Re: Found a Vulcan HD!

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

btomlin@NOSPAM.texas.net (Bruce Tomlin) wrote:

>I found a IIgs in back and popped the lid (who 
>wouldn't?)  I saw what looked like an internal hard drive mounted in a 
>power supply, and the cable was 40 pins.  The controller board said 
>"Vulcan" on it.
>
>What it looks like is an IDE controller card!  The large number of TTL bus 
>buffer chips on the controller board seems to confirm this.  The drive was 
>40 megs, but didn't have an OS on it.  I guess that's because the GS RAM 
>Plus card only had 1 meg on it.  I installed 6.0.1 and upgraded the RAM to 
>2 megs and it booted right up and I connected to my Power Mac with 
>Appletalk.  It also had a "Sonic Blaster" audio digitizer card in it.

The Sonic Blaster is a demultiplexing as well as a sound input card.
Connect a set out amplified speakers to the card's output and you'll
find it decodes the stereo sound output from the IIGS motherboard.
The Sonic Blaster also has an amplifier on the card, so you can
connect non-amplified speakers to it too.  You'll need to adjust the
volume controls on the card if you do this.

You should find a stereo input and a stereo output for the card.

>Anyhow, I happily paid $80 for it, and along with it came a IIgs monitor 
>(no cable, but I got a spare a few days before), an Imagewriter II 
>(they're a dime a dozen these days), a 3.5 drive, a third-party 5.25 
>drive, an ADB mouse, an Apple II mouse (is this the same pinout as the Mac 
>Plus mouse?)

The ADB mouse is the same pinout as the Mac ADB mouse.
ADB was released with the IIGS then later used on Macs.

The "Apple II" mouse (as in IIe or IIc mouse) has the is compatible
with Mac Plus and earlier.  It may or may not work with the IIGS
running GS/OS (on a ROM 3 under GS/OS, the older non-ADB
IIe/IIc/Mac Plus-and-earlier mouse is non-functional).

>the original power supply and filled Apple RAM card, and 
>assorted manuals, including the ones for the Sonic Blaster and the GS RAM 
>Plus.  (But no Vulcan manual.)
>
>So now I have two IIgs's with hard drives!  I'm probably going to swap 
>parts around and put the Vulcan drive in the same machine with the 
>TransWarp.  I wonder how big an IDE drive I can put in the thing.

Physically in the case?  Any 3.5" hard drive, IDE or SCSI.  The
controller only supports an IDE hard drive with like number of
cylinders and heads, though.

http://www.allelec.com/ Alltech Electronics sells an IDE hardcard
called the Focus.  The smallest model costs $59, but the
controller on the hardcard can support IDE drives up to 2GB.
With the right cable, this card can drive your replacement drive.
Actually, in Alltech's older advertisements, they promised to
sell the controller to Vulcan users without a 2.5" hard drive
attached for a lower price.  I'm not sure if they went through with
selling the drive like that.

>So how reliable is the HFS FST in 6.0.1?  I had heard of a fixed HFS FST 
>in a 6.0.1 disk image on a web site, but there was no indication whether 
>this was the standard 6.0.1 FST or a newer one rolled into it.

The HFS FST in System 6.0.1, once you apply the patch, is
quite stable.  I use HFS almost exclusively (when you have
a 1GB hard drive, it is almost mandatory if you want to avoid
a desktop full of icons...with HFS, I've enjoyed the space a
large hard drive provides...I have over 500MB of the drive filled
up with IIGS goodies).  I have had no problems with it except
for the time when one of my drives physically failed.  Ironically,
I found out that my *PRODOS* backup was corrupted but my
HFS one was not!  The moral of the story is to back up often
and to make sure the backups are good.

>If I put in a drive of a couple hundred megs, I don't want two dozen 
>partitions cluttering the desktop.  Just a Prodos boot and big HFS 
>partition would be enough.

I recommend two ProDOS partitions and two HFS partitions.
The first ProDOS partition to boot with.  The second one for
8-bit applications.  The first HFS partition to store your stuff
with.  The second HFS partition as a backup of the files from
all your other partitions.

>But I guess I wouldn't be able to take the IDE 
>drive to a Mac to run Disk First Aid on it every now and then.

Actually, many of the newer PowerMacs have IDE hard drives.
Just connect the drive from the Vulcan to the second IDE
channel of the Mac's controller.