Memory upgrade to 2 megs and more for a IIe (not platinum) ?

Hello Keatah,
reading the thread was quite interesting.... besides the issued problem itself:
which drives to you intend to use with that kind of apple and appleworks ?
the reason for my question is just reflecting where that kind of file is to be stored to, when shutting down the computer....
using large drives with 640 kb on the disk would probably result in splitting a file to fit on 4 (?) Disks -
or even when using a 800 kB drive with the 3,5" drive-interface still the result might be up to 3 (!) Disks....
or do you intend to use a harddisk solution ? I just also wonder about the filesize itself.... how many pages of text would such a file contain ?
the question just came up to me because i remember that i had entire books ( some 300 pages ) stored on one 140 kB Disk...
asuming that - i guess that textfile shall contain several 10.000 pages ?

but back to the issue....
i haven´t tried it by myself and therefor don´t stay with this guess on experience - but have you ever tried to operate 2 cards parallel in one computer ? Is the desktop-expander capable of operating two parallel cards for example in slot 4 and slot 5 ?

Is there any text in the manuals that cover this topic ? Is it for example possible to handle 2 cards of the version Ramworks III together while it probably might not be possible with the version 2?

In former days i used some RAMcards with programs on mathmatical calculations ( Mandelbrot trees )and in very rare cases used 2 cirtech 1 MB Ramcards parallel with the posibility to handle the memory within the program itself... but i also remember that coding the cards to operate together and binding the banks of the cards together to one large block of memory was a task of nearly 2 weeks till it worked fine and that i just made that one time for the use of that cards within UCSD Pascal 1.3....
- but i never tried to operate both cards together within appleworks as one memory... in fact i only used one card for expanding memory and the other one was used as RAM-Disk for fast storage and swapping of data between files...

my first advice to solve the task would be to examine first very tough the manuals to find out about options of using the Cards parallel....

and second task to find out the solution for the storageproblem mentioned above...

and this just leaves another large problem besides - the Powersource... using large amounts of memory and large diskdrives together in an apple IIe might exceed the limits of the normal powersource very fast and a much stronger "custom-made" power source will be required.... That was one of the very first tasks i had to solve in those days ... i spent quite a lot time in those days to get a power-source able to deliver 10 Ampere at the +5 Volt branch and 4 Amperes at the +12 Volt branch and just even the - 5 Volt and - 12 Volt branch needed to be tuned up to deliver at least 500 milliamperes for the computer to stay stable....

Unless you can find or build your own 2mb expander, I think you're stuck on a IIe. Given that there isn't a lot of demand for a larger than 1mb memory card, you likely won't see anyone working on one unless they think it'd be a fun project.
Especially since there is an Apple II that will work with large Appleworks files. The IIgs with the right memory card would let you have about 6mb Appleworks files

In that case the question could be raised why not taking a IIGS-Board and stuffing it in an Apple IIe case as this was done with the IIe to IIGS Upgrade board ? this could even be done with a "normal" IIGS-Board ... you just must add the keyboardconnector in the reserved connectorspace and add the former powersource plug - thereafter take a piece of steelplate 1,5 mm and draw the backpaneloutputs to the plate - take a drill and a fine saw and aditional fine rasps and thereafter replace the backpanel with the new substitute plug in the keyboard and be happy - in a speacial way the IIGS-ROM1 was anyhow some just continued developement of the IIe with a little more adds and a additional redesign of the layout.... but the size is nearly the same - the slots are the same except the modified memory-expansion-slot....
I´ve done that with one of my IIe cases and one of my IIGS-ROM1 boards.... and that works perfect !

Have you searched for the expansion daughter boards?

Well, of course finding your treasure in your own storage would be great. What I meant was, have you tried looking to buy the daughter boards at large? It's probably a long shot, but you never know.

Keatah and all,

As you probably know by now, I hit eBay at least twice a day primarily for Apple II items (and some Mac as well).
In the last six months I have seen one 2Meg Daughter Card for the Ramworks/Ramworks III cards. It went fairly quickly once it was listed.
There have also been a couple of the RGB Daughter Cards for sale, but they also went rather quickly.
I have often wondered why other third party developers did not come out with memory expansion cards greater than 1Meg for the II, II+, IIe, or IIc.
I understand the difficulty with the IIc due to limited space, for the rest it just does not make sense to do them for the IIgs, but not for the IIe.
Maybe some young, enterprizing person with skills will come along and make one.
Wouldn't that be nice?

Hello Steven,
the major problem is not limited to the design of such a card, because the entire RAM has to be splitted in to small blocks of memory that is switched into the slotspace and that the adressing of that huge number of blocks have to be latched in the chips as temporal storage.... the much bigger problem is that to operate the RAM of that card with such programs like appleworks or applewriter the source codes are needed to program the card for cooperation with those programs - that´s the real problem today because these sources are out of reach..... and therefor it will turnout to become realy dificult to get a "nowaday card" to perform same way like the old ones from AE or Cirtech.

Here was one that sold on ebay for 202.50 (bid) He did mention in the listing that he used it for Appleworks, so I can assume if you can find this, it would work.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120760384356

Smiggly,

Oh Yes. It would absolutely work.
As a matter of fact, that is the card I was talking about before.
It was up for bid last August. That's seven months not six, but I was close. lol

I was guessing that was it, I saw you found one, and had never seen one, so I went looking for it to see what it looked like before it disappeared forever when ebay purges stuff. I was also curious what someone would pay for something like that.

You have an amazing memory to have seen and remembered when you saw that sell.

A 1MB RAMWorks card should be more than adequate for practically any writing project if you're dividing your work into manageable chapters or sub-chapters.

I have an 8MB IIe (3MB on the RAMWorks, 5MB on the RAMFactor), with later versions of AW, you can choose which card to use for AW's desktop expansion but I've found the RAMWorks is the better option - support is automatic, and no patches are needed for either card.

I hope you're not wasting your time with anything less than AW4, 5.0 or 5.1.