Re: Apple II Flashcard?

[apple2pd@ground.ecn.uiowa.edu (ground.ecn AppleII Librarian)]

In article <aUCDa.60660$x67.2767656@twister.socal.rr.com>,
Bryan Villados <news003@macgeek.org> wrote:
>Has anyone ever seen this card, and possibly have detailed information about
>it? It's a Synetix flashcard:
>
>http://www.macgeek.org/temp/a2flashcard.jpg
>
>It looks to be a very early memory card that acts like a disk-based device.
>I'm curious to see whether or not someone got it to work on ProDOS, will it
>work on a IIgs, etc. I don't have the card/box... I just came across this
>photo.
>

I have 3 of these cards.  I use one in my IIe as a RAMdisk in ProDOS.  It
has been running 24/7 for about 20 years now :-)  I got my first Synetix
SSD (Flashcard) when I was using a II+ and Apple Pascal.  The Pascal
system was much faster and convient using the Flashcard as teh boot
device.  I never could get the SSD to work with Pascal 1.3.

The card came with drivers for DOS3.3, CPM, and Pascal.  ProDOS was not
released yet.  So I wrote my own driver for ProDOS.  The card came as 144K
or 288K.  I have 288K cards (fully populated). The 144K card was only 1/2
populated.  There is no ROM on the board, so all drivers must be OS
resident.  Thus the card was a good candidate for slot3 use in a IIe.

At one time, Plusworks sold a Appleworks utility disk that enabled AW2 and
3 to use the card as a memory card in a II+ or IIe.  (Yes, plusworks
enabled AW2-3 to run on a II+).

 --Steve

-- 

 --Steve  (apple2pd@ground.ecn.uiowa.edu)