June 21, 2022
This machine was purchased from an indoor flea market in Kentucky although I can’t remember the exact town. There was a listing on Craigslist at the time and the previous owner had purchased it for her kids many years go. It also came with a color composite monitor, although I’m using it with an Apple II monochrome monitor at this time. The machine had two Disk II drives, controller card, and a normal 64k/80 col card, nothing else. Everything below is stuff I’ve done to it since…
Switched from II+ due to ADTPro issues to see if the IIe behaved any differently. With Super Serial Card in both slot #1 and slot #2 ADTPro Boostrapping works fine but cannot get DIR or RECEIVE to work using MacBook mid-2012 with Catalina. USB to serial adapter is a legit model so drivers should not be an issue.
First installed 5.25 Drive Controller with known working 5.25 Unidrive and booted from known good disk. Next, switched to the Disk II Controller and hooked up both Disk II units that wouldn’t work with the II+. They seem to work fine with the IIe so some other problem existed on II+.
Current configuration:
- Expansion Slot = 4 MB Garrett’s Workshop RAM/80 Column
- Slot 1 = Empty
- Slot 2 = SSC
- Slot 3 = Empty
- Slot 4 = Mouse card
- Slot 5 = Empty
- Slot 6 = Disk II Controller
- Slot 7 = Microsoft Softcard
Tested 80 column mode using PR#3, worked as expected. Tested both Disk II drives, they seem to work normally so unsure what issue was with II+.
Since cannot DIR or RECEIVE disks via MacBook, next plan is to switch to Linux PC and see if it works. There seem to be some issues with Java on Mac (and have been for many years) so I’m going to test with a different computer. If everything works, I might finish cleaning this one up and use it as my daily driver for Apple II stuff instead of the II+.
Need to check RIFA cap in power supply as I’m not sure if I replaced it or not.
So, installed Kali Linux on Parallels on the MacBook 2022-06-22 and enabled the same USB to Serial converter to be accessed by Kali. Installed OpenJDK-JRE version 11 using apt. Made sure user was a member of dialout and tty groups then tried ADTPro again. Initial Bootstrap transfers worked properly, as did the normal DIR and RECEIVE activities. Should you need to add a group to a user in (at least Debian-based) Linux, the following terminal command should work:
sudo usermod -a -G dialout brian
(where dialout is the group to add the user brian to)
After getting DIR and RECEIVE working, I went to one of the Asimov mirrors and collected the basic CP/M disks for the Apple II. Transferring each of these to fresh disks, I can now boot into CP/M 2.2x which is one of the things I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I’ve also got A2osX running, something that feels like Linux and is ultimately designed to provide multi-user/multi-tasking for the Apple II series. Seems pretty stable…