Re: Apple IIe Enhancement Kit

[Don Bruder <dakidd@sonic.net>]

In article <1112745624.538457.263650@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com>,
 "jkalin196511@yahoo.com" <jkalin196511@yahoo.com> wrote:

> I have a Apple IIe Enhancement Kit on e-Bay, and someone has asked me
> the following question "what effect does the kit have", and to be
> honest I don't have a clue.  It was given to me from a guy off of
> freecycle along with some printers, and a Apple IIe; and since both my
> Apple IIe's are already enhanced I thought I would auction it off on
> e-Bay.
> 
> Can someone tell me exactly what the enhancement kit has in it and what
> it will do? 
> 
> Thanks,
> Jim
> 

Character ROM chip (for the "Mousetext" characters), 2 monitor ROM chips 
that include a couple of bug-fixes and the return of the 
"mini-assembler", plus a 65C02 processor with several machine-language 
instructions that the "regular" 6502 didn't have. 

Overall effect: You can run the "newest, latest, greatest" Apple II 
software that uses the "fancy" stuff - Appleworks and ProTerm are 
probably the two most well known. There are programs that require a 
65C02's extended instruction set to be able to run, while making no use 
of mousetext, but I can't think of what they are at the moment. One 
version of ProDOS will malfunction in a nasty manner (think "potential 
disk corruption") if run on a machine that still has a "plain" 6502, due 
to an accidentally left-in-place 65C02 instruction, but will run fine on 
a 65C02. The last (2? 3?) releases of ProDOS 8 also require a 65C02 if I 
recall rightly, for exactly the same reason (except for them, the 65C02 
instructions were left in intentionally because the 6502-based machines 
had been declared officially obsolete/support for them had been dropped 
by Apple by the time those versions were released)

Aside from "canned" programs that require the "enhanced" 
capabilities/character set, "Joe Average User" will see very little 
diference between an enhanced and an unenhanced machine. The situation 
changes a bit for someone coding in assembly, but not enough to REALLY 
matter, other than the extended instruction set. ROM entry points (the 
"officially documented" ones, anyway) and behavior remain essentially 
unchanged with the exception of a couple bug-swats here and there. Those 
who like to hack together ML routines will find the task a little 
simpler due to the mini-assembler being available. Other than that.... 
<shrug> I can't think of anything else that's different enough to bother 
mentioning.

-- 
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