Re: Apple II Workstation Card as serial port

[Hugh Hood <hughhood@earthlink.net>]

David,

I bought one of these several months ago for potential use with a netatalk
network and found myself wondering the same things about the serial ports.

As you know, the card uses a Zilog 8530 SCC (same as IIGS), but the
"documentation" of the serial port feature of the card really just mentions
firmware compatibility with the Super Serial Card, and makes no mention of
being able directly to address the 8530 registers or even how to select
which of the two ports to use, other than by some configuration program
included with the software accompanying the card.

There was some mention of more hardware/firmware details on the card being
available in the APDA AppleShare Programmer's Guide for the Apple II that
Sheppy now sells on the Syndicomm site, but I can't confirm that.

Maybe Eric will see this and chime in.

Hugh Hood



in article 3b4c4f1e-bf39-4772-90af-a1c89ffcbd27@t3g2000vbb.googlegroups.com,
schmidtd at schmidtd@my-deja.com wrote on 9/22/10 7:20 PM:

> I picked up one of these the other day.  I had my fun remote booting
> the IIe, but now it's time to get down to business.
> 
> The scant literature about the card indicates that it can be used for
> serial port(s) if you don't feel like networking.  I found some
> software on the disk that will let you set up one of the ports as
> serial, supposedly corresponding to Pascal 1.1 entry points.  That
> didn't happen to work with my code, nor did it respond to the usual
> Ctrl-A/Ctrl-I commands, but that's neither here nor there.  My real
> question is... is there something that you can do with the card, with
> default firmware, to do the equivalent of IN#2 on the SSC or SCC and
> have it listen to data coming over the wire?  Without having to attach
> a 3.5" disk to an Apple IIe?