Bill Bland wrote: > I'll need to search for more information about the PC Transporter card. It > looks like it may be fun to fool with. It's got a serial port, and a > Din plug. I have no idea what the latter could be for. As others have mentioned, the DIN plug is for connecting a genuine PC keyboard to the card. This isn't strictly necessary, since the PC Transporter is able to use the Apple II keyboard. It is more important if you were using the PC Transporter in an Apple II+, which is missing lots of keys. I'm not sure what you mean by a "serial port". The PC Transporter does not have any kind of serial port. It can use serial ports provided by the Apple II (either the IIgs built-in ports, or a Super Serial Card). Working from memory, the PC Transporter has the following connectors: - DIN-5 for an optional PC-compatible keyboard. This goes through an adaptor cable, which connects to the card on a 6-pin molex header. - A pair of two-pin molex plugs, which are used to intercept the speaker in an Apple II+ or IIe. These are not used in the IIgs. - A four pin molex connector which is used to override the composite video output in the Apple II+ or IIe. This is not used in the IIgs. - A ten pin connector which can be used to connect a CGA (digital RGB) monitor, or which can be connected to the ColorSwitch card. The latter is used with a IIgs to select between PC Transporter and IIgs video output to the standard IIgs RGB monitor. - A twenty pin connector for attaching floppy drives to the PC Transporter. It supports the Apple 3.5 Drive and specific PC-compatible 5.25" and 3.5" drives which were sold by Applied Engineering. In theory, you can connect other PC-compatible drives to the card, but you need the right cabling and/or AE's drive enclosure. It only supports double density (360K for 5.25", 720K for 3.5"). Depending on what options are installed on your card, you may have empty RAM sockets and/or a 40-pin IC socket. The latter is for an 8087 Maths Coprocessor. The original version of the card used 64Kx4 "ZIL" RAM chips (zig-zag in line), which can be installed in groups of eight (256 KB). The maximum RAM capacity of the card is 768 KB, of which 640 KB is available for the PC. (The rest is used for video memory and the BIOS.) The later version of the card uses standard DIL RAM chips, and has the full complement of 768 KB installed when shipped by AE. The key points about the PC Transporter card are: 1. It has no ROM on the card. You _must_ have the software that was supplied with it before you can use it for anything. 2. There are two main functional modes for the card: (a) Running as a RAM disk and/or disk controller card for the Apple II. This requires a pre-boot driver which is loaded into the card by a patched copy of the PRODOS file (either ProDOS-8, or the GS/OS boot loader). You cannot boot the Apple II via a drive connected to the PC Transporter. You _must_ boot from a drive connected to another disk controller. (b) Running as a PC. This is entered by using the STARTAEPC program or its corresponding .SYSTEM file. These run under ProDOS-8. The software includes a control panel facility for configuring the PC. After you launch the software, the PC video output is activated, and it boots very much like a genuine PC. The PC Transporter has an NEC V30 processor running at approximately 7.5 MHz. It has a 16-bit data bus, and as far as the execution of PC code is concerned it is about three times the speed of an original IBM PC or PC/XT. Disk I/O is slower than a genuine PC. When in PC mode, the PC Transport can share a variety of peripherals of the Apple II. The Apple II's own CPU is occupied servicing the PC Transporter, so you can't use it for anything else while you're running in PC mode. The supported peripherals include: - Keyboard. The PC Transporter uses the Option key to enable special key combinations that are unavailable on the standard Apple IIe or IIgs keyboard. With the IIgs you can also use an extended ADB keyboard, which gives you the full complement of PC-compatible keys without any special key combinations. - Speaker. - Monitor. The PC Transporter overrides the standard video output of the Apple II, replacing it with its own CGA-compatible video display. It supports the standard PC 25 line text mode and graphics modes of 320x200 with four colours or 640x200 with two colours. - Floppy drives. Any floppy drive connected to the Apple II may be used with the PC Transporter to format a disk in MS-DOS format. In nearly all cases, the resulting disks are not physically compatible with a genuine PC, since most Apple II floppy drives use physical disk formats which are incompatible with the PC. For example, this lets you set up a 140K MS-DOS disk using a standard Apple II 5.25" drive, or an 800K MS-DOS disk using the standard Apple 3.5 Drive connected to the IIgs disk port. If you connect an Apple 3.5 Drive to the PC Transporter then it will be able to access 720K disk formats which are compatible with a genuine PC. Unfortunately this isn't 100% reliable. The best way to achieve floppy disk compatibility with a genuine PC is to use AE's 5.25" or 3.5" TransDrive connected to the PC Transporter, or an Apple SuperDrive connected to Apple's SuperDrive controller card, or a PC-compatible drive connected to a BlueDisk controller card. - Emulated hard drive. The PC Transporter can create an image file on a ProDOS volume which can be used as a hard drive by MS-DOS. With recent versions of the PC Transporter software, you can create two drives (C: and D:) up to 32 megabytes in size (by using two 16 megabyte files for each drive). You need a standard Apple II hard drive of some variety for this to be useful, though you can set up a small emulated hard drive on an Apple II floppy disk. - Mouse. I don't think it can emulate a multi-button mouse. - Serial ports. I think the PC Transporter may support some parallel cards, but I've never used one with it. The PC Transporter can support some printers connected to serial or parallel ports on the Apple II. -- David Empson dempson@actrix.gen.nz Snail mail: P O Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand