Re: GS newbie questions

[Howe Family <khowe@omninet.net.au>]

In article <39C69545.A2108BB3@netscape.net>, Kate Slaminko 
<krslam@netscape.net> wrote:

> Picked up a GS Woz for $5 at a garage sale.  No manuals, and am having
> some trouble figuring it out.

Point a web browser to 
http://www.educate.net.au/~apple2/manuals/index.html. I've gone to some 
effort to put the manual for the GS onto the net (with permission from 
Apple), just for people like yourself.

> (1) There's a small card that says SuperSonic by MDIdeas Inc. on it with
> a pair of cables running to J25 on the motherboard.  What does it do?

It's a sterio sound card. (Without the card you only get mono.)

> (2) The daughterboard has 8 SIMM slots, four of which are occupied, so I
> assume I've got either 4 or 16 Mb RAM.  However, the RAM disk
> configuration only shows 1129 (or so) Kbytes available.  What's up with
> that?

Sounds like you might have a good memory card there. If it's a Sirius 
Ram, which does have 8 30 pin Simm slots, it may only have 256K chips in 
it, making it only 1 meg. However you could easily pull those simms out 
and put in 1 Meg simms to take it to anything up to 8Megs (the maximum 
for a GS).

> (3) I got both 3.5 and 5 1/4" drives that show up as slot 5, #1 and slot
> 6,#1 respectively.  Both drives check out fine, however when I set the
> thing to boot from the 5 &1/4 drive, it won't.  I'm trying to load some
> old autobooting s/w on 5.25 disks and can't believe they're all bad,
> especially since they pass the verification test.  Is there a problem
> with the drive? the computer? or the operator?
> 

The drives are pretty old, perhaps they need a clean? They should 
certainly work. What software are your trying, and was exactly happens?


Also note that the Woz machines came out with the original Rom 00, which 
needed to be upgraded to Rom 01. If yours doesn't say Rom 01 when 
starting it is an unupgraded model. If it does, you should be fine 
running all the latest software.

Persevere with the GS, it's a truly great machine. If you've already got 
a good ram card, all you really will need is a hard drive to make it 
into a very useful machine. You can buy the focus hard drive card, 
(which has a laptop IDE drive on a card to drop into a slot) for only 
$69 from Alltech Electronics. (http://www.allelec.com/harddiap.htm), 
which comes loaded and ready to go with system 6.01 and a bunch of 
freeware.

> Please respond directly to me as I won't be spending much time on the
> group until I get this thing running properly.
> 
> Thanks!
> Ron
> 
> 

You welcome.