The Apple //c project

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Flack was kind enough to respond to a tweet I had the other day about acquiring an Apple II. This thread is a reminder for me to post all about why I was looking for one and what the project goals are.


EDIT: I edited the title to say //c instead of //e because it already stung me once.

[Casual Observer]

Is your goal to spend lots of money repairing a 30 year old system that does less than the phone anyone of us has?

[RealNC]

Is your goal to spend lots of money repairing a 30 year old system that does less than the phone anyone of us has?

I've yet to see a phone that becomes an Apple II after repairing it. So a phone can't do that. You lose.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Is your goal to spend lots of money repairing a 30 year old system that does less than the phone anyone of us has?

The worst game for the Apple II is infinitely better than whatever people think the best mobile game in history is, so "does less" is a bit charged, don't you think?

But yes, I do enjoy learning about computer systems from, say, 1979-1989 and there's no better way to know one than to try it out! Come on pal. Next round of Karateka is on me.

[Flack]

Actually it's a IIc, not a IIe -- the "c" stands for "compact," although that would be relative to 1984 standards, not today's. The IIc came with a built-in 80 column card, RAM expander, and a few other internal upgrades. It's not as expandable as a IIe (which ultimately hurt sales), but the built-in floppy drive and other upgrades (including a joystick port) make it more convenient.

Also making it more convenient is that I had a spare one out in the garage, which I was willing to ship.

Uninteresting trivia fact: When my dad purchased our original Apple II+ clone (a Franklin Ace 1000) in 1982, it came with an amber monitor (I guess that year, amber was the new green). We had that monitor for a year or two before upgrading to a color Amdek monitor. When my dad sold the Franklin Ace 1000 in 1985, I inherited the Amdek for my Commodore 64. I've owned both of them (the computer and the monitor) ever since, and that's the same Amdek in the picture below, testing out the IIc before shipping it out.

[AArdvark]

Yes but does it come with a golf cart seatbelt? I've heard horror stories about that.

THE
SCREECHING HALT
AARDVARK

[Flack]

Hah! No, I learned that lesson -- breakable things should not be placed on top of the golf cart in the garage... although truth be told, that's probably the fastest that machine ever went.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

The thread originator has been fired. I'm the new guy. Thanks for the clarification on the //c versus the //e piece.

ALSO. It looks like this is the best way to use flash disks on Apple // computers: http://dreher.net/?s=projects/CFforAppl ... II/FAQ.php

[Flack]

Weeeeell, good news/bad news. The bad news is, that won't work with a IIc, because the IIc doesn't have the ability to add internal cards.

The good news is, BMOW's FloppyEmu appears to be essentially the same thing, connects to an external port (so no internal card required), supports reading/writing disk images to/from a MicroSD card, and is cheaper. The CFFA3000 does some things the FloppyEmu doesn't do (and vice versa), but if they had both been available back when I bought mine, I probably would have gone with the FloppyEmu.

One caveat; I believe to get the FloppyEmu to be the boot drive, you'll have to open the computer and physically change the ribbon cables, connecting the external drive as drive 1 and the internal floppy as drive 2. That would allow you to still copy .dsk image files to floppies (and back), but it sounds like you would have to mostly have one or the other be the boot drive.

https://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/
http://quinndunki.com/blondihacks/?p=2602

[pinback]

Apple IIe Memories

My friend Doug (not that one) and I would stay up late when we were 11 or whatever, eating M&Ms and writing text adventures awash in the midnight glow of our green-screens. We did not know how to write text adventures, but we had sugar and enthusiasm. We did not know "object oriented programming" or even "programming", so we would code rooms like this:

100 PRINT "You are in a large stone room."
105 IF ROCK = 0 THEN PRINT "There is a rock here!"
110 IF INPUT = "GET ROCK" THEN PRINT "You got the rock!"; ROCK = 1
...

Which was all well and good, but if at any point you ever dropped the rock, ROCK would get set back to zero, and so it would immediately teleport back to the large stone room.

Those were the most fun times I ever had on a computer, and the Apple IIe was the greatest toy a nerdy kid could ever have.

Apple IIe Memories

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

You have saved me hundreds of dollars. Thanks, Flack! I do like that within 12 messages of any computer system on this BBS we have a compact user's guide on setting it up and making it work generated from nothing. We are the best at this. We even have the one guy saying that the platform in particular sucks, which gives it a total 80s authenticity!

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Those were the most fun times I ever had on a computer, and the Apple IIe was the greatest toy a nerdy kid could ever have.

I once went to my friend Joe's house. He had what I now know is Aztec for his Apple //:



This was before my family had a computer. As far as I was concerned, Aztec was the greatest game that ever was or could be. Who knew how many levels it went?! I assumed that it went forever. You could hit people with a whip and throw grenades at them I think.

Well, one summer my parents enrolled me in a computer class. It remains one of the fundamental life-changing events in my existence. We got lots of instruction with computers but we also had plenty of time to do whatever the hell we wanted. My mother either bought me a disk of ten blank floppies or we acquired them from the class, I don't know. I took one and gave it to Joe and asked him if his older brother could make me a copy of Aztec.

He returned the disk to me the next week. He pointed to the rear plastic of the disk - far, far from the exposed magnetic bit. If you can visualize a 5.25" disk then you know that they folded the plastic over the magnetic disk. A small piece of the plastic holding it together had come off a little.

"He couldn't copy it because the disk was bad," Joe said, showing me the little tab that had lifted off.

"Oh," I said disappointed.

I kind of knew that was bullshit at the time, but hey, I didn't have a computer. Who was I to argue?

Aztec has been playing on the other monitor. It still looks incredible to me.

[Flack]

In 1982 my dad sold our TRS-80 Model III to purchase a Franklin Ace 1000 (our Apple II+ clone). Overnight, we went from owning a computer with a cassette drive to a computer with dual floppy disk drives and a modem. The only software we had for the TRS-80 were Scott Adams' text adventures, and things we had typed in from magazines. Suddenly, we went from text adventures and games written in BASIC to real-life games. I tend to associate with being a "Commodore guy," but for almost 3 1/2 years, our primary computer was that Apple II clone.

Roughly six months after getting that computer my dad met Ron, a local sysop who ran a popular warez BBS. He and my dad hit it off, and before long Ron was inviting me and my dad over to swap software. Ron was in college, but lived off campus in a little duplex. If I had to guess I would say Ron was 21, my dad was probably 35, and I was about 10. Ron had two Apple II setups, one for his BBS and one for playing games and copying disks, and his computer room (come to think of it, I think it might have been the dining room...) was super hot with all that equipment running. Ron and my dad would sit in there for a few hours, copying games. My dad rarely had any programs Ron didn't have, so each time we went over there my dad would bring a couple of boxes of blank disks and give them to him for his time.

There wasn't enough room for me in that room, so I usually sat next to them in the living room. Next to Ron's super 70s stereo were a stack of D&D manuals and modules that I would go through, looking at the pictures while the two of them laughed and played games.

All of those things -- the sound of the disk drives, the noise from the games, the heat from the computers, the D&D modules, and the feeling that we were all doing something cool -- all mixed together into one single memory. It was one of those experiences where as a kid you just knew this was something you wanted to do for the rest of your life.

[Flack]

The Apple II to me was my introduction to modeming, copying floppies, and computer games. It was playing Karateka, and Lode Runner, and Wizardry. It was knowing how to do things that adults didn't understand. It was learning the magic of for/next loops. It was running a PrintShop business. It was trying to understand copy protection. It was dangerous and stimulating and exciting. It was the beginning of everything I became.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

The first job I ever had that had any sort of "being on a computer" component was with Kodak. They had a deal where if you had a kid in college they'd hire them for the summer for crapass summer jobs. (I guess I mean the work was crapass, it was a great deal and they paid a lot better than minimum wage.) The job was in "Investment Recovery" and I recall there being a lot of morning where I'd be on a dumb terminal trying to identify what giant part was where. I also did some data entry.

I didn't get the same job the next year. The next year I was putting light sensitive emulsion into canisters and transporting it form location to location. There was no computer component to that job, although when we had long breaks before the gunk came in there was a place where they would let us use a dumb terminal if we wanted.

First job I ever had where I was on a computer all the time was with Xerox a while later. I think it was kind of good that my family didn't have our own computer until years after I had been aware of them and seen things like a camp's Apple or a friend's C64, it made me think they were precious and special and not take them for granted. I'm still pretty happy I get to have a job where I am on a computer all day.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

One caveat; I believe to get the FloppyEmu to be the boot drive, you'll have to open the computer and physically change the ribbon cables, connecting the external drive as drive 1 and the internal floppy as drive 2. That would allow you to still copy .dsk image files to floppies (and back), but it sounds like you would have to mostly have one or the other be the boot drive.

(An aside - for some reason I thought the //c needed an external disk drive. So I thought I'd buy one on eBay and when it showed up I would try a disk out - but it has one as part of its own self! Amazing!)

Regarding the FloppyEmu and the boot drive thing - do you need it to be a boot drive in order to, for instance, have it play any games? I don't suspect I will copy physical disks to the SD card, I'll just go grab the TOSEC library of Apple // images and whatnot. And I would imagine I would do a lot of "grab a virtual Apple // disk like with Lawless Legends and run it." Is there a way that you know of to run this stuff, or are we screwed if it is not the boot disk?

I will read up on this too.

Thank you so much, Flack!!

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

The joystick I bought for it works on all Apple // computers except the //c because of course it does. Nnnnngh. I edited the title.

There is an adapter out there, I guess. It's a brand new joystick so I'd like to use it.

[Flack]

Okay, so I have some good news and some not so terrible news.

I'm using the CFFA3000 along with those TOSEC disk images, and I guess every TOSEC disk image is a bootable floppy. On the Apple II/II+/IIe, software expects the primary disk controller to be in slot 6, and the default disk to be 1. Pretty much any multi-loading game is hard coded to look for that, so let's just say that any other configuration -- using disk 2 instead of 1, using a different slot, etc -- won't work. It might work for a few games here and there but... let's just say, it doesn't work.

The IIc's internal floppy is on slot 6, drive 1. That's great for booting real disks and stuff, but now the problem becomes, where do you connect that FloppyEmu thing. Internally, there's a connector for slot 6, drive 2, and you can connect it externally, but nothing is ever going to boot off of it. There's a trick that involves booting up into ProDOS on 6/1, typing a bunch of commands, and somehow that'll get it to boot off of 6/2 on the next reboot, but so many games don't support that, and plus you don't want to type 10 lines of gibberish every time you want to play a game.

So I was digging and I found this -- an A/B switch for Apple II drives. The site specifically mentions hooking it up to an Apple IIc for the purposes of swapping between the real/physical internal floppy and a FloppyEmu. It's $16. And now that I look at it, it's the same place that sells the FloppyEmu. That makes even more sense.

https://www.bigmessowires.com/shop/prod ... ab-switch/

So, yeah -- an extra $16, and you can flip between having the real drive and the FloppyEmu on 6/1. That's really a win/win. 99% of the time you will leave the FloppyEmu on 6/1 so you can boot those virtual disk image files, and I guess if you bought a real Apple II game or something you could flip it back to the physical drive.

If you have no desire to ever boot off of a real physical disk, you could just disconnect the internal cable for the internal drive and connect the FloppyEmu to that port (6/1), but if it were me, I'd buy the switcher just so I always had the option.

BTW, that external drive you bought should probably show up as 6/2 when you connect it. So if you ever wanted to go from image-to-floppy (or floppy-to-image) you can do that using that second drive and any Apple II copy program (I'm using Nibbler something-or-other) and then just copy from 6/1 to 6/2 or vice versa.

[AArdvark]

Christ, this thread made me grab the C64 users guide in PDF and start reading it. I don't want to write basic code. Why does stuff like this get me all jacked up to want to write some programs! Ngggggh!

THE
10 QUIT
AARDVARK

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

The store selling this stuff is closed till after the 13th of August, but that is OK. This project continues evermore.