Re: Couple of //e Questions....

[david@uow.edu.au (David Wilson)]

<penman@No-spam-cotse.com> writes:
>Sorry, David, but none of the //e's I've ever seen have 80-col
>built into the motherboard.  They're 40-col unless you supply an
>80-col card.  Apple shipped the platinum (and enhanced?  I can't
>remember) with a card that also brought memory up to 128k.  Take the
>card out and you're back to a 40-col, 64k machine.  The RamWorks
>card supplied extra memory and 80-col - in fact if I remember
>correctly, they even touted in their ads that their method of
>80-column had won a patent.  :)

If you don't believe that the 80 col hardware is on the motherboard
type the following on a 64KB //e:

]POKE49165,0

The characters are now half the width and every second column is 
will be a rubbish character.

If you would like to use the 80 col firmware on a 64KB //e then
do this:

]POKE49162,0		: REM turn on 80 col firmware
]PR#3			: REM switch output to 80 col firmware

Now press ESC 4 to put it back to 40 columns and you have the
new firmware without 80 columns (later versions of ProDOS 8 do
step 1 of this for you if I remember correctly).

What I was saying is that unlike a ][ or ][+ which had an 80
column card, the //e has all the 80 column circuitry on the
motherboard and just needs RAM and a couple of buffer ICs in
the AUX slot to give it 80 column functionality.

Thus, if you have a 128KB Apple //e and would like to increase
the RAM to 1MB+, you remove the 64KB AUX slot card, insert a
1MB AUX slot card and you now have 1MB+ without using any extra
slots (except on a PAL //e where the larger 1MB card will very
likely block any use of Slot #3).
--
David Wilson  School of IT & CS, Uni of Wollongong, Australia