Re: Laser 128 to Laser monitor connection?

["Russ Gibson" <russg@rnstech.com>]

> While it is not going to outperform a TransWarp GS, the Laser 128EX/2
> was a very good computer.  It had a 3.5" Chinon disk drive built in and
> the floppy port could control up to four drives, which could be GS
drives,
> UniDisk drives, Mac drives (without the eject button) and even floppy
port
> hard drives.  It had one slot on the side where you can plug in a
standard
> Apple II expansion card.  The EX/2 also had 1MB worth of memory
> expansion built in, ready to populate with memory chips.  It had a clock/
> calender chip powered by a NiCad rechargeable battery pack.  The port 2
> firmware was switchable between the RS232 serial interface and the MIDI
> interface.  The port 1 firmware was switchable between an RS232 serial
> interface and a Centronics parallel interface.  The computer had
non-cache
> based acceleration and could be set to roughly match one of three Apple
> II computers -- the IIc Plus, the GS, and the IIe.  Of interest is the
order
> of the ports.  Laser orders them differently than Apple -- port 7 holds
the
> 3.5" drives and port 5 holds either the 1MB memory expansion or the all
> purpose expansion slot.

Actually, the port on the side could hold an expansion that allowed up to 2
cards.

The firmware for the EX2 3.5" drives was almost completely rewritten - it
performs much faster than the same firmware in the 128 (either series),
128E, or the 128EX (any of the 3 models).  It could still be furthur
optimized...

The EX2 hardware was significantly modified from the 128EX:  Most of the
heat problems went away.  However, it is possible to get *most* of the
functionality of the EX2 just by adding the EX2's add-on card to an EX
(there is an internal expansion port that was part of ALL 128EX's but
wasn't used until the EX2).  The expansion card (which, if I recall
correctly, sits under the upper left side, next to the external expansion)
would be simple to reproduce (especially since I still have schematics
somewhere...).