Why are Apple II users "different"?

[Keatah]

A lot of the publications were indeed more exciting than the software. The titles that were memorable were so because they (to me) pioneered some new graphics rendering technique or did something never seen before. And it was the simpler titles that had great replay value. Games like Star Blazer or Gorgon or Snake Byte were a blast to play! We all knew the II series had no graphics capabilities beyond the processor plotting a pixel. No fills, limited sprite capability in the form of shape tables - even then that was a firmware program and not hardware. It was those games that could scroll a background or generally do complex graphics that had excited me.

 

But all that aside, the magazines and newsletters were written with a sense of wonder and stimulated the creative process, by helping you think about what could be possible.. Something that is not present in today's publications. Not by a longshot. Today's rags are all about comparisons and media and its delivery, and how cost-effective something is. I'm not impressed!

 

Additionally, I always found it a thrill to see what new capabilities could be added by hardware. Though little of the then-available hardware enhanced the gaming experience. It was usually stuff like printer interfaces, modems, clocks, 80-column display boards, and ram expansions that were the norm in the early days of the II series.

Edited September 20, 2011 by Keatah

[potatohead]

Yeah, that comment rings true for me.

 

As an avid Atari and Apple user back in the day, I found the differences striking at times. Apples cost a lot. There was no getting around this. Ataris cost a lot too, in the beginning. Apples stayed fairly expensive throughout.

 

The closed Atari scene stunted the kinds of writing seen related to the Apple. It got better for sure, with Byte, Creative Computing, COMPUTE, others jumping in, giving the Atari plenty of love. Same with most 8 bitters.

 

Early on though, the Apple was just open, and it was simple, and I think that just sparked the desire to do stuff. In terms of graphics, the Apple had just enough to get it done before double-high res. When double high-res hit, some companies, like Borderbund made good use of it. Apple games looked fairly cool then, but it was clear there were display speed issues, with visuals well managed to make the most of the CPU only graphics.

 

I think the other defining thing was many Apple computers were fairly well equipped. Since they cost a lot, it made no sense to just get the minimum. Might as well get a nice one and be done with it. Disks were fast too.

 

Adding stuff was a big deal, as was doing simple mods to the machine. That clearly influenced how people dealt with the machines. Plugging stuff into Ataris was the equivalent. Neither one better, just different.

 

The great thing was people tried doing ANYTHING on Apple computers. Some of it went badly, a lot of it turned out just fine, with the raw graphics being just enough to get something golden on the screen, fun, etc...

 

For doing things, besides gaming, Apples were just great. A well equipped one could be a publishing station, with lots of interesting software out there, exploring all sorts of ideas. That influenced the writing too, in that there was a "serious" note to things, creative too, hackish at times.

 

I just played a little Ultima V this weekend. The disks still boot just fine. I don't have a mocking board, so it was just the little odd clicks and chirps I remember well. Little, tiny differences in that sound meant a lot! It's a experience very similar to the Atari, in that overall nostalga. Love it. Here's something, I guess:

 

The very first time I played "Star Raiders", I was moved. Still play that one, and it's still great!

 

On the Apple, "Ultima" was similar. (I jumped on Ultima II) It just worked for that computer, because of how the Hi-Res screen attributes made all the colors available. Looked great, played great, stood against the other machines, satisfying.

 

Another experience was this great 2D animation thing. "Tweening" was the word they used. You could define shapes and paths, and then ask it to "tween" between them, producing some very intriguing art. Lots of stuff like that on Apple computers. The interesting thing was it appeared and saw use, despite the limitations. People did everything with those hi-res screens! Patterns here and there made for different colored displays. Page-flipping made most displays possible, though sometimes crappy. I think the simple nature of the machine just brought the best out in people. No custom chips, etc... Just write the code and the challenge was to put it on screen in a way that was compelling, where on newer machines, it was exploit the chips, sometimes detracting from or influencing the development overall.

 

Again, neither superior. That's not my point. Just different, which is.

[Keatah]

We, me and my buddies, when we first got the II+, it took us like 5 hours to figure out what an RF modulator was and another 3 hours to find a store that had one they could sell us. Ugggh! This II+ was also an endless source of debate as to why the shitbox 2600 being just a game system always seemed to have better graphics than a real computer costing 10x the amount and having all sorts of hardware and "sophistication" built into it. We'd cozy up in sleeping blankets and debate this till 2 am in the morning, with popcorn, and Carl Sagan's Cosmos playing on those 300 Kg VCR abominations, never really understanding the concepts we were bandying about.

 

OHH shit!! I remember now, THAT's were I put my two best Astronomy books. One is titled the Solar System, from National Geographic, or Scientific American. And the other is a physics-like text with all sorts of charts and a stylized black hole on the cover - a thick and proper text book way beyond our understanding - just titled ASTRONOMY. Cool. I remember I used the books for filler material to help ensure the chips stayed seated. I bet that specific II+ still works fine.

 

 

However, While I was in the 70's and 80's I always thought the Apple II was the start of an era. But today I am thinking it was more like the END of an era. The end of a time when computers had to do all the work by themselves. What I mean by that is the uP had no help from intelligent peripherals.

The 1541 and 810 are intelligent peripherals. These drives manage their own stepper motors, and power on/off to the spindle motor. Buffering and timing calculations are done on the drive by a real microprocessor, and things like that. The host computer just sends a request for data and waits for the drive to put it on the bus.

Not so in the Apple II series. The Disk ][ drive sits there like an idiot, waiting to be bossed by the main 6502. The RWTS software on the host machine controls every aspect of the drive; the spindle, the track/stepper motor, the r/w protect switch. All the sector timing and mapping.. All of it! ..is handled by the main 6502 in the Apple II itself!

 

This "philosophy" (though it was a necesary design contraint then) was prevalent with the Silentype printer, the serial/parallel cards and some other early interface boards. A nice thing was that the boards often contained a ROM on them that the main 6502 would access. And in it would be a little program that, when run, made the card do it's thing. Any card that had this would appear to the user as an intelligent peripheral.

Some of the first cards that had real processing power on them were modems (implemented through simple logic and complex firmware) and clock cards. The clock cards were the first to have a uP on them and simply spit data back when asked. The clock cards needed to be totally independent from the main cpu. Modems quickly gained that level of functionality once speeds eclipsed 600 baud and higher. The main 6502 simply could not run user software and guarantee timing accuracy necessary for serial communications above 600 baud.

This was one of the unique features of the Apple-Cat II modem, you could dig down into the registers and really dick with stuffif you wanted to. Or let the modem handle it all.

 

It was this level of versatility, born out of simplicity, that allowed the Apple II to fit into so many environments as well as it did.

 

With the custom chips, you (as a programmer) would have to figure out ways to make use of their features. These features were locked in and you couldn't change them to suit your style. And it was that "feature-set" which had given the early 8-bitters each a distinctive personality. Or in the case of the II series, no custom chips. About as "custom" as you would get in an Apple II set-up would be the ROM's or PROM's, or EPROMS (EEPROMS and EAROMS were not yet on the scene). This also meant a user could really customize the behavior of an add-on card to high heaven, though it was rarely done for home user situations. It would be more applicable to re-do the firmware on a serial card to interface with a machine controller, for example.

 

 

Anyways, without those custom chips the programmer's job could be orders of magnitude more difficult. A programmer had to figure out how to teach the hardware to do something. If you needed a sprite in the II series you needed to write a kernel for it. But it was a blessing in disguise because it "weeded out" a lot of also ran authors. On the flipside it also imposed no limit on how something could be done. The programmer was totally free to go in any direction without influence. If he wanted to do something he went and did it. No contraints.

 

 

I should dig up my old Bouncing Bessel. This is a program that had set up 4 pages in ram and flipped between them in sequence. While the 6502 was managing and going through the pages I used one of those Z-80 CP/M card to calculate the next sets of pages. It made the classic Bessel (looks like drop in the water with waves) function weave in and out; in near real time.

 

 

We achieved even better performance by pre-rendering everything and then using a slightly patched AXE Packer to stream it from the Sider 10Meg drive. All very pioneering stuff back then.

 

 

About the Double Hi-Res modes. There never really was enough cpu power in the //e to really make good use of DHR for arcade-style gaming. If you take a look at Air Heart, one of the first DHR action games, you'll see there was very little on-screen animation. Not that it's slow or anything, just not a lot. It would have been nice to see one of the Saturn Systems or Transwarp cards be cheap enough to become a must-have addition.

 

 

Again, gaming never made use of those cards, even the Sprite Board or Arcade Board never became popular. And these boards had a graphics co-processor of the same family (if not the exact one) that was used in the ColecoVision.

 

 

There was a glimmer of hope with the Mocking Boards. Though folks often bought them to use in their own applications and educational stuff rather than to enhance the few titles that did support it. A II series game had to stand on its own without *requiring* the presence of a Mockingboard. This often meant the board added little more to a game than background music. The kick-ass sound capability was not integral to any title really. Not like in the 400/800 and C-64. And certainly not like the few Intellivoice carts. In those three systems, well, sound was da'bomb!

 

 

I believe it was the 400/800 and C-64 which had the best balanced custom chipsets overall. Considering processing power, resolution, available memory. Everything was very well balanced. And adding these "multi-media" style enhancements to the II series seemed to always result in an unbalanced configuration, somehow.

 

 

Enough of that I don't mean to beat it to death. If you're a true Apple fan from "the day" you know all this stuff. If not, then this is only a tiny glimpse into the world of the II.

 

I must indeed say so though, that snapping off the cover of a II+ or //e was a magical moment. Like getting de-rezzed in Tron. One second it's a computer appliance, the next it's a whole new world of high-tech stripped naked, baring all for you to see. I could just imagine all those electronics going this-a-way and datta-way. Like a living maze of a sorts.. One instant you're in a software environment with a keyboard and monitor, the next you're a hardware hacker with access to each and every logic signal. Nothing hidden, no mystery in custom chips. No secret firmware. It was all documented. All observable, measurable, readable, accessible.

 

In Microsoft's own words used to describe that shit box Metro thing.

It's Authentic, Clean, Light, Open, Crisp, Fast (though that is debatable)

Responsive, yes responsive, I often found C-64 and Intellivision games to be somewhat sluggish and often slower responding to joystick movements than things done on the II, or 2600, or 400/800.

The II was Clear and Straightforward. Content was king, and no room for shit bloatware. And the II never tried to be something it wasn't.

 

In fact, this style of hardware design is what caught IBM's attention an thus was born the modern-day PC we all love and hate.

 

 

 

*MY* personal favorite enhancements during my ][+ & //e days were these, in no particular order:

 

 

1- 300 baud Hayes Micro-Modem. The Hayes Micro-Modem has great sentimental value for me, especially the Micro-Coupler part. I like the soft click of the relay and magic glow of the red LED indicator. I learned ASCII Express on this bit of hardware; not to mention all my telecommunication activites of the day - wardialing - War Games. Crap. I must have gone through 3 boxes of fanfold paper printing lists and find systems to "hack" into. Then I learned how to actually set up an AE line and ramdisks. I also learned about protocols and data compression, and how to control the modem with firmware. What fun! And we learned how to combine an AE line with real BBS. All those special control characters and Spinning Cursor mods were just too much!

 

 

2- upgrade to 1200 baud Apple-Cat later on and by bits and pieces I collected a tone decoder chip, a firmware chip, the BSR stuff, a 212 card, the expansion connector kit for the back, a handset, piles of wires and stuff for boxing, and a then-comprehensive set of software. I still kept the Hayes 300 baud modem around because I had this one terminal program that'd let you send a picture and have it come up on the screen at the same time you were typing *AND* transfer warez in background. Way way too much for 300-baud though. Too bad..

 

 

3- Videx Keyboard Enhancer on the ][+, I absolutely loved the type-ahead buffer. This was also a source of some strange pr0n jokes we made up then with the BOOFER. It's too raunchy for AA here. Well, I could que up a disk command and have it execute as soon as the ] returned from a previous command. It also came with a nice lower-case font, and had provisions for a 15-key function strip you could assign macros to. Things like LIST or CATALOG or something. This was a special add-on because I learned to type right after I got this. AND it has a 6507 cpu on it. That's right folks, a 6507, just like in the Atari 2600. I noted that right away and spent weeks trying to devise a way to access it for additional computing power. We eventually succeeded by using a lot of wires and other gates. It really was a kludge though.

This was also cool because you could program the macros, and we wired in things like a big-red-button and other buttons and switches into a custom control panel for some games like Flight Simulator and Jet. It had a standard D9 connector and we had tons of connectors from worn out joysticks.

 

 

4- Epson MX-80 f/t with GrafTrax III dot-matrix printer. I had the Original Apple parallel card, but quickly found the Grappler to the be the best choice for working with graphics and program listings. It had a kick-butt on-board firmware. 2K I believe.

 

 

5- The Micro-Buffer! Now this rocked and kicked ass. I could dump listings and graphics and everything in an instant - to the buffer - and have it feed out the data piecemeal to the printer as fast as it could accept it. Which wasn't saying much! I could dump a 30K basic listing in a few seconds and move on to something else, like copying warez, while the printer would toil away for the next 20 minutes printing.

 

 

6- The clock card. I knew I was flying high in the professional world when I got this addition. I really had no practical use for it, aside from incorporating it into my BBS. We mainly used it to limit your idle time and just generate some statistics and logging. It was also something of a status symbol if your BBS could report the time. Sysops went through a lot of trouble to either do a hardware or software clock. But before we could afford a hardware clock card, we made a software clock that would be accurate as long as you didn't access the Disk ][ drive. Everytime the floppy had I/O going on, the clock would stop. But later fixed that by monitoring the types of disk access and amounts of transferred data. And we could then calculate how much to buff-up the clock. This was more accurate, it "monitored" track to track seeks amount of data written out or read. But it still didn't account for rotational latency. So the software clock eventually became more accurate, but not like a real independant hardware clock like the Timemaster II H.O. from Applied Engineering. The H.O. stands for High Output and that term was in vogue then because of the "High Output" four cylinder car engines of the era. High Output?? My ass!

 

There was also a type of pseudo-clock that relied on the oscillator inside the Apple-Cat II modem. You lost some other functionality within the modem when you ran the "driver" or "module", but you had a pseudo-hardware clock! And it was as accurate with or without disk access as long as the system was powered up. That modem did everything, including Boxing and speech recognition and synthesis. It could be a serial interface too, and an answering machine, and a home light controller with the X-10 BSR system. But I mostly used it for pushing warez to callers.

 

7- The Gibson Light Pen (prior to being sold to by Koala Technologies), I never did anything with this except poke my sister with it constantly.

 

8- Mountain Music System. This was The Bomb! I built up quite a comprehensive library of sound waves and files used in the making of Tron, along with more MetaTrak data for use with the Syntauri. Once, to my great dismay, I couldn't get it to work in any games (!) and after than I let it sit around for a while and then hooked it to several guitar amps and put everything in the closet and get this huge bass-rumble. If you'd go outside you'd hear that Windsor Rumble sound; which is being discussed in another thread. I never understood musical notes very well. So the Syntauri keyboard sits "rotting" away in its original box with all the original packing material and stuff - including the beyond being rare plastic demo phonograph disc. It is punched to fit into a 3-ring binder, and you unclip it from the binder - it's like a 10 X 10 sheet of plastic - you put it on a record player and listed to 1/2 hour of demo music. It's a record that is engraved into a plastic sheet! And you could mail it through the postal service without fear of it getting cracked or anything. You could even roll it into a tube. I have only played that 4 times, and made an audio recording onto cassette tape so I could play it over and over a thousand times. And it has no creases in it. So it's a good thing.

Mostly though, the Mountain Music System and Syntauri Keyboard were wasted on me. I did little more than make stupid sound effects and sit there like an idiot drooling over 10Hz "Windsor Rumbles".. Yes we did the same thing with the C-64 and Atari-800 too. I don't know why so don't ask.

 

9- Koala Pad and Blazing Paddles. Oh this was so much fun. It was great hitting control reset and dumping a hi-res screen to disk. We'd do this with a lot of action games and gussy'em up real good and fantasize about the games of the future. While I never because an "Artist" by any means. I conisder this to be my first Photoshop experience. I also acquired an Apple Graphics Tablet, but by then the days of the II series were coming to an end. I had delegated the //e to a word processor and text file editor. It was a time of when I was trying to get into the Amiga. What a fucking mistake that was. Despite the cool stuff with the Digi-View thing and PhotonPaint, I could not stand the Amiga. It seemed like an endless sink-hole for money and never delivered on what was promised. Don't get me wrong, the Apple II was a sink-hole too. But I got so much from that conflagration of hardware. And it was F-U-N !!!

 

10- The Sider Drive - A totally kick ass 10Meg hard drive the size of a briefcase! Smaller than the earlier Corvus units, it was. And it was faaaassst! Especially with a Zip or Rocket chip going. It was also the beginning of my digital photo album. I would say I made about 30 or 40 unique and good quality hi-res pictures altogether. They are sitting on one of my Sider drives which has not been powered up since "the day". What's that, 25 - 30 years?

 

 

This is a nice link, and a good reference. However, there is a quite a bit missing. I hope to round out this in near future though. I do have a ton of stuff to contribute but no time, sorry folks, you'll have to wait.

http://mirrors.apple...tion%20Project/

 

 

http://en.wikipedia....mputer_Products

http://en.wikipedia....ki/Novation_CAT

http://www.jammed.co...a/Machines/cat/

http://www.apple2wor...ctionstrip.html

http://en.wikipedia....iki/Networks_II

http://apple2.org.za...ES/EDHEL/sider/

http://www.atarimaga...b_of_mass_s.php

http://mirrors.apple...er%20II/Photos/

http://mirrors.apple...r%20II/Manuals/

http://mirrors.apple.../Documentation/

http://mirrors.apple...em%20II/Photos/

http://mirrors.apple...m%20II/Manuals/

http://mirrors.apple...onStrip/Photos/

Edited September 20, 2011 by Keatah

[dudeslife]

TOSEC did a nice job on USENET earlier this year with the Apple II software archives and their posting of Compute, Compute's Gazette and the other retro mags has been stellar on USENET. The problem is the Magazine and Book preservation for retro Apple. I seen nothing but the same 40-50 pdfs duped on every Apple "retro" website (more manuals than books as pointed out ad nauseum in this thread already). Where are the Compute's Books? Incider & A+ Mags? These are a lot cooler to me than the software. I have been reading old Compute and Byte mags the past month and its been a blast.. cool articles about the "future of computing" and the game articles, and the glorious "type-in" programs.

Is this the TOSEC archive you are talking about?

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:CC3F6F728DEC7F8DAAD82E40ED358B8D799C25F1

 

I don't use torrents so I can't tell you. check usenet. They posted 5000 disk images.

Edited September 20, 2011 by dudeslife

[Hatta]

There's an Apple II tosec here too, but it's not the most recent one. You can always find the most recent TOSEC dats on the TOSEC website.

[HuckleCat]

Thanks guys. Now I have an itch I have to scratch.

 

 

I'm buying an Apple //e with a disk drive off somebody on Saturday for 15 bucks. He's not sure if it works as he has no way to hook it up to a monitor or tv, and says it has no power cable. He insists that I can use the same power cable that a modern PC uses for it, is this true? I only had a //c back in the day, and it had one of those power brick on a cord deals. Anyway, he claimed to have tried it out with one of his PC cables and it powers on.

 

So I'll just hook it up and try out Wasteland, which I still have from 1988, and listen for sound effects. Won't be able to grab an analog video cable till next week.

[The Usotsuki]

The power cord is the same as a modern PC.

[Rex Dart]

There was also a type of pseudo-clock that relied on the oscillator inside the Apple-Cat II modem. You lost some other functionality within the modem when you ran the "driver" or "module", but you had a pseudo-hardware clock! And it was as accurate with or without disk access as long as the system was powered up. That modem did everything, including Boxing and speech recognition and synthesis. It could be a serial interface too, and an answering machine, and a home light controller with the X-10 BSR system. But I mostly used it for pushing warez to callers.

 

Like red/blue/green boxes... or did it hit people? Either way sounds pretty sweet.

[dudeslife]

Thanks guys. Now I have an itch I have to scratch.

 

I'm buying an Apple //e with a disk drive off somebody on Saturday for 15 bucks.

 

great deal. I am still looking. I bought the Virtual ][ emulator to hold me until I can find the actual retro hardware. a nice sophisticated emulator.

[HuckleCat]

Ok, so, I got the //e today, and am pretty psyched. However, there were some problems, but it's nothing I cant take care of --

 

The Good -

- Came with an 80 column card

- Super Serial card. (What is the benefit of one of these?)

 

The Bad -

- The DIsk II controller card is fried. When it's plugged into the machine it won't boot up, does not "beep", and the display is black and white bars. Without the card, the machine starts up, beeps, and gives a prompt after "Apple ][", as it should.

- There's a weird "spot" on the circuit board of the Super Serial card. I'm not sure if it's a problem or not. The machine acts fine with it plugged in. Later I will take a picture of it and see what you guys think.

- The 80 column card is plain - no 64k.

 

So, next week when I get paid I will get a newer disk controller card off the Ebay or some jazz. Hopefully the weird big-ass disk drive it came with works. It's a "Rana Systems - Elite One", and I know nothing about it.

 

I'm excited about upgrading it, and may possibly get enhanced //e chips for it. Back in the day I had a //c, and it need no upgrading.

 

Fun!

[potatohead]

The Super Serial card can help you get ADT bootstrapped onto your machine, and from there you can fetch disk images from the Internet.

 

Just got the necessary bits for that today. Needed a DB25 serial cable, USB serial adapter (hope that works, as I don't have any serial ports on anything but my micro-controllers), and a coupla test floppy disks.

 

I also made the audio cable to use with the cassette, in case I need to bootstrap with that. Off to go and find instructions now... I think it's possible to just type things in too. Don't know yet.

 

Nice score on the Apple, BTW. Mine was a Platinum //e, with a single Disk drive, 80 column card, and Super Serial. I got it for $40, and had to deal with the power supply, but it was all minor league. I've jammed on the Atari for years, VCS and 800 XL / 400, and got stalled on the CoCo 3. The Apple has me wanting to do stuff right now, so that is what I'm doing

[HuckleCat]

Would the super serial card be a faster transfer with ADT? I already have cables for bootstrapping with the cassette ports, but I hear that doing it that way is like transferring with a 300 baud modem.

[desiv]

Would the super serial card be a faster transfer with ADT?

Yes...

Much much faster..

(Audio bootstrapping is kual tho..)

Hopefully your SSC is OK...

 

Good luck with the //e!!

 

desiv

(p.s. A USB - serial device should work fine. I use one with my laptop for ADT)

[potatohead]

Cool!

 

Just read the page, and they say those things work fine too. You know, Apples are just cool in this way. Yeah, thanks! I want to play more than Ultima...

[potatohead]

Well, this is the shit. I'm just about done writing my bootable disk. Not hard at all. I used Serial, and I chose a conservative 9600 Baud, and it's working just fine. Once I get a disk written, I'll see what it actually runs at. The SS card shows 9600 as the top speed. Maybe this varies, I don't know, been a long time.

[The Usotsuki]

I think SSC can be cranked to 19200 bps using undocumented features of the 6551.

[desiv]

Found this online:

Also' date=' David Schmidt’s ADTPro uses the Super Serial Card (without the Turbo ASB daughtercard) at up to 115,200 baud by accessing a special hardware register on the card.[/quote']

 

I can't remember what baud rate I used with my SuperSerialCard right now...

The IIc I believe I use 19,200, but I probably should test that again...

 

desiv

[potatohead]

Actually, the trouble was I needed to set BOTH machines. The //e does 115200 just fine, transferring a floppy in about a minute! Sweet! That's with the Apple branded Super Serial card, running in slot 1 on my machine.

 

Just got done playing Robotron. The Apple port is my favorite one.

 

I have to say, this setup is very nice. Easy, fun.

Edited September 25, 2011 by potatohead

[HuckleCat]

Ok, so I took a few pics of the Super Serial card where it has the "issue", that I'm not sure is really an issue or not.

 

What do you guys think?

 

 

Right next to the "X3", those arrow-looking connections on the board are sorta corroded..

 

 

Is this bad? Is this fixable?

[desiv]

That's intentional. Not sure why, but it's mentioned here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_and_play

(Look at the pictures on the side)

 

So, that was on purpose. If it works, I say your fine..

 

desiv

[HuckleCat]

Ok, cool, thanks!

[potatohead]

I'm not where I can go and take a look at mine. The thing is, that's either supposed to be connected, or not. Let's hope not. If that turns out wrong, a little solder will take care of things. As was said, if it works, you are set, no worries. If not, that's not a hard fix.

[potatohead]

Another difference I see with Apple users is they use their Apples for more than gaming still. The old software, formats, etc... are all kind of useful still, and that inertia might hold back new things.

 

There isn't a lot of software hacking to be done, like there is on the newer machines with custom chips and such as said, though there is some.

 

Now that I've got serial setup. I think the next thing to do is use the Apple as a terminal for one of my Propeller boards that also has serial. I'm wondering whether or not any terminal programs exploited the SS card to the higher baud rates... I could really get some use out of that. And is the ADT transfer protocol documented anywhere? Might be fun to have that same Prop board send files to the Apple from SD card. I've got good serial and SD card drivers...

[Keatah]

Regarding this Super Serial Card "issue". Upon visual comparison to my card sitting right here (ready to go back into its storage box). X3 needs to be a closed and completed circuit. From the looks of your picture, it still is.

 

Your board seems to have suffered some water damage. Water got on the board while there was power going through it. As far as it being fixable, well hell yes! This sort of "damage" is little more than daily usage. We used to spill water and all sorts shit on our old hardware. If it ever got too bad we'd put it in the dishwasher. Many electronic components are not damaged by water alone, it's the combination of water and power-on that causes corrosion and electrolysis and the dull gray finish you see in the photo.

 

A little brushing with a q-tip and alcohol/water is a good way to get 90% of the shit off it. Those old vintage electronics are pretty tough compared to today's trash. And they use +5V for logic high, thereby "cutting" through minor high-resistance shorted connections and debris that can build-up on a board. You can get the other 10% off by resoldering and reflowing with generous amounts of solder flux and a soldering iron.

 

Please check above the SY 6551 chip and the slik-screened #4, because I see additional corrosion there, a little. My concern is if there is any corrosion underneath the DIP chips.

Edited September 26, 2011 by Keatah

[Keatah]

That's intentional. Not sure why, but it's mentioned here:

http://en.wikipedia....i/Plug_and_play

(Look at the pictures on the side)

 

So, that was on purpose. If it works, I say your fine..

 

desiv

 

None of the pictures in the wiki article are of the same model SSC he has, nor do they have the correct number of solder pads. The comparison is invalid. Where in the article does it specify the states of the jumper pads?