I was wondering if I could use an apple II emulator and a 1.2MB 5-1/4" drive on a PC to format and copy software onto the disks to use on my clone?
Matt
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No. Your Apple II hardware is the only thing that can write a disk that it can read back again. Judging by your other thread(s) your drive head may yet be dirty, or you may have fried some electronics by connecting the ribbon cable incorrectly, or any of a number of maladies may have befallen it. Does the CP/M disk still boot?
Yes it will boot from CP/M. If you read my other posts then you will see that I just bought a new 5-1/4" drive and also the motherboard has been repaired along with the ROM card and floppy controller. I was given 3 programs by the guy who repaired the computer for me. CP/M, DOS 3.3, and ProDOS. Only CP/M will boot. The first time I tried to boot from ProDos it said : "?Syntax error in 130 when in slot 7".
I moved the controller card to slot 6 and then after powering it back up I got the following at the top center of the screen "#1940" and the disk kept spinning until I powered it back off. I tried Dos 3.3 but when I powered it on the disk kept spinning but no response.
Yep, I read that. Moving the controller and then seeing the spinning-forever disk problem would be consistent with a misaligned ribbon cable cause - unless CP/M still boots. It seems strange that your repairer would send you back disks that didn't boot.
The message coming from ProDOS makes it sound like it's reading BASIC after all - can you do a CATALOG once it errors out?
It boots from the CP/M disk and I can type DIR and view the files on the disk even now. I made sure the ribbon was correct with the red marker lead on the ribbon matching to pin 1 on the card. After it posted #1940 at the top of the screen with ProDOS, it wouldn't do anything until I pressed CTRL and ESC I think and I got a * for a cursor. With DOS 3.3, I could here the drive accessing the disk on boot up but then it would just sit there with a blank screen until I powered it off.
well several clones do have a problem with ProDOS because it contains a chechsum routine on the ROM. That was one of the first strikes from Apple Computer against clones to integrate that checksum routine.... most people in old days overcame the problem by using cloned ROMs from original Apple Computers.... another problem might be RAM... how much RAM is in the computer ? If only 48 kB ( and no language card inside ) the boot will crash due to insufficient RAM... for ProDOS 64 kB is required.... probably its usefull to read my pages about Basics of Disk II .... there´s also stuff about disk and formats that should be known....
sincerely speedyG
Here is a copy of my email from Geoff Body responding to my question on the specs of the board.
"Matt,
the computer is an Apple II+ clone with 6502 (NMOS CPU,) 64KB ram (48KB + 16KB language card) and Z80 card built in slot 4.
IIe memory cards (for AUX slot) aren't compatible. The hardest part is getting software onto the computer.
The most common option is a super serial card which allows connection via a serial cable to a PC running ADTPro.
This allows transfers from disk images on the PC to be written to floppy media via serial transfer.
I also think some one has a game server via serial connection to PC using the super serial card to load and run games without the need for a disk drive.
Z80 card needs to be booted from disk."
He installed Apple II ROMS onto the ROM card before he sent it my way.
So, to answer your original question... the thing you need to do is familiarize yourself with ADTPro and find yourself a Super Serial Card.
Now I have a problem with the drive reading disks. I booted with CP/M and I put in a another floppy that came with the computer to see what was on it but it said there was a bad sector. I put the C/PM disk back in and it said the same thing. I restarted it but it wouldn't read it either. Now I don't know if the drive is dirty, bad, or the C/PM disk is now bad.