What was your favorite expansion card for the Apple II?

[Keatah]

Just as it says on the tin can, what was your favorite expansion card for the Apple II?

 

Back in the day I was blown away by the Microsoft 16K RAM CARD. This enabled my measly 48K machine to play in the big leagues with a full 64K bytes of ram. It let me load different languages and thus I thought my computer was becoming smarter.

 

Next up was the Microsoft SoftCard. I didn't really exactly know what to do with it when I first got it. I was expecting it to make my games play better with faster and more detailed graphics. But obviously that wasn't the case. It would be several years before I appreciated the magic of really having 2 computers in one. Z80 and 6502.

 

But first and foremost was the MicroModem II. Despite being only 300 baud it made my imagination go at 50,000 baud. I did all sorts of cool experiments with it, both real and imaginary. And of course I had a WarGames computer with it! Remember the war dialers? And the first times you called a BBS? Magic!

 

The Disk II controller card bears mentioning, but at the time I took it for granted and only recently appreciated the elegance of its design. I thought it was a simple pass-through board, you know, to connect the disk drive to the bus. I had no idea at the time it was a state machine or did any computing. Computing was reserved for big 40-pin chips, you know..

[+save2600]

My favorite Apple ][ card was the game controller card so I could use this bad boy to play Conan, Montezuma's Revenge and Moon Patrol.

 

 

 

BTW: trying to perform a search in Yahoo! Images or eBay, looking for vintage Apple ][ stuff is goofy. Mostly brings up current offerings or pictures of apples. lol Used to have a ][+ that was black. Thought it was a real Apple, not a knock off Bell+Howell, etc. Didn't see any readily available online, but see some beige ][+'s. Was/is my particular model extremely rare or something? If so, figures.

[The Usotsuki]

The Bell and Howell Apple ][+ wasn't a clone or a knockoff, it was actually made by Apple.

[Keatah]

Made by Apple for B&H for educational institutes and schools. While not rare, they typically command about $600 on fleabay.

 

To search for Apple II stuff use quotes, like "Apple II" or "Apple //e". Facebook also has large unending photostream with hundreds of pics.

Edited May 26, 2016 by Keatah

[doctor_x]

apple cat modem with breakout box.

[Osgeld]

disk II controller, so I can use a floppy like a person and not tape drives like a poundstore heathen

[JamesD]

Of modern cards... the CFFA boards. No contest. For boards from back in the day... it's a tougher choice.

 

If it were just the IIgs, it's a bit of a tossup.

A 4MB or more RAM board or Transwarp GS would be my choice... probably both.
The machine is pretty usable with that much RAM and more speed.
Too bad Apple didn't let it ship with at least one more MHz. That would have made RAM and easy choice.

If it were just the II and II+

The language card. You needed it to even run all the BASIC software for the system.


As for the II line as a whole

 

The Disk II controller was a must have; to the point where it really isn't an expansion but a standard feature... and it was built into the IIgs chipset so definitely standard feature.

For the II and II+, the language card or one of it's many clones is almost a necessity. So much so it was built into the IIe and later machines so again... a standard feature.

The Z80, 6809, 68008, etc... cards are pretty cool but outside of the CP/M board they are extremely rare... mostly because there's almost zero demand. The Z80 card was slow as far as CP/M goes so I think businesses serious about CP/M bought a separate machine... and there are so many better ways to have support for those CPUs with other machines I'm going to say cool but nowhere near my favorite.

 

The arcade board and other boards that add a TI graphics chip and AY sound chip are cool, but there's no software and I'm really not thrilled by the TI chip.

 

80 column cards are really nice, but you don't absolutely need them. With a monochrome monitor you could display as many as 70 characters per line. With double hi-res you could have 80 columns with pretty readable text. Bankstreet writer uses 38 characters per line but does display characters as graphics.


That brings it down to the real contenders... so here is my top 4

#4. S.A.M. The Software Automated Mouth. Why would I chose such a rare card to be at #4? Because speech is cool, speech generated by software is really cool, and the board is based on a DAC. That means you could make music with it, play sound samples... all stuff that can really enhance software on the machine. The biggest drawback is the lack of a programmable timer interrupt. Without a vertical bank interrupt or timer it means software is tied to timing loops or polling. I placed it behind the Mockingboard because of of the timer issue and lack of existing software support. Also, the IIgs lacks a software speech synthesizer that uses the new sound sound chip, but it is perfectly capable of doing anything the S.A.M. does and more.

#3. The Mockingboard. It includes AY sound chips, programmable timers, and some support optional speech chips. It has enough software support to make it worthwhile and I've actually written a music player for it... even if I still need to create a tracker program for writing the music. But I'd put it behind the S.A.M. if that board had a timer. The interface to the AY chips is inefficient, speech chips are harder to understand than good software versions with no room for improvement, and there were multiple boards with different features... which usually means software often ends up supporting the simplest model. You can play back sound samples with AY chips, but that requires some pretty precise timing and the AY chip interface can only complicate that. The IIgs sound also eclipsed the Mockingboard by so much it's not as attractive as it was at first.

#2. Larger memory cards (RAMworks and other) could serve as a RAM disk, with a patch turned Apple Pascal into a development system that could support huge programs for the time, and it added 80 column support as well as new graphics modes to the IIe. Since the IIgs came with extra RAM, I'd say it's not so much of an expansion across the board. Still, the multi-megabyte boards are compelling and some of the clone Apple II motherboards can be hacked to support expanded RAM on board. If Apple Pascal weren't based on the slower than it needed to be UCSD interpreter, this would be a lot more attractive for me. Ultimately, if you have a lot of memory, you need to load a lot of code and data to fill it, which makes me say it has to rank behind disk storage... but not by much.

#1. That puts the SCSI card, or other hard disk expansions at #1 on my list. Lets face it, disk storage capacity is one area where 8 bits sucked so bad that every popular 8 bit machine seems to be getting a modern fix for the problem. It only makes sense that this would be just as important back in the day. No you couldn't run all software from them like you can with the CFFA 3000, so you are still stuck with floppies, but that's mostly just a problem for games.

I would have put a IIgs motherboard upgrade at #1 if I thought it fit the question and it worked in the older II and II+.

[Tbullet]

Let's see. I loved my Mocking-board, Grappler + printer card, my AE 512K ramfactor (what couldn't that thing do), 128K 80 column card, and my datatrain 1200 baud modem. Still have all those goodies and surprisingly they still work fine.

On my IIGS, 4 mg ram card and the CFAA 3000. Still want to get a AE Phazor for my IIGS.

[Keatah]

I liked the u-SCI 64K/80 column card. It was similar to the Microsoft Ramcard in the functionality it added, but for the //e. And boy what hot shit it was, it added 80 columns with only 2 chips! The other 8 were for RAM, naturally.

 

The Grappler+ was another sleeper card which I didn't appreciate how trouble-free it was till much later. But at the the time I knew it to be among the best.

[SSG]

I like my language card.

[MarkO]

I would have to say the Practical Peripherals MicroBuffer.. More that just a Parallel or Serial Card ( or Both, since there were Three Versions in Three Memory sizes ), but I had the Parallel/Serial Version with 64K or RAM... Which meant that When you printed to the Printer with 256 Bytes of Buffer, the MicroBuffer held the Entire Print Job and let the Computer go back doing whatever you were doing...

 

 

I didn't have any of these Cards, BITD, but having Interfaces to Control Real World Devices are where you can get very powerful.. Included in that would be the Uthernet Cards.

 

MarkO

[iKarith]

Probably the Echo+. Never really did know enough to use the music functions, but it was the echo in the first computer that was basically assigned to me in school, so it has some special significance. I've got a normal echo with the triangular speaker, but the Echo+ was the one I used first.

 

Didn't have access to a whole lot of expansion cards growing up, just the standard RAM/80col, Disk II, and Super Serial cards.

[doctor_x]

Apple Cat.

[iKarith]

 

#4. S.A.M. The Software Automated Mouth. Why would I chose such a rare card to be at #4? Because speech is cool, speech generated by software is really cool, and the board is based on a DAC. That means you could make music with it, play sound samples... all stuff that can really enhance software on the machine. The biggest drawback is the lack of a programmable timer interrupt. Without a vertical bank interrupt or timer it means software is tied to timing loops or polling. I placed it behind the Mockingboard because of of the timer issue and lack of existing software support. Also, the IIgs lacks a software speech synthesizer that uses the new sound sound chip, but it is perfectly capable of doing anything the S.A.M. does and more.

 

 

The IIgs did have software speech using its DOC, and unlike SAM it could speak while the computer was doing something else. Only almost nobody ever used it. It's there though.

[robj]

IKarith, can you share some details for the IIgs speech software? I'd be interested in have a try of that and comparing to the SAM generated speech.

 

I did some searching but did not find anything for this.

 

Thanks

rob

[iKarith]

I wish I could. I just know Spectrum uses the Speech Tools, and very little else ever did. They exist, that's about all I know. I suspect it's basically early Macintalk (so SAM-derived) speech, but I haven't tried to play with it yet. I know there's nothing that would use it like TextTalker with an Echo or whatever you'd use with a Mockingboard.

 

The thing I'm most interested in right now is a TextTalker interface for the Mockingboard, but I don't know if that ever existed. I think it didn't, since the Echo was THE card for speech, SlotBuster was second fiddle, and Mockingboard was "just for games".

I'd take a well-tuned Votrax over a TMS-5200/5220 or ANY chip from RC Systems, but that's just me. OTOH, if I had a TI chip from the early 90s that could make a very nice "modern" Echo replacement. The chips were often application-compatible and even sometimes pin-compatible, so if you give it a better phoneme/morpheme/dictionary, it'll sound a thousand times better than anything Street Electronics ever hoped for, and work with the same software.

 

The other thing I'd kinda like to do is rebuild and hot rod the Mockingboard. Some noise isolation, shielding and quality amplification could make those chips sound as good as any AY-SYNTH! Definitely a required upgrade because reasons.

[robj]

I did some more searching and found this, looks like this has some examples for using the IIgs speech toolkit. (And the speech toolkit I hope )

 

http://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/images/gs/programming/Talking_Tools.zip

[thorr]

I loved my ComputerEyes video capture card.

[nicholas042893]

Since I've always worked with making art, I have always loved my ComputerEyes card. I would capture images from video cameras, VCRs, TV, and later I was burning image files to CD and using a DVD player to play the images and capture them on my IIgs. I would trade a Transwarp for it if I had to! (Even though I don't even have a Transwarp...yet!) I haven't used it in a few years, but I should get back to it, really. I want to begin to replicate it in case something ever happens to it. It would also be great to implement more features in the software that would be GS specific, since the Apple II version was more limited unfortunately. A GS version could be stunning!

ComputerEyes won me over the first time I used it.

Edited July 10, 2016 by nicholas042893

[nicholas042893]

Since I've always worked with making art, I have always loved my ComputerEyes card. I would capture images from video cameras, VCRs, TV, and later I was burning image files to CD and using a DVD player to play the images and capture them on my IIgs. I would trade a Transwarp for it if I had to! (Even though I don't even have a Transwarp...yet!) I haven't used it in a few years, but I should get back to it, really. I want to begin to replicate it in case something ever happens to it. It would also be great to implement more features in the software that would be GS specific, since the Apple II version was more limited unfortunately. A GS version could be stunning!

ComputerEyes won me over the first time I used it.

I have found evidence there was a GS version of the card that captures in color! http://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documentation/hardware/video/computereyesgs_manual.pdf

There's also software for it. http://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/images/gs/hardware/

My lifelong goal will now be to hunt down that card!! Must have it!!

[thorr]

Cool! The GS version did/does exist. Here was someone wanting to get rid of theirs back in 2010 http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?21150-FS-FT-Apple-IIGS-Computer-Eyes

 

I think mine was a ComputerEyes/2 if I remember correctly. I still have it, but no computer to put it into. I remember scanning stuff from my VCR and being able to manually convert it to double hires color using DazzleDraw or something.

[nicholas042893]

Cool! The GS version did/does exist. Here was someone wanting to get rid of theirs back in 2010 http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?21150-FS-FT-Apple-IIGS-Computer-Eyes

 

I think mine was a ComputerEyes/2 if I remember correctly. I still have it, but no computer to put it into. I remember scanning stuff from my VCR and being able to manually convert it to double hires color using DazzleDraw or something.

 

That's awesome! You might need to pick up a computer just to use it Don't let it go to waste!

[thorr]

I have been looking into it actually. I have a bunch of floppies that I want to get the data off of and I have a Mac LC-III with an Apple IIe card, but I don't think I have the dongle that allows you to hook up 5.25" disk drives. The idea of picking up an Apple II GS is very appealing because I always wanted one, but I am not sure if my ComputerEyes card would work in it. Mainly, I just want my floppies converted to disk images as cheaply as possible at the moment. I have been playing King's Quest I, Conan and Ms. Pacman on AppleWin and I am using a Mach III joystick (for Intel PC's) with a USB to 15-pin joystick adapter. It feels just like it did back then playing those games. Back in the day, I put all of my best programming files I wrote on one floppy and created my own process to transfer it to a 286 PC using a serial cable, Copy2Plus, a modem program on the PC side and QuickBasic to construct the disk image. To my amazement it worked in the Apple 2 emulator back then and to this day I still have the disk image. On the 4th of July, I updated my old Fireworks program that I wrote as a kid and fixed the things that bothered me about it and made it much better. So much fun!

[Muzz73]

I was pretty fond of my AE RAMworks II back in the day. It gave my IIe an extra 256K RAM and lived happily in my aux. slot. The RAM came in handy for ProTerm and Appleworks!

[Keatah]

ProTERM rocked! It was the last and final telecom program I acquired and used for the Apple II.

 

Prior to that it was Com-Ware II 5.1 from Novation, and of course the venerable ASCII Express. After that I had transitioned in PC-based things like ProComm+ and similar. Then the internet was invented - and browsers became the "terminal program" of choice