Apple IIe Enhanced + IDE + TCP/IP!

Last week I did a major change on my Apple IIe computer. It actually got a new mother board from the US that I found on E-bay. It is an so called 'enhanced' version. It was sold back then as an upgrade kit that contained some ROMs and a new CPU. They are hard to find now a days and you need the exact type. The ROMs of this motherboard for example didn't fit in my own old motherboard. You need this upgrade for a lot of software and also hardware. It improved the Apple IIe a lot.

The first project I needed the enhanced ROMs for was this card. It is an IDE interface for the Apple IIe and it has a Compact Flash inserted in stead of an IDE drive as you can see. I already got it running in the mean time, so now I can install and start software on a CF in an Apple IIe. How cool is that? :) It should be possible to boot from it as well, but I haven't got that working yet. I still need a floppy to boot ProDOS first, but I'll try to figure that out as well.

But there is more. Even cooler is that I installed an Ethernet card in the Apple IIe. It is so great that people are still developing hardware like this for these old machines. I also needed the enhanced ROMs to get this running, but as you can see it works! I hooked it up to the internet this morning and started the IRC client from the Contiki package. If you click the picture you can see a little conversation I had this morning with MiVo on the #JMJ channel. Really cool that this actually works :)

Here is another picture of the Apple IIe back on its spot. The only thing I still need to find out is how the CP/M card works that was in the machine when I got it. I didn't get any software with it though so I'll have to go on the internet and look for it. It should be fun because I also have CP/M on the Commodore 128d and it would be cool to exchange files in this way I guess. Well not useful in any way, but fun for sure to get it working.