HANDS ON The Applied Engineering PC Transporter System Reviewed by Mike Markowitz It isn't every day that an add-in card for the veteran Apple II rates a story in the Wall Street Journal. That's what happened during AppleFest in September, 1987 while Applied Engineering was demonstrating the PC Tranporter to admiring throngs. "Now Apple Speaks IBM" said the colorful buttons. To many Apple hackers it was a chilling prospect. The product finally shipped in January, 1988, only a few months late. The biggest initial customer was the Department of Defense, which took four thousand (to be installed in new Apple IIGS's in schools for military dependents all over the world. ) With a price tag as impressive as its spec sheet, PC Transporter is aimed at Apple users who need MS-DOS capability, but who don't want to buy a whole bulky, obsolescent computer to get it. In effect, PC Transporter puts an entire PC-XT clone inside your Apple, where it sleeps until you wake it up by running special "pre-boot" software. When it comes alive, it treats your Apple peripherals as if they were the equivalent devices connected to a PC. The ImageWriter printer, for example, emulates the IBM Graphics Printer, and Apple 800K 3.5" disk drives can be used as MS-DOS 720K drives. The Apple mouse can emulate the Mouse Systems PC mouse connected to COM2. MS-DOS can read any ProDOS clock/calendar to time/date stamp files. You can even create an MS-DOS volume on a ProDOS-compatible hard disk. Although PC Transporter has no PC-compatible "slots" of its own, it can use devices connected to many of the slots and ports of the Apple II. First the price tag, then the spec sheet... COST The package we received for review invoiced out at $957 retail. This included: PC Transporter with 768K $639. IIGS Installation Kit 49. 5.25" 360K One-drive System 269. The minimum configuration of the card is 384K of RAM for $489. The installation kit (cables) for the IIe or II+ is $39. Apple 5.25" drives are single-sided, and too dumb to work normally with MS-DOS, so you will need at least one of AE's drives. The Two-drive unit is $399. There are quite a few other options, including an 8087-2 math co-processor chip for $229. Ouch. You can upgrade the memory in 128K increments ($40 each). The chips are not standard DRAMS, but "dual ported" ZIP chips that stand on edge, to take up less space on the board. Apple II+ users will need to buy an IBM-style keyboard ($139) and adapter cable ($34), since they don't have enough keys, even in funny combinations, to use MS-DOS software. Apple IIGS users contemplating the world of MS-DOS may also wish to ditch their toy keyboards for something more substantial. Otherwise, the keyboard remapping is fairly easy to remember: becomes , and in combination with the digits gives you the function keys. SPECIFICATIONS PC Transporter is a remarkable feat of engineering. The design team included Cliff Huston, who helped Steve Wozniak design the original Apple II disk controller, Dick Huston, who wrote the ProDOS operating system, Peter Quinn, the engineering project manager for the Apple IIe and IIc, and several other Apple veterans. Apart from the RAM chips, there are only fifteen chips on the board (sixteen if you add the math co-processor.) The disk controller chip and video chip are especially impressive as examples of customized large-scale integration. The card draws only 350 milliamps of current on standby, 600 milliamps when active. The use of surface-mount technology should ensure that this will be a reliable board. The CPU is an NEC V-30, which emulates the Intel 8086 operating at 7.16 Megahertz. The video output supports the standard IBM Color Graphics Adapter modes, but can be used with composite, TTL RGB or analog RGB monitors. The twenty-four RAM chips are special "dual ported" memory accessible to both the PC Tranporter and the Apple's own microprocessor. You can use this memory as a RAM disk when running Apple ProDOS programs. It appears as "drive #1" of the slot PC Transporter is plugged into, with the volumn name /RAMAEPC. INSTALLATION The board can live in any Apple slot, except #3. On the IIGS it can go into Slot #7 and it doesn't interfere with the memory expansion slot. The package we received included a short, videotape (VHS format) in which the well-groomed hands of a young lady demonstrate all the tricky steps of the installation process. The manual gives a detailed procedure for each kind of Apple II. The IIGS installation kit includes a separate, small circuit board called the Color Switch, which takes the digital RGB output from PC Transporter and converts it into an analog RGB signal for the Apple monitor. The Color Switch snuggles up against the power supply case (a little rubber bumper keeps the pins on the back side of the card from shorting out on the case). The cabling to and from this board makes some tight turns, but we were able to complete the installation without difficulty. Users who have some confidence and experience in installing and removing circuit boards should have no difficulty with PC Transporter. The board uses static sensitive CMOS components however, so the usual precautions should be taken (touch the power supply case to discharge yourself, don't do the installation on a dry windy day, unplug your electrostatic air purifier, and keep the cat out of the room.) According to Applied Engineering, the PC Transporter is compatible with the Laser 128 and later Franklin clones of the Apple II, although this is not mentioned in any of the advertising or documentation... DOCUMENTATION The 162-page spiral-bound User's Manual is written to a very high standard of clarity and completeness, but the sheer complexity of the product means that most users will have to invest a few solid hours of study. Chapters cover hardware installation, software configuration, technical theory of operation, using the PC Transporter software, MS-DOS reference, keyboard reference, disk drives, printers and other peripherals. Appendices list the Apple interface cards supported, PC Transporter file types, MS-DOS Utilities, and a brief bibliography. A good four-page index makes the manual a pleasure to use. COMPATIBILITY PC Transporter performs exactly like a typical PC clone, in most respects. Lotus 1-2-3 and Flight Simulator ran without difficulty, but a few copy-protected games would not boot, or crashed immediately after loading. The MS-DOS operating system is NOT provided with AE's package, but you can legally purchase a copy from almost any computer store for under $100. The following programs all ran perfectly: MS-DOS 2.11 Mavis Beacon Teaches GWBASIC Typing! PC-DOS 3.30 Copy II PC WordStar 3.3 PC Tools Multimate 3.5 Norton Utilities VolksWriter Colortrope Kedit Chessmaster 2000 Print Shop for the IBM PC Print Master ProDesign II (demo disk) We even ran IBM's own tutorial disk "Exploring the IBM Personal Computer XT". You can't get more True Blue compatible than that! Peter Norton's handy SYSINFO utility gave a computing performance index of 3.2 (relative to the original IBM PC). We could not get any PC games to recognize the Apple joystick. AE's tech support explained that even though the Apple II and the IBM PC use the same kind of "digital" joystick, the Apple handles input from this device at a much slower rate, and there was no cost-effective way to emulate the IBM-style game port. Few purchasers of PC Transporter will be buying the product in order to play games, so we do not see this as a major compatibility problem... SOFTWARE To use PC Transporter, you place AE's preboot disk (both 3.5" and 5.25" formats are supplied) in an Apple drive, and a bootable MS-DOS disk in a TransDrive and simply turn on the computer. The software is a standard ProDOS application, (so you can launch it in the usual ways) but after loading itself into the first 128K of memory on the card, it runs a little memory test, snaps into MS-DOS and boots to the familiar A> prompt. If you have forgotten to put a bootable MS-DOS disk in the drive, or left the latch open, the program crashes with a fatal error, and you have to reboot. The PC Transporter software includes an elegant Control Panel which is accessed by holding down the Shift key and pressing Caps Lock twice (an unusual enough combination that you don't have to worry about entering it by mistake!) The Control Panel consists of a series of nested menus providing total control over the system configuration. On a IIGS you can still interrupt PC Transporter to access Apple's Control Panel in the usual way; AE should have called their Control Panel something else to avoid possible confusion. The next release of the PC Transporter software will include diagnostics, as well as the AppleWorks enhancements from AE's RamFactor memory card. The 360K TransDrive was one of the noisiest disk drives we have ever heard. It sounded as though a small animal trapped inside was trying desperately to escape. As expected, it would not read disks formatted on a high-density (1.2 Mb) PC-AT style disk drive. FILE TRANSFER An MS-DOS program, TRANSFER.EXE, included in the PC Transporter utilities, can be used to move ASCII or text files to or from ProDOS. It can be executed immediately from the DOS prompt if you know all the path names, or run in a menu-driven interactive mode, which takes you through the process step by step. We had no trouble moving AppleWorks text files into WordStar (as "non-document" files.) SUPPORT AE offers a one-year warranty on PC Transporter. On memory chips they offer an incredible five-year warranty. A technical support line (not toll-free) is manned from 9 to 5 (CST) on weekdays. Among Apple users, this company has a good reputation for standing behind their products. EVALUATION If PC Transporter had been available a year earlier, it would have been a greater value. Today, a PC-XT clone, with medium-resolution CGA graphics and no hard disk is only marginally viable as a home/business system, even if it coexists peacefully inside your Apple II. Moreover, most educational software looks and runs better on the old Apple II than on any PC, so the usefulness of PC Transporter in schools is questionable. The industry standard has moved very quickly to EGA graphics, a 20 Mb or larger hard disk and a fast 80286 (PC-AT class) microprocessor. Now a plain PC-XT can certainly do a great deal of useful work in almost any environment, but its capabilities are really not that much greater than an enhanced IIe running AppleWorks. To attract the typical user, a coprocessor system like PC Transporter has to offer significant additional power that the host system cannot provide in its "native" mode. Remember that most Apple II users contemplating an upgrade would rather have a Macintosh of any kind than the fastest, fanciest PC clone on Earth. We are a loyal breed. It would be a very good idea for AE to offer an inexpensive 20 Mb half-height hard disk as an option, installed in the TransDrive unit. Very few Apple II users can afford a ProDOS hard disk, since they are about twice the cost of equivalent MS-DOS drives. Running today's MS-DOS applications without a hard disk can be a torment. It might also be a good idea to offer a version of PC Transporter that could be installed inside the Apple IIc. This would be a packaging challenge, but AE's admirable Z-RAM memory card for the IIc demonstrates how much can be crammed into that little computer. In the long run, AE will need to enhance the PC Transporter hardware in order to stay competitive with low-priced clones; at least to the level required for Windows, if not OS/2. Meanwhile, the package is an excellent "interoperability" solution for at least half a million people who enjoy Apple II computing at home, and endure MS-DOS at work. --------------------- Applied Engineering PO Box 798 Carrollton, TEXAS 75006 sales (214) 241-6060 technical support (214) 241-6069