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Apple IIe - enhancement kit installed and BBSing


deepthaw

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IMG_7994.thumb.JPG.a466a0a99c31df5dd2505c5f75f22b75.JPGAfter a month or so of waiting, the enhancement kit (consisting of four replacement roms and a 65C02 CPU) for my Apple IIe arrived. I decided to save a bit over ordering from Reactive Micro by buying it from a seller on Ebay, which was a mistake. It certainly appears to be vintage (which I honestly don't care about) but it took a month to arrive and was packed in such a way that the pins on half the ROMs were badly crushed. I'm shocked I was able to bend them all back into place without snapping any off.

 

The enhancement kit made the IIe a bit more compatible with the IIc. It adds new characters (MouseText), a CPU upgrade (65C02 from 6502) and some other minor tweaks. The big deal for me was compatibility with ProTerm, a terminal software. I was ready to plug the WiModem232 in and flash back to my prime BBSing days when ... I realized I need a gender changer.

 

Change of plans. I already have the IIe hooked up to my Raspberry Pi for ADTPro so I figured I'd get the Pi to act like a modem. This was much easier than I expected (so easy, that in retrospect I kind of wasted my money on the WiModem232) and basically consisted of using the serial <-> usb cables I already had hooked up, doing a quick compile from a git repo and running "tcpser -s 19200 -d /dev/ttyUSB0."

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And success! Spent a bit of time poking around the Captain's Quarters BBS, which I believe is running from an actual Apple II. I also tried visiting a few other BBS's I frequent (The Agency and The Black Flag) but none of them really work well from an Apple II. They're targeted towards the ANSI-heads of the mid 90's, and the poor Apple IIe just can't display or send the characters their menus expect. Tonight or tomorrow I'll telnet into the Pi and try using Alpine, Lynx and other tools to browse the Intarwebs.

 

Next up on the TODO list: I have a BOOTI preordered, which will let me mount a USB drive as a hard drive (and then I can run stuff like the Total Replay game collection.) Then I need to get a Mockingboard or Phazor for sound. I'm still slowly playing my way through Wizardry too - don't want to jump to Ultima III before I have a Mockingboard.

 

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