Re: //e card in LC

[drucker@lclark.edu (Ivan Drucker)]

> Can anyone who has had experience with the //e card in the Mac LC computers
> let me know how it fares?  How perfectly compatible is it?  (I know that it
> is an honest-to-goodness //e on a card, but that isn't my question).  Has
> anyone had things no run on it that do run on a //e?  Like, for example,
> "screen splitting" done with timing (a la Bill Budges "Apple a la mode" article
> in Softalk a million years ago)?  And other pretty hardcore Apple specific
> stuff?

I've had very little problem with mine as far as compatibility and whatnot.
 The big issues I've found are:

Copy protected 3.5 and 5.25 disks, or unprotected ones that use odd loading
schemes, don't necessarily work. (Apple says for copy protected 3.5's, you
might need to invest in a 3.5" Unidisk rather than use the internal).
Screen draw is slow, but not so much that I've had a problem with any game.
 It's really more of a problem with scrolling, but I imagine some intense
things that involve page flipping or something might not work completely
right.
Anything that doesn't like the Enhnaced //e doesn't go over too well, which
isn't surprising I guess.
Things sometimes get thrown when the Mac hard drive talks to itself.
Rather than use the ROM-code generated beep, it plays a beep of your choice
that you set with the //e control panel (including a sampled original Apple
][ beep, but it just doesn't sound quite the same).  I assume they did this
so that the beep was at a constant pitch even when you run the //e in fast
mode.  If you have an old system master, you can have it BLOAD Applesoft
into the top 16K and set the pointers to use it instead of the ROM on the
card, and then you can thrill to the original beep.

I've used plenty of DOS 3.3 and 3.2 stuff and it seems to work fine.  I
actually made a couple of ProDOS programs to automatically load 3.3 or 3.2
so I don't have to boot disks to get to it.

These drawbacks though, are not enough to cause a problem for me -- in many
ways, it's like using the Apple ][ I always wanted to have:  RGB screen,
hard drive (you can partition some of your drive for ProDOS), clock card,
accelerator (to 1.9 Mhz, or about double speed), as much RAM as I want,
typeahead buffer...it's pretty fun.

Basically it allows you to set up various parts of the Macintosh as though
they were slots in the //e.  Thus the printer and modem ports become Super
Serial Cards, the clock is a clock card, the hard drive and internal 3.5
are a SmartPort card, mac RAM is on a RAM card, the 5.25 is a 5.25 card,
etc.  I think there's also an Appletalk card, but I could be wrong.  You
can configure any of these items to be in whatever slot you want.  You also
get to choose whether you want it to run normal or fast, with a typeahead
buffer or not, and with an inverse screen or not.  And you get to set the
system beep.

If you have some little program you'd like me to test it with, I'd be happy
to do that (you mention one, but I'm unfamiliar with it).

Drive warnings:  the card will ONLY support the 5.25 drive (the platinum
one, which Apple still sells and lists for $260, if you can believe that),
and ONLY the Unidisk 3.5" (the white one, not the grey ones often used on
IIgs's) -- I don't know if Apple still sells it, but you can buy it from
places like Sun Computers.  You can daisychain up to two of each.  The card
treats the Mac internal drive (or both internal drives, if you have an
original LC with two floppies) as a regular 3.5" drive too.  

Ivan Drucker
drucker@lclark.edu
Lewis & Clark College, Portland OR