ADTPro beginner questions

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Joined: Sep 26 2019 - 16:46
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ADTPro beginner questions

I've got ADTPro (2.0.2/Mac OSX 10.9) working great with my II+ using the cassette ports (it took a while to get the audio levels right, but worked fine after that).

Now I'm ready to move on and speed things up with a USB to serial adapter on the Mac connected to an Apple Super Serial card. I have a few questions:

 

1) I'm leaning towards a Startech USB to serial adapter with COM retention (FTDI chipset). According to the ADTpro website you should avoid adapters with using Prolific chipsets and instead go for FTDI as they're more compatible. Is the above a good choice?

 

2) I already had a few 25 pin (male) to 9 pin (female) cables which I'll use between the USB adapter and the Super Serial Card, but how do I determine if they're "regular" or "null modem" type cables? I do have a multimeter for continuity testing, but I don't know which pins go where for either. UPDATE: never mind as I found the necessary info here.

 

3) I bought the Apple Super Serial Card years ago and never got to try it out as my II+ was in storage. I've now placed it in slot #1 and wonder if there's a way to check if it's working or not (diagnose the card itself) without actually connecting it to another computer? That would eliminate other issues in case my setup won't work right away. It looks to have a couple of ROM chips, so I was hoping the PR#1 command would get something going, but apparently not...

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Try some terminal software

Try some terminal software like ASCII Express to see if it sees your Super Serial Card.  PR#1 isn't terribly useful unless you have your SSC hooked up to a printer.  You can kinda sorta get something to respond if you have a modem with a Hayes style command set (AT) attached, but it isn't really usable.  It pretty much isn't going to do anything if you just have it hooked to a PC or Mac on the other side unless you are running a terminal program there.  Then if you've got all the baud rate, parity and bit settings right you might see some text come across.  If it isn't set right you'll see gibberish at best.  Terminal software on the Apple II side will make getting the settings correct much easier than trying to do it with the extremely limited firmward on the card.'

 

 

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Last seen: 3 years 10 months ago
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A simple wire / jumper (or

A simple wire / jumper (or "loopback") between pins 2 and 3 on the RS232 DB connector (TxD and RxD) should make your terminal program show on screen what you are typing provided you have disabled hardware handshake in the settings menu of that terminal program. The communication speed setting is irrelevant for this test.  

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Last seen: 3 years 3 days ago
Joined: Sep 26 2019 - 16:46
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Cool! Thanks.

Cool! Thanks.

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