Osgeld

I am going to have to keep an eye out for you, you seem to have quality machines with more than fair prices, and a high rep around the forums ... now just gotta wait for "that something special" to appear. No clue what that is, but I will know it when I see it hehe

agreed, next time

just chcek the caps before shotgunning it, look for puffyness, leaking, burning etc, to be totally sure you would need to remove them and test them, but at that point replacing nearly 30 year old caps seems wise also check for any broken/cracked/loose solder connections and reseat any socketed chips

since this thing is in a nutshell an arduino it uses this library for SD card handling http://code.google.com/p/sdfatlib/ which supports fat 16, and fat32, SDHC cards, but only 8.3 filenames

I am hoping to start getting them out in may, currently 2 weeks away from even getting the enclosures, and having them machined (hopefully not by me) , meanwhile I do have one of the PCB's hooked up and its just software polishing until then. the inital batch is only 10 units, if there is enough demand I will do another, likewise the design is/will be open source I just have not released final anything yet, outside the SD card one could make it using though hole parts and perfboard if they wanted ps: the realtime clock in that demo is not on the unit, its a costly option that has very little use outside of timestamping your files

just for giggles I had some yuts tell me to put like 2 hard drives in a cardboard USPS envolpe and ship it to him in scottland "cause its never been a problem" I refused ... stuff in the system gets tossed around quite a darn bit, just becuase of the speed and volume, well packed may be ok for packing it in a van and driving around but it should be a TANK if its physically fragile and going through a postal or delevery service if it has any signifigant mass.

Ki-cad has a auto place feature, its much like autorouting, slow, somewhat unpredictable, and you usually have to go back and change most of it. Though it is handy when laying out things on perfboard, cause you can put your grid spacing at .1 and say go at it as it flips n rotates ... even then you got to fiddle with it as it does not seem that intellegent ... ie if you feel that a large dip part would be better going tall than wide you got to do it yourself

its a simple machine ... and its nothing to design exactly what you want in terms of hardware and software for it for example you can just write crap and have it talk direct on the io-card bus, vs other machines which were hidden behind a small pile of micro controllers ie C64. A 64 is great when you want to do awesome sound and graphics, but you dont have 7 slots directly connected to a cpu, you have 1

I have a performa430 (LCII) I would not mind ditching 120meg HD 10meg ram (actually 12 but it maxes at 10) pay shipping, be glad to check it all out for you, as I have only booted it a couple times heck I will toss in a 2 gb drive (its loud as crap, but functions fine)

does it have the trackball for slither?

yea I gave 15 bucks for my iic, plus shipping the IIC+ has the internal power supply and a 4Mhz zip chip stock, but is a pain in the butt without an external 5.25 inch drive as the majority of // software is on the 140k disks

max out its ram, get a scsi cd rom, and a larger hard disk thats what I did with my 800k floppy SE, the cd rom seems overkill but its easier than a pile of floppys or waiting on modem transfer on large programs or a bunch of mid sized ones

got the pcb's http://osgeld.a2hq.com/2013/04/05/pcbs-in-hand/

anyone wants a set of what seems to be new original joysticks I snagged a pair a while back thinking they were something else and have no use for them

hah says the guy that kicks in the thread moaning about nekbeads not giving him instant gratification

cause they have been there since the 90's and forums come and go, but yet the usenet group has been there for decades as a common ground? I like atari age, I like forums, but I have been able to access the usenet group from when my apple II was still a market selling PC, sorry no forum hosted by a private entity can match that at this time

and no 3rd grader is going to benifit from reading a pdf of outdated material for a computer that no longer exists, so take your bag of fail and sack it

theres the arcade board for the apple II, its a TMS chip but hardly any software supported it otherwise there are some semi-crappy micro solutions avialable, I have a 240x200 NTSC mono display running on a atmega1284, the propeller can push multicolor VGA, both from interal processes

there is more to atari age than atari, and if you have not noticed I stick to coleco, sega, classic computers, and hardware, all are in atari age

you have tons of texts for the apple 2, I find books useless when I want to get something done... need a poke, would you rather google a text file, hit f3 and be done, or read 2 chapters to do the same? again another minus for books, we know what these machines are capible of, if we get stuck at least we can ask someone decades later also I am NOT against making archives of books, but "I want to read half a book to make a tone" doesnt make the argument of " i want to get stuff done" when its the third link on google 10 FOR L = 770 TO 790: READ V: POKE L,V: NEXT L 20 DATA 173,48,192,136,208,5,206,1,3,240,9 30 DATA 202,208,245,174,0,3,76,2,3,96

and theres tons of it for apple, its not all formatted in a pretty pdf but every single aspect of the machine is out there with as many ways to do it as possible on a limited machine I think you understand it best, its one step above an altar, how many switches can you toggle before it is all known, that still gets pushed, but not in great leaps n bounds as later "game systems with a keyboard" which have greater capibility and mystry

the thing is IMO the lack of elder books really opens up creativity sure its an apple II, your not going to make an XL quality demo with the machine no matter how greybeard jesus your are, but without the limitations and restrictions of the past your almost more free to pull some more bull with what you have. again your not going to write a 1st place compo using basic for 3rd graders, and your going to have to dig deeper than the skin that is the available documentation. other platforms have books, we have people... I find people much more dynamic and interactive

This is a long drawn out story so bear with me... Back what seems an eternity(2012) ago, a comp2.sys.apple2 user named Ricarrdo pointed out a dead in the water project that allowed a specific revision apple IIGS to go out the serial port, hit a windows program, read a hard disk image and return it like it was a nativly installed hard disk. Not knowing much about it and asking questions I found the authors home page http://apple2.boldt....=terserialdrive and messed around with it, not getting too far. Luckily David Schmidt of ADTPro fame took an interest and bolted on ADT pro's magic serial drivers (along with ethernet drivers) which not only increased speeds from 19200 to 115200 but made it compatible with every classic apple //, IIgs and apple /// the day that was released, now a part of the standard ADT pro package, I wanted to make a stand alone box, so my apple II would not have to be tied to a big honkin windows/linux/osx PC. darn well knowing this software driver was not compatible with many applications, I felt that as a rom 255 IIc owner, meaning no slots, that some mass storage was better than none at all. I set about porting the software to an AVR micro using a standard SD card as storage. Originally dated for October 2012, I have been absolutley slammed at work so here it is, darn near April of 2013 and I have 10 final PCB's and enclosures in the mail, a machinest to mill the enclosures, open source schematics, and soon to be released firmware to provide the virtual serial drive's server software in a small stand alone box. Goal # 2 is to keep it under 50 bucks (before shipping) which is well within target. Goal #3 is to provide ADT pro support so I can image a disk direct to SD card, or download an image file to SD card and copy direct to 5.25 140k floppy, but its not fully functional of this writing. There has been numorous postings on https://groups.googl...comp.sys.apple2 mostly mirroring activity on http://osgeld.a2hq.com/

sorry friend you missed the point, you moan about not having books when there is at least a dozen people online every single day at https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/comp.sys.apple2 that will do just about anything to share information, resources, code and knoledge, while nearly bending over backwards to make your apple 2 project a sucess becuase you cant get a copy of compute sorry your too lazy to enjoy the fruits available

lets define your point first was it though theres an active community that will tell you exactly what you want to know with no effort? or was it cause those neckbeards in the ghetto will point you directly to what you need to know in eactly what file you need to have to get that information? or was it even though when I rejoined 5 years ago there has been plenty of new faces, sometimes weekly? maybe if you dropped the attidue that its a bunch of grumpy old farts clinging to their COMPLETELY USELESS 25 YEAR OLD BOOKS you would involve yourself and find out how to do something with the A2 other than bitch an moan on how kids that dont care (meaning you) cant program it?