Re: IIe, IIgs, Mac LC-II hardware compatibility questions.

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

Charlie <charlied@NOSPAMbboard.com> wrote:

> David Empson wrote...
> 
> > Applied Engineering's "PC Transporter" is a PC/XT emulator card.  It
> > allows you to connect an Apple 3.5 Drive and can act as a controller for
> > it.  This isn't an ideal combination, because the drive operates very
> > slowly, cannot be booted and is incompatible with some software.
> 
> My Apple 3.5 Drive connected to my "PC Transporter" (in my IIgs) boots disks
> with no problem.

Interesting.  Mine always breaks into the monitor if I try to boot from
it.  Of course it won't do anything until the "firmware" is loaded by
pre-booting with a patched copy of ProDOS on another volume.  It will
subsequently access the drive OK if booted from a different volume (even
without the patched ProDOS), but I never managed to boot from the drive
when connected to the PCT.

Once I got the SuperDrive and its controller card, I removed the 3.5"
drive from my PCT, and told it to use the SuperDrive as the A drive.
This allowed the PCT to work with 1.44MB disks, but I found that I had
to reformat them with 2:1 interleave to get acceptable performance when
writing.  (A PC usually formats disks at 1:1.)  Reading was not affected
(the SuperDrive card has a track read cache).

> It is slower than it would be if connected directly to the
> smartport (about the same as using a disk  that was formatted with 4:1
> interleaving) but it does have the HUGE advantage that it will read and
> write PC disks (720 kbyte variety) as well as Apple II disks.

Of course you have to be running in PC mode to read and write 720K
disks.  I also found that its 720K support wasn't very reliable - it
worked best if the disk was formatted on a real 720K drive (i.e. a PC).