Re: REQ: Info on Franklin Ace 2200

[scraft@bigpapa.nothinbut.net ()]

>>I recently acquired two Apple II systems, one is a IIc, the other is a
>>Franklin Ace 2200.  It has two floppy drives in the system unit and a
>>Franklin green screen monitor, but no software.  I assume it's an Apple II
>>compatible?  (vs. IIc or IIe?)  Can anyone provide me with more info on
>>this beast
>
>Well, my Franklin Ace 1000's are basically ][+'s, so the 2200 is
>probably something better than THAT, anyway.

The Ace 2200 is somewhere between a IIe and a IIc and a PC.  Franklin
always gave a little bit "more" for the dollar.  :)

There are read and write lights on the floppy drive.  You'd be
amazed at what games were actually writing data to the hard drive
(what we'd call a pagefile/Vm these days?) when you thought it 
was supposed to be loading something...  The double-hires light
flipped on whenever aux memory was "locked on", so sometimes
in Wings of Fury the ligth would be on although the game itself
was hires only.  The CPU light was cool, we need more of those,
I think only the BeBox has one now.

OK, on to something useful.

The base 2200 (I read about 2000s and 2100s but never saw one) has
128k of RAM.  You have to get some kind of special RAM chip (I
never figured out what the chip spec was) to increase the memory
to 640k, I think it emulated all "slot0" memory so you could use 
it in AppleWorks or ProTERM, but not as a RAM disk like RAM5-
type memory expander cards.

There are DIP switches inside for what you want to set in terms of
the internal slots.  One was 2/7 and the other was 4/5 or something
like that.  So it's like a IIe or Laser 128 series in that respect,
but the ports on the back are identical to the "standards of
the day", ie Superserial and Epson APL.

The CPU was a 65sC02a, not quite the rock-hard 65c02(a?) you'd
get in a IIe or IIc, and this made some games incompatible.  I mean
things like crash unpn bootup, so you'd know immediately what worked
and what did not.  :)  Then again, it might have been the other
parts that were looking for "II trueness" that was crashing.
Cracked programs with the Tom-e-Hawk Boot never worked on the 
2200.

The speaker sounded better than the IIe/c, and the text chars looked
better.  But games like Star Fleet I were weird in text mode, since
instead of torpedoes being represented by apples, they were represented
by "F"s, whch *really* didn't look like torpedoes.  :)  That 
reminds me of something else.  There is a switch in the back for
MouseText or standard characters.  In this day and age, keep it
on MouseText, it affect something elsebesides text, and you want it
on always.

Time to run along now.  My memory is particularly hazy on the slots
thing, so Your Mileage May Vary.  One day I gotta get one of those
again, I was "born" on a 1000 and lived on a 2200 and then Laser...







-- 


"If you could sell your worries,			Kid
 would anyone buy 'em?"					Steve Craft
 O{+>							scraft@nothinbut.net