Re: Apple 2 Where/How much

[labelas@hotmail.com (Labelas Enoreth)]

> Don't forget about the LC //e card that runs in any Mac LC computer with
> a 680x0 processor and an LC PDS.  It's basically an enhanced //e on a
> card the size of a pocket calculator.  It runs at either 1 or 2 Mhz, and
> uses the Mac video and speaker, as well as its 3.5" floppy.
Aw, you mean 'Faster' is only 1Mhz faster? And here I was thinking big...

>   The cards themselves are not too hard to find, but the funny cable
> that plugs into it and splits off for a 5.25" floppy drive and Joystick
> are a little scarcer.  If nobody else has the pinouts for that cable,
> one of my winter projects is to map out the pinouts on my LC //e "Y"
> cable so that others can make their own...
Yep. I agree. I only managed to get one out of sheer luck. And I had had
the stupid card for quite some time before that. Silly me assumed that the
5.25 would plug right into it when I first glanced at it. Then again, the
card and cable were both free, so I guess I didn't really miss out on
much.
BTW, I think that a lot of the LC PDS cards used that silly 'Cable that
splits into many' with the three rows of pins (right? not going to unscrew
and doublecheck)...I think it was because of the small space alotted in
the back of the LC case. I mean, an ethernet card could just have it right
there, but, for instance, my PAS16 has the same kind of plug and it goes
out to this big ol' patch panel (and one time I forgot which card I had in
and was trying to plug the IIe adaptor cable into the PAS...whew, glad
nothing bad happened.)

Some problems I've noticed with the IIe PDS card, anyone want to contribute...?

32-bit addressing. One needs to turn it off before using the card, which
sucks if you have more than 8Mb of RAM...multiple restarts to do things.
Also why the IIe is not supported in the 040s

Disk drive problems. I'm not the only one, a friend of mine has had lots
of problems as well. Maybe it's the software, or maybe a revision of the
card, but...it will always read fine and access the drives, but a lot of
times when writin it will fail in some way or (in his case and mine
occasionally) all the drives will be marked write-protected for no reason.
Which was why I couldn't use AppleWorks for quite some time...kept
reporting that I needed to unlock the disk even though it was...

ProDOS partitions are a pain to make, unless you like reformatting your
internal HD or have and extra HD laying around. I recommend extended
eye-gouging rather than trying to format a Zip with a ProDOS partition. Or
any removable media for that matter.