9-pin connectors - one black that matched the Atari standard for use with Commodore 64 and Amstrad, and one grey for Spectrum users.