After several days of combat with ADTPro and my IIGS, I’ve finally managed to get a good connection and create a couple of boot floppies.

One big issue was a lack of a valid DIN8 to DB9 cable. I tried 3 different ones, even hacked a couple of them apart only to find that they only had 4 or 6 of the required wires, none wired to the correct terminals and without enough wires to build the correct cable. Also, make sure you add yourself to the Dialout user group and then restart X or reboot the machine; there are ways around this but this is the proper way to gain access to the serial ports, whether real, USB, or virtual.

I then went through a couple of IIe’s that I had picked up a couple of years back, only to find that one of them actually had a Super Serial Card. Good enough, decided to give that a go. Out of the box didn’t work, though, so found that the modem/terminal jumper block was hosed. In trying to get it out, I broke a couple of pins and hopeless dented others. Using a machined-pin socket, some pieces of leads cut from a resistor, and some more pieces to create bridges, I reconstructed the jumper block. Biggest problem is that the cap from the original was not attached when I pulled the card out so I have no idea whether the jumper is set to the modem or terminal position. However, via 2 different types of USB-Serial converters, it now works… subject to the following caveat:

Each time you power up, you have to go into the IIGS control panel (CTRL-APPLE-ESC), Slots, Slot 2 (preferred) and change to Your Card, Save, then Quit back to prompt. Hit CTRL-APPLE-RESET, releasing RESET first to reboot then hit CTRL-RESET to prevent booting from floppy.

Start ADTPro on the Linux box. I tried several different settings but found that on Bootstrapping tab the defaults work best. One other issue that got me several times is that things appear to work normally sometimes except no transfer occurs. Make sure you type IN#2 and the 14B using the Shift key; even though Apple prints an upper case B when you type the 14B, if it’s not really upper case things will probably screw up. Also, this allowed the Speediboot option to work properly, which is much faster than the regular ProDOS and ADTPro Serial transfers back-to-back.

I’ll try to post pics of the SSC soon. Feel free to post questions.

Also, I’m running Xubuntu 15.04 on an Acer Chromebook with modified firmware. Works great in the small area I have available for testing.