Re: Need floppy card identified

[W Stewart <waynes@intergate.bc.ca>]

You've already figured out it's a UDC card. I've never had mine
work with any version of GSOS. So I'll take a guess that the person
that had it only used the IIgs under Prodos 8 and probably transferred
the card from a IIe. Possibly had 1 or 2 3.5 drives on it that wouldn't work
directly on the IIgs. Thereby saving himself around a $1000.
I believe a number of people especially schools only used the IIgs as
a faster IIe. There were lot of machines never even had 3.5 drives.

Unfortunately this card doesn't support Superdrives or 3.5 Unidisks.
However it'll support 5.25 Unidisks, 3.5 AppleDisks(eject button only
works in the first connector), Mac drives(400 & 800k), and clones of
these. It also works like a smartport in that if the first drive is empty
whether it's a 3.5 or a 5.25 then it'll automatically boot from the second
drive.

While my card has identical markings,I don't know if there were different
ROM versions. I'd be interested in hearing of one of these where the 3.5
AppleDisk eject button works in both drive 1 & 2.

       Wayne


Bruce Tomlin wrote:

> While looking for cheap IIgs machines for parts to eventually get one good
> machine working, I found one that had a floppy card (in slot 6, I think).
>
> The only identifying marks on it are "REV B", "35 306201 00", and "MADE IN
> HONG KONG".  The main chip on this is a "VTCL 27-692-0-0 61H20B56F" on the
> front and "35 3063 01 00", "703010" and "REV B SS" on the back.  The 2764
> EPROM contains only two ASCII strings, "3.5 DISK" and "5.25 DISK".  It has
> two ribbon cables soldered to the board, with 19-pin D connectors on the
> ends.
>
> When I tried to use it from GSOS 6.0.1, I got a message that said I had to
> install the UniDisk drivers.  But they were already installed!  FWIW, I
> was trying to see if it could control an FDHD drive that I had swapped
> into an Apple 3.5" drive case.
>
> Can anybody tell me about this card, how to USE it under GSOS 6, and what
> good it does that someone would have installed into a IIgs?  (Maybe it was
> to control drives without daisy-chain outputs.)