Re: Anyone Know What these Cards are???

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article deth@healey.com.au (Dave) writes...

>When I bought my ][GS about 8 months back it had a few cards in it
>that I dont know. Can anyone help with what these are???
>
>In slot 2 is a card thats labelled "LightningScan". It runs to a port
>out the back that has a female socket, 8 pins so I assume its a
>scanner port. There's a program that came on the HD for it and its
>seems to be a scanner program?? If so...what sort of scanner works on
>it??

    That is an interface card for a hand-scanner unit. The one you
have was made by Thunderware (I think that was their name) and was
more or less the same as the Vitesse Quickie interface. The input
port is an 8 pin mini-DIN connector, and it should work with a few
of the hand-scanners available for PC's (Thunderware and Vitesse
both included a scanner with the card, the LightningScan GS and the
Quickie, but they were simply OEM products with their labels on them).
Find a scanner which uses an Omron 1700 scanhead (I seem to recall
that was the one).

    With software, it allows you to scan images in 320x200 (4-bit)
or 640x200 (2-bit) greyscale. That is B&W, with 16 levels of grey.
You can scan near-photographic quality images or sharp line-art,
even use it for OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and scan in
text from books and magazines. Mind you, it's not quite as good as
OCRing on a PC or Mac, due to the software and scanner itself.
You can do up to 400 DPI scanning (oh, it works on 8-bit Apple II's
as well, but in 1-bit B&W - 560x192 or 240x192).

>In slot 5 is a pretty small card. Instead of the usual card being
>green it is blue. Its labelled "SuperSonic by MIDIdeas inc."

    That is a stereo output card. As odd as it may sound, it's only
function is to grab existing sound from the built-in Ensoniq chip on
the motherboard, and output it into two separate channels (a true
left/right stereo signal). It may do a bit of filtering as well to
clean up sound, but nothing more. Apple Computer was too short-sighted
to add stereo-output to the 1/8" phono jack (despite the Ensoniq chip
already supporting stereo output) and so left it up to the user to
get stereo if they wanted it. Considering it had the best sound of
any personal computer in the world for a number of years, I think
most would.

    In a sense it is like leaving keys off a keyboard (just the
stems present) and making you purchase the plastic key-caps from
a 3rd party company. Oh well, at least Apple added an expansion
connector which didn't leave you totally stuck (which is where
these stereo cards come in). The SuperSonic is a fairly decent
stereo card, I've owned two (had a third at one point) and they
work nicely, although I wish they made the phono connector external.
I've damaged the connector on a pair of speakers having to jam it
inside the case. :/ (the tail end was too thick and long to fit
comfortably).

>Two wires run off it into another tiny card that has a port leading to the
>outside back of the case. It's a female socket...looks like it takes
>the same plug as speakers/headphones etc.

    Does this tiny card piggy-back onto the first card? If so, you have
the SuperSonic Digitizer option. That let you input sound (to record
8-bit digital audio, using the ADC in the Ensoniq; yes, Apple left
out a microphone input too). If it leads to a full-sized separate
slot card (doesn't sound like it from your description) you have the
Digitizer Pro option. That had it's own ADC, better than the one in
the Ensoniq. It is also possible someone built some kind of port
connector with external input/outputs (like I said, the inputs being
on the card itself, at least later revisions, was a big pain).

>It also has a rainbow ribbon cable running from the Supersonic card to
>the motherboard just next to the memory expansion slot. The pins on the
>motherboard are labelled J25. Some sort of midi card?? If so...any ideas
>on using it?

    That is just the connector leading to the Ensoniq I/O molex
connector. It's the expansion connector I mention above, which
allows the card to tap the stereo-signal from the chip (or send
it a signal to its ADC to process and digitize sound). You can
actually tap 8 separate stereo channels from the connector (i.e.
two front speakers, two back, two side, and two elsewhere, for
true surround sound) but no card ever supported more than two
channels (ditto for software as far as I know).

    It has nothing to do with MIDI, for that you need another
add-on card or serial adapter device. Btw, the Ensoniq 5503 is a
wavetable synthesizer chip with 32-oscillators and 64K of RAM
for its use, not at all state-of-the-art today, but still neat
for doing MIDI stuff (well, basic stuff at least :).

>Thanks fo any help. If any of these require special programs for use,
>could anyone point me towards where to obtain them. Thanks again.

    The stereo card will work automatically, just connect up a
pair of amplified speakers (the SuperSonic supports unamplified,
but it'll be too low and weak) and run your software. You need
special software to digitize sound or work the scanner though.
You can get the former off FTP sites.

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca