Re: Apple/IBM Trackstar knowledge??

[wernst@cris.com (Warren "Llama" Ernst)]

kilroy@bham.mindspring.com (Jeff Vaughn) wrote:

>deth@magna.com.au (Deth) wrote:
>
>***Oi!
>***     I've got an old Trackstar downstairs from about '87 that runs
>***both Apple II and IBM software. Its housed in an old XT, with 2 floppy
>***drives, EGA card. Does anyone have any knowledge about this cause I
>***was wondering, if I changed the Trackstar card into a 286, which it
>***will work in, and if the 286 has a hard drive, is it possible for me
>***to use the HD for Apple Software??? Thanks for any help.
>
> A hard drive on an old Apple? Is it possibile? I thought the Uni-Drive was
>their greatest achievement (grin).
>
>Kilroy
>(The Apple Collective)

If Kilroy is for real, then I'd say the Apple Collective is off to a
bad start. Old apples can use hard drives - but ProDOS has a max size
limit of 32 meg per partition. However, SCSI drives work fine, as do
IDE with  AE's Vulcan drives, plus there were a couple of propriatary
formats.

Anyway, regarding the trackstar; since you have the Older Model with
the EGA port, I'm not sure you can move it to another machine that
DOESN'T have an EGA monitor. But, if your 286 has an EGA, then you're
all set. As for using a hard drive with it, I'm afraid I don't know.

I have the last of the trackstar models, the Trackstar Plus, which
uses VGA, a hard disk emulation, clock chip, joystick and apple disk
II support, and even basic network support. It is sitting in my P-100
and runs just fine in Widows 95. Still, for some tasks, the software
emulators work better or have less trouble, so the Trackstar Plus is
no silver bullet. The Pass-through VGA connector makes resolutions
beyond 640x480 fuzzy, it doesn't use the full 128k exactly like my
real Apple IIe's do, there's no mouse support, and transferring single
files from the Apple to the PC side is very slow and labor-intensive;
its a one-file-at-a-time affair.

Wish I could have been more helpful reguarding the old trackstar.

Virtually,
Warr
former Beagle Bros tech support
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