Monthly Archives: July 2015

Posted on by

Apple II Cards Purchased

Just purchased 4 Apple II cards through eBay. Actually, I was only after the IEEE-488 card but also included were a Microsoft Z-80 card as well as a couple of other interface cards. Will worry later about the rest, currently want to see what the 488 card can do in a IIGS.

Also working on purchasing some other Apple II related items and/or emulation items, including an MFM emulator. Not sure if there were ever any MFM hard drive controllers for the Apple II, but thought it might be an interesting bit of kit at some point…

Eventually going after Ian’s Mockingbird-compatible card, have a bare SDisk2 card, and a couple of prototype boards. Now to find some kit to build from all of this stuff… did I mention that I have around 10 printer/parallel port cards? Must be adaptable to some use.

Posted on by

ADTPro with Xubuntu 15.04 and IIGS ROM01 (Super Serial Card)

This is a duplicate of a discussion item I opened on ADTPro’s SourceForge site. Your mileage may vary but I welcome questions and will try to help.

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.

Posted on by

Recent Retro Equipment

So, recently picked up a few different retro computer systems and accessories. First batch was an Enhanced Apple //e with color monitor, duo drive, ImageWriter, and software. Later discovered that the machine had a Super Serial Card, Apple SCSI card, AppliCard, and a couple of other extra cards. I haven’t had time to play with it due to lack of space.

Second batch about 9 months later consisted of a breadbox C64 with (2) 1541 drives, (1) 1541-II drive, and miscellaneous accessories. Also included a rather beat up Apple //e (unenhanced) with several expansion cards, (2) Apple Disk Drives, (1) after market disk drive, and accessories. An Amiga 500 with external 3-1/2″ drive was included (original version 1.2 Kickstart) and an old Packard-Bell 286 machine. A couple of green-screen monitors with composite input completed this batch, along with several books, disks, etc. Unfortunately, no Amiga software at all.

Another score was an Apple IIGS through eBay on the cheap; no cards, but works pretty well and in decent condition. Also, picked up (3) 5.25″ Apple Smart Drives, an ADB mouse and keyboard through shopgoodwill.com. This has actually turned into a pretty good little system to tinker with by combining some cards from the previous batches and one of the 5.25″ smart drives that isn’t as flaky as the others. Unfortunately, the IIGS didn’t include a memory card so I’m trying to find one on the cheap.

Some details of my ADTPro adventures with the IIGS will follow.