Re: IIe emulation card ?'s.

[labelas@hotmail.com (Labelas Enoreth)]

In article <jalking-2607991746190001@s08-pm01-hland-t.telis.org>,
jalking@telis.org (Jason A. King) wrote:

> Hi,
>    I'm thinking of adding a IIe emulation card to my Performa 475. I was
> wondering if I can use a Unidisk 800K drive, DuoDisk drive, or standard
> 800k apple disk drive with the card? Are there any limitations between
> drivers for the card and Mac OS software? Is it a good route for IIe
> emulation on a Mac with a 68040 processor? Any advice you have would be
> appreciated and helpful.

Hi! I have that card, the only drives I've ever used with it were the
Apple 3.5 drive (IIgs era) and the Platinum 5.25...I think it may support
the UniDisk 5.25 but I don't think it supports the UniDisk 3.5. I think
you can also use an external superdrive if you have it. The DuoDisk is not
supported though. Oh, and neither is the original Disk II (if you used one
of those converters to adapt it to the newer smartport type plug)...I'm
not sure about the mac 800k drive (if that's what you have) but I don't
see why not, other than the fact that it will be controlled totally by the
card and thus you will be unable to eject the disk other than via the
'paperclip hole'

As for it being good, yes, I'd say it's probably the fastest and most
accurate method of IIe emulation on a 68k machine, plus, you can use real
disks, drives, and joystick/paddles, the mouse and all your mac
peripherals are seamlessly integrated as opposed to roundabout methods
used in many emulators...Plus, it runs in fast and normal mode as well. (3
and 1 Mhz, I believe, though it could be 2, maybe...)
Also, it is very easy to get software for it, simply make a prodos
partition on your HD (which admittedly is probably the most difficult
step, because it needs to be a 'hard partition' not a soft partition,
which rules out disk images and the like)...[if you need any help, email
me, I can probably answer any problems you'll run into setting it up.]
However, you could also add a small external SCSI drive dedicated to the
IIe card as well, if you wanted...or prodos partition a zip disk if you
have a zip drive (which is a pain, but can be worth it)...anyway...because
you can just download things from the internet and copy them right over to
the drive, unshrink them using shrink II or unbinscii them...if you need
to, use DSK2FILE to restore them to an original 5.25 disk if they need to
be run from the disk, or else just then copy the contents over to the the
hard drive or a 3.5 disk...and you can even double-click the programs from
the finder in order to launch them, (and copy, delete, etc...) which is
wonderful if you've been mac-bound for so long that you don't remember the
intricacies of prodos...

The only flaw is that the IIe card is not compatible with 32-bit
addressing or any version of MacOS that forces 32-bit on all the time (7.6
I think?). And there are a few small incompatibilities that I remember
offhand with some Apple II software that try to do things directly to the
hardware...