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Re: 1) CF Focus 2) Ciderpress

Hello John.

> Have you ever heard of older Focus cards which are not compatible with
> CF cards? (I haven't but wondered..)

I personally have not heard of any issues other then with some of the very 
first CF Cards produced, but that had nothing to do with the Focus 
Controller.  I think the CF Cards were specificaly designed for the digital 
cameras they came with rather then to the later evolved CF standards.  Now 
that it's almost 10 years later very few of those cards still remain in use 
today or at least I think as I've only ever seen one in person.

I'm not really a Focus Card 'expert' so maybe someone else would want to 
coment?  Technally speacking though, as long as the CF Card works on your 
PC's USB reader then it should work on any Apple II IDE Controller with a CF 
Adapter.  In fact I've had CF Cards I thought were good and worked on the 
MicroDrive to where I could partiton them, but when it came time to load the 
volume images from Cider Press on my PC they failed.  From what I cermize 
the MicroDrive utility just writes to the boot sector where as CiderPress 
restores each scector from the image to the CF Card.  Hence, a 32 Meg image 
on my PC's Hard Drive from CiderPress.

On a side note, the 'raw' CiderPress images are 32 Megs but a simple ZIP or 
RAR will compress them to only a fraction of that size.  Great tip if you 
want to email images or post them for downloading!


> Have you ever talked to the guys at Sparkfun - they seem pretty
> helpful on the web site anyway. They describe, for example, how to
> make your own solder masks for low volume in house surface boards.
> Pretty cool.

Thanks for that lead.  I'll have to check them out.  The last few proto type 
PCBs I've worked (Yes I'm still working with them Ryan! :-P ) with were all 
surface mount and laying out the solder paste by hand is really starting to 
become a major pain.  Last time I priced masks they were in the order of 
$100+ bucks.  Although they were designed specifically for your PCB and not 
just something generic.


-- 
Henry S. Courbis
www.GSE-Reactive.com
Legacy Hardware and Support - Come take a look at what we have to offer!