Re: Help needed to identify "Applicard"

[ntt@cleese.apana.org.au (Jonathan Pratt)]

shopwood@socs.uts.EDU.AU (Scott Glenn Hopwood) writes:
> 
> The card is marked "Appli-card" and was made by Personal Computer Products Inc.
> It is a very long card which will not fit properly into the GS.
> 

Appli-card (also called star-card) was (still is I guess) a CP/M card
which worked slightly differently to the standard z80 card.

It has its own 64K of RAM on board, and an 8mhz (but it might have been 4) z80
(twice the speed of the one in the standard z80 card).  In stead of
disabling the 6502 on the motherboard, which the other cards did, it ran
concurrently with the 6502 and used it to do all the I/O.

it had an advantage if you didn't own an eighty-col card, because you
could set it to use the hi-res screen for text display (similar to APA)
producing 70 columns across.

It needed to be booted from its own os disk, but then would read and write
any cp/m disk you wanted in the usual fashion.  There were special drivers
for doing the necessary I/O.

I have one somewhere (with boot disk and manual) but I've lent it (with the
//e it was in) to a friend.  I could find further details if required.

I myself would be interested to know if anyone has a PDQ-II  (a 68000
copro card for the ][+ or //e) and might like to part with it...

cheers
ntt@cleese.apana.org.au