ADTPro on a IIgs (Non-standard Connection)

[DistantStar001]

So I'm trying to get ADTPro to work on my Apple IIgs. Sadly, this is my most neglected of all my Apple //s, there's no sentimentality to it, I found it at a local recycler about 15 years ago, and they agreed to sell it for about $20 (I really miss when I could still do that). It's pretty bare bones, the standard 256k of RAM, ROM 01, no extras. It was a "WOZ", but the upper case was all chewed up, and the school that had it carved a bunch of stuff all over, so they let me swap it with the case from another (more aesthetically pleasing unit) that had serious corrosion issues on its motherboard. The battery is dead (but never leaks), so all the settings are default. Over all the unit is very reliable.

 

I am trying to connect it through the modem port, using an 8 to 25 pin cable I purchased some years back to get my grandfather,s //e to print with an ImageWriter II. I was told at the time that the cable was a modem cable, and that it wouldn't work for printing, but I bought it anyway, and it works just fine with an aftermarket SuperSerial Card. Now I'm trying to see if I can experience similar success as modem cable with my IIgs. I already got a 25 to 9 pin adapter (female to female), and hooked it up to my MacBook with a 9 pin serial USB adapter. I know the serial adapter works, since I've used it for ADTPro, and to bootstrap my //e. I've connected my IIgs, modem/printer cable, to 25/9 pin adapter, to serial/USB, to MacBook, and I've tried several times to bootstrap the IIgs. For its part, IIgs does beep a lot, and the curser seems to flash more rapidly when the Mac sends files (ProDOS, and ADTPro), however all I get on my screen are a bunch of ]\ prompts after each beep. If I select the //c ImageWriter option, then one of the prompts will be ]@\ when sending ProDOS, but that's the only difference. On the other side, if I boot my IIgs from a floppy, it always times out when requesting a file.

 

Because it beeps, and the curser flashing, I have to assume that IIgs is receiving information from my Mac, but it doesn't seem to understand what it gets. Maybe the cables are the problem, but if it's receiving information, wouldn't that mean that my problem would be in the settings, as opposed to the hardware? Any suggestions, or advice would be appreciated?

Edited August 3, 2018 by DistantStar001

[david__schmidt]

 

Because it beeps, and the curser flashing, I have to assume that IIgs is receiving information from my Mac, but it doesn't seem to understand what it gets. Maybe the cables are the problem, but if it's receiving information, wouldn't that mean that my problem would be in the settings, as opposed to the hardware? Any suggestions, or advice would be appreciated?

 

It's your cable. It truly needs to be a "printer" cable in order to work.

[DistantStar001]

Nuts!

[spacecadet]

I agree it's probably the cable. I had a similar problem with mine; it was doing stuff, so I thought the cable was carrying data, but nothing was actually working. In my case, it turned out that I needed to remove the null modem adapter I'd bought (IIRC the instructions say to use a null modem cable, so I bought a printer cable and null modem adapter, but the adapter messed things up).

 

So yeah, even though it seems like the cable's working and the problem lies elsewhere, it probably doesn't.