Re: Laser 128 to Laser monitor connection?

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

REMOVE_CAPSgcifu@hughes.net (Greg Cifu) wrote:

>Actually I have the AppleColor as well as GS monitors. The fact is that
>I'm collecting these and I like to match up OEM parts where possible. I
>understand that the Laser was (in some respects) a superior performer to
>vanilla Apple IIs but my TransWarp GS serves my real Apple 2 needs quite
>well. I'm not actually looking to use any of the Lasers but to match them
>up.

While it is not going to outperform a TransWarp GS, the Laser 128EX/2
was a very good computer.  It had a 3.5" Chinon disk drive built in and
the floppy port could control up to four drives, which could be GS drives,
UniDisk drives, Mac drives (without the eject button) and even floppy port
hard drives.  It had one slot on the side where you can plug in a standard
Apple II expansion card.  The EX/2 also had 1MB worth of memory
expansion built in, ready to populate with memory chips.  It had a clock/
calender chip powered by a NiCad rechargeable battery pack.  The port 2
firmware was switchable between the RS232 serial interface and the MIDI
interface.  The port 1 firmware was switchable between an RS232 serial
interface and a Centronics parallel interface.  The computer had non-cache
based acceleration and could be set to roughly match one of three Apple
II computers -- the IIc Plus, the GS, and the IIe.  Of interest is the order
of the ports.  Laser orders them differently than Apple -- port 7 holds the
3.5" drives and port 5 holds either the 1MB memory expansion or the all
purpose expansion slot.