David Wilson wrote:
Michael J. Mahon wrote:David Wilson wrote:The model 312 was only about 95% software compatible with the IIe. Replacing the ROMs with genuine IIe firmware bought it up to 99% with the following differences:Hard to see why they would shrink from copying the ROMs after they'd illegally used the ASICs!The MPF-III actually has 3x 8KB ROMs. The usual CD & EF (with the C0xx range mapped into C1xx space to support the on-board parallel port). The extra ROM was mapped into A000..BFFF when required (the rest of the printer code lives there) along with BASIC extensions and the self test code).
That's a *lot* of extra ROM--almost enough to have DOS on board!
MPF-III BASIC has additional keywords not found in Applesoft: BASS 0-8 (stop,waltz,rumba,tango,march,cha-cha,blues,rock,swing) EFFECT 0-3 (whistling bomb,explosion,laser gun,machine gun) INSTR 1-4 (piano,bell,xylophone,organ) PLAY buffer,rhythm SONG tone,length TEMPO 1-15 (640-52 beats/sec) These are to control the on-board AY-3-8912 PSG chip.
Wow! So yet another non-standard extension that was supported by essentially zero software! It's easy to see why they thought it would be fun, though. ;-)
The keyboard also has 12 function keys which can have user defined strings assigned to them (the keyboard is actually 8-bit with the 8th bit read at another location).
Yes, I've seen several of these keyboards in the surplus market. -michael New, faster SUDOKU v2.0 solver for Apple II's! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."