Re: AE PC Transporter Questions

[Sean Fahey <a2fan@hotmail.com>]

On Tuesday, November 20, 2012 12:00:37 PM UTC-6, Tempest wrote:

> 1. How rare are they and how expensive would it be to get a working setup (card and disk drives)

Three to five individual PCTs show up on eBay on average per year. They've sold for $75 to as high as over $300 mostly depending on if they came with TransDrives or not. If you look hard, you'll see two or three included with a system (usually a IIGS).

> 2. How compatible is the card with games?  I'd be interested in running very old PC games on it, not productivity software.  I assume as long as the game followed IBM's standards it would run.

Compatibility is excellent if you're using the old Lotus/dBase/Flight Simulator model for testing. I've only had problems with obscure commercial software and crap that wants a dongle - even when I had the dongle, the translation wasn't quite right.
 
> 3. Is it true you have to use special 5.25" drives with the card?  Are those drives impossible to find now?

TransDrives are much harder to find than the card itself. See:

http://osites.tripod.com/transport.html
http://osites.tripod.com/driv.html

> I know it's just cheaper to keep an old PC around, but I really would like to try this. :)

PCTs are FUN and one of my main interests in Apple II tinkering so I understand completely your motivation. You can run CP/M in addition to various versions of MS-DOS (I recommend 3.30) and there a ton of app and games out there to explore.