The Apple II Project

This is an ongoing tale of the attempt to build some killer IIe and IIgs and IIc systems.

So far:

Obtained two IIe systems - bare units
Two IIGS systems
One IIC system

Got a Commodore RGB color monitor a Zenith RGB green/amber monitor, a Apple II and Apple III composite monitor and the little IIC composite green monitor.

Bought a whole skid of apple stuff - drives, cards, cables, software, magazines etc. Now sorting through it and researching to come up with a plan of what should go in the machines.

So far looking at putting in the:

Apple AII Memory Expansion 670-0024

Most any slot (other than 3) that you want. Apart from that, it appears as a normal ProDOS volume called /RAMn where 'n' is the slot number in which it is installed).

or maybe the Applied Engineering Ramfactor

This is a "Slinky" style memory expansion card for any standard slot of an Apple II, II+, or //e. You can set up the card with a variable number of variable-sized partitions and then switch between them almost instantly. Any partition can be based on any operating system, or on your own program. Couple this with the battery backup option (it's really more of an uninterruptible power suppply for the card) and you have what amounts to a hard disk operating at RAM speed.

Applied Engineering UDC card rev 2.0 for the 5.25" floppy and the Apple 3.5 floppy interface for the 3.5" floppy.

Apple Mouse Interface Goes into slot 4 for the mouse.
Apple SCSI card for the external 20gig scsi hard drive.
Apple 80col RGB interface to go with the commodore analog RGB monitor.

What i am lacking so far is the The Apple IIe Enhancement Kit inlcudes 4 replacement chips including a 65C02 cpu, a character generator and two monitor ROM chips. This is available from http://www.gse-reactive.com for $25 and i also see it on ebay. I have the Mousetext Tool Kit which is said to provide a maclike environment in the IIc and in the IIe that has been updated with the enhancement kit.

I also have the Applied Engineering Transwarp v1.3 accelarator card. The TransWarp runs at 3.58, 1.7 and 1 MHz speeds however, it includes 256 KB of on-board RAM.

Just found some Zip Chips from Zip Technologies! Zip Technologies, introduced the 4 MHz Zip Chip Model 4000 in May of 1989. Rather than building an accelerator on an expansion card, Zip used a hybrid chip design known as System in Package (SiP), and used this chip module to directly replace the microproccessor in the Apple II. They took a 65C02 core and combined it with control logic and 8 KB of cache ram into a very compact 40-pin DIP package, not much bigger than the original 65C02 CPU it replaced. With the Zip Chip, all setings are software controllable, including individual slot speeds which could be set at 1 MHz or "accelerated." The accelerator was a cache type and was capable of 10 different speed settings. This looks like a better way to go than the transwarp.

Next - putting it all together.

Comments

Tried two of the apple scsi cards in slot 5 and slot 7. Booted ok to the apple scsi utilities floppy but could not detect a scsi card which is odd.

Any suggestions? I have a cms card somewhere but i wanted to use all apple parts for this project. This is a ROM 1 machine, i might try the ROM 3 machine to see if there is a difference.

gord

littlejohn's picture

Did you set slot 5 or 7 to "your card" in the control panel? You must do this before it will 'see' the card.

Are you gonna sell off any leftovers??

Probably not...interested in trading tho'
Goal is to build a 'point-in-time' machine that illustrates computing on a certain date with hardware and software.

I've given away and sold a bunch of things i am no longer interested in - all the Amiga stuff, the Atari ST520, the powerbook 100, 190,180,1400, 520, 540 and 280c as well as the SGI stuff and the OSI challenger and the commodore 64 stuff. Put the TRS 16 on the curb...gave away the Hyperion. Original Compaq went to the dumpster. Mint condition Mac plus went to a computer museum.

Still have a bunch of things i don't need or really want - the radio shack model 100, the tandy 1400LT, the toshiba orange plasma 8086, etc These i would sell or trade.

g