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.

Bootstrapping Apple IIe over Audio

I recently did another project that took me a lot of time and effort and that I wanted to share with you. When I was in school I learned to program assembler on an Apple IIe. Back then I had a C64 myself with a tape drive and the Apple IIe already had a disk drive on it with 5,25 inch diskettes. Back then that was the coolest thing I ever saw and I started saving up  to buy a 1541 disk drive for the C64. A while ago I could get an Apple IIe from someone for free and I couldn't resist that. The only problem was there were some diskettes with it but not much usable stuff. Well not for me anyway. But how to get software on it I don't have any other hardware anymore with 5,25 inch diskettes. I did manage to get a couple of boxes of new and unused diskettes though.

I started looking for a way to transfer diskettes from a PC to an Apple IIe and found this little tool called ADTPro. The only thing is you can install a server on the PC side but you also need a client on the Apple IIe of course. Well this tool can do something that is called 'boot strapping'. It is a way to get an OS running on a Apple IIe without anything to start with. It supported serial and I happened to have a Super Serial card in my Apple IIe, but I could not get it to work. The hard thing is though with serial you never know why until you get it working. Could be interfacing, cable, protocol. Who knows.

An other option was using audio. The Apple IIe has a casette port that wasn't really supported in the DOS implementations because it had diskette and everyone used that, but with some assembler calls you can get you Apple IIe to read data from the audio in port. You connect you Apple IIe with audio in and out to the sound card of your PC and after a few system calls the ADTPro tool starts sending audio through your sound card into the Apple IIe and loading ProDos directly into the memory. And then when you have ProDos loaded you can again transfer the ADRPro audio client over audio to the Apple IIe. And suddenly you have the ability to transfer disk images from the PC to the actual floppy drive. It only takes a very long time to do that.

The first thing I send over because of this was a serial terminal program. With that program loaded I could finally find out why my serial connection wasn't working. It turned out to be a problem on the PC side. The USB to Serial device I used under Windows 7 crashed after a few bytes. So I installed ADTPro on an older Windows XP machine that still had an actual serial port on the motherboard. And that worked. Now I can transfer diskettes at 11520 bits/s and that is as quick as the disk drive in the Apple IIe is anyway. So it is just as fast as a normal disk to disk copy. The next thing I found out though is the Apple IIe has old Roms installed. It is not the 'enhanced' version. And I need that to get an ethernet card and IDE interface running. I just got some Roms of E-bay and am waiting for them to arrive now. So I guess I'll have an update to this story somewhere in the future. Well I enjoyed this project and I am happy I got the Apple IIe running now :)

Apple Ipad in the Apollo Studio

Last week I sold my Korg Mono/Poly. It is a really nice synthesizer, but I just could not find a nice spot for it in the studio. With some cash money in my hand I couldn't resist getting an Ipad for the studio. I had seen so many nice apps for it already and last week Jazzmutant declared the Dexter end of life, so I guess eventually I won't be able to use that one in the long run any more, so better look for something new already. Here is a picture of them together so you can compare size. I played around a bit with the Ipad already and  I must say it is much more responsive than the Dexter. Apple has made that touch surface so good. The Dexter feels more solid though and is made to reside on a desk, where the Ipad is more a mobile device. I must find a nice stand for it I guess.

The next thing to do was rearrange my desk again. I was so sure last week that I had the right setup, but now I had to add another device on an already crowded desk. Eventually I managed. The app you see running on the Ipad by the way is the new iMS20. An emulation of the Korg MS20, I must say it is a really really cool app :) I haven't connected the audio of the Ipad yet to my PC, but over the headphones it sounds very good as well. Too bad there is no digital audio output on the Ipad. That would be really cool, but I guess most people use analog audio inputs on their DAW.

Here is a picture of my complete workspace again. I think I like the Ipad best in the horizontal position, I just need to find a stand to tilt it up a little bit and to have it more solid on the desk. But now I'm going to look for some more apps. I'm looking at Touch OSC now. An app that turns the Ipad in a midi controller. That is actually what I'd like to use it for. I just have to figure out how to get that working with Sonar. But from what I've seen to far from the Ipad I can highly recommend it for usage in a studio. There is just too much cool stuff already and I'm sure there will be lots more to come in the future. I really hope Cakewalk will see this too and integrate support for the OSC (Open Sound Control) protocol from the Touch OSC app and I'm sure more will follow.