Re: Apple IIc modifications

[Kevin Dady <kevin@hackaday.com>]

On Oct 28, 6:47 am, powe...@macgui.com (Sam Latella) wrote:
> Hi,
>
> What modifcations can you do on a standard Apple IIc?  I just purchase an
> Apple IIc and am still amazed by how portable it is even after 20 years.  I
> tested the machine with a 55 inch LED TV and WOW!  I am reallly going to
> enjoy watching my kids play educational games from the Apple II era on a
> modern 55 inch Samsung TV.  I gues the knew meets the old!
>
> So, back to modifying the IIc.  I've read somewhere that you can mod it to
> work with 3.5 inch drives is this easy to do?  I've got basic experience
> replacing chips, installling cards, and hard drives.  Soldering is not my
> forte at all.
>
> Besides getting a Zipchip.  I'm more interested in a cheap alternative of
> getting a 3.5 inch drive to work with the IIc.
>
> Any other mods I've missed for the IIc.  Would like to hear them.
>
> It's to bad Apple never went the route of the IIc for the IIgs it would have
> been a winner, and very neat portable alternative for the Apple II line.
> For now I'll stick to having fun on the IIc with the kids.
>
> Thank-you for your time,
> Sam

Not to be a buzzkill and this is just my opinion but the 800k 3.5 inch
disk is a pain in the ass and personally not worth the trouble. Its a
variable speed format that only apple used, so its not like you can
just pop a disk in your PC and copy files over to it, heck even my
powermac 9600 is a little weird making prodos disks.

The majority of apple II software is in 5.25 format so if the software
allows it the best you might be able to do is make a "mix tape" of
stuff.

Finally you can hardly find HD 1.4mb disks now let alone DD disks so
your going to have to order them, at that point once you get disks
ordered and shipped, a computer that can actually read the silly
things in apple format, and fuss with making a mix disk you might as
well just get a box of 5.25 DD disks and use as normal, or use
something like apple game server for the programs that load fully in
ram ... killing the need for floppies anyway.

Grats on your IIC, I have one as well and its a fun computer just as
all apple 2's without needing a bunch of space, which is nice though I
wish it had a slot sometimes