Re: How I got interested in the Apple ][...

[ferdimh@gmx.de]

> Let's hear your stories....
Yes, I'll tell.
I've got a brother who is 16 years older than me. He has had a (I
think russian) Apple //e clone and used it until ~1994. That's when I
can remember seeing the apple ][ first (I was 4 years old...). This
was when my brother just typed in a long program and ran it and it
outputted a screen full of zeroes. (Note that I haven't seen a IBM PC
before!) My brother didn't like this infinite loop because he hadn't
saved the program and one can't abort a PASCAL program by hitting
RESET. (I know that now, I didn't know that back then...)
Then my brother moved away but left the Apple here. Around 2000 he
took it out of the attic, and fired it up for testing. I still found
it a very interesting machine, but he wanted to keep it, so he took it
home (600 km!).
The next time I saw an Apple was when I was asked if I wanted to have
2 "very old computers" from school (2006). First I wanted to sell
them, but then I fired them up with a friend of mine. Nothing was in
workable order. Both monitors were out of working order and the disk
drives failed too. I started fixing the monitors (I have acquired some
electronic repair skills from my father), fixed a bad solder joint on
one and a broken contrast pot on the other. Time to try again. A sign
of living! I got "Apple //e" on-screen and one drive was spinning, but
it wouldn't boot. The first try was to swap drives one and two and
got a boot! The other one worked out-of-the box (for a short time,
until the power supply failed). I started reading  the manuals and
learned programming in Applesoft. At that point I didn't want to sell
it any more. Half a year a later I wanted more. I opened up the blown
power supply, but was unable to repair it, so I designed a linear type
power supply capable of delivering 10Amps on 5V and 6 Amps on 12V. I
knew that would be oversized, but I had the transformer handy. I gave
this one to a friend who has a NTSC TV (which is unusual, because I
live in Germany...). The other had PAL color output.
BASIC is very slow, and on a slow machine I didn't want to have a slow
language. I borrowed the PASCAL disk from my brother, but ran into
trouble trying to read it because the disk format was not original
disk ][. It was written using normal Shugart DD drives with 80 tracks
on 2 sides. This made me take a closer look at the disk drive. The
copy of "Beneath Apple DOS" I got with the Apples helped a lot, but
was not sufficcient. So I searched the net for more info, and found a
very active community, but no info about that strange format.
I found that there is a lot of Apple ][ software on the net, and I
also found out how to transfer it to the Apple ][.
Then I had to learn 6502 assembly language, which proved to be not too
difficult because I've got a lot of 8088 Assembly language.
I have designed a compatible drive which connects to a normal disk ]
[ controller using a ROM state machine. I chose to use 3.5'' disk
drives since the disks are much easier to get now.
WIth great help from the community I managed to get a ProDOS driver
going (which my brother didn't have).
Thank you for that!
And every time I finish one Apple ][ project I start with two more.
This is what I want to do in the future:
 - Simple network games over NadaNet
 - Fast software UART over the Game I/O socket ("NadaSSC")
 - Replica of the Disk ][ controller to be able to connect more drives
(at the moment I can use 3.5'' OR 5.25'' drives...)
 - Interfacing the Disk ][ to an IBM PC
 - Cloning the SSC
 - Cloning the whole Apple //e, involving some redesign (e.g. a REAL
50Hz display mode)

I always want to do everything my own way, so I don't like to copy
other's design. I think this is the best way to learn something.
These projects will be enough work for the next years I think....

---
Ferdinand Meyer-Hermann from Germany