Apple 2?

[mart_man00]

Any Apple 2 users?

Im attempting to get some software to my 2c and 2es, but i dont have a modem. I also heard its floppy drives wrote a different way from pc's(5.25 drives im talking about, I have some froma old xt/386).

Any suggestions? Anyone even remember these:p ?

Thanks

[DerekKraan]

I've got a suggestion: Try posting this in a forum for Macs. Then maybe someone will know. :-P

I'm not saying nobody here knows it, but there's a much higher chance of you running into someone who knows old Macs at a Mac forum.

[mart_man00]

Its not a Mac :p

I might try it, but i find mostly Mac users dont know there Apple history and need helmets to read their email :D

[DMR]

Unfortunately, Apple floppies of that era did use a different low-level layout (capacity, # of tracks, # of sectors, sector size) than their PC counterparts, on top of the issue of using a different filesystem format. I haven't worked with those beasts in friggin' ages, so I can't rember if anyone developed some sort of translation software like the PC Exchange program that later Macs had.

Come to think of it, IIRC the only reason PC Exchange worked was the fact that, by that time, the Mac 3.5" drives used the same physical layout as PC 3.5" drives. With that in mind, I'd expect PC Exchange just took care of the problem of mounting/accessing a PC floppy filesystem, but didn't deal with any low-level stuff like track/sector translation.

[mage492]

Have you tried using an external floppy or cd drive? The only distro that I know of that even HAS images for 5.25 floppies is Slackware, and that only runs on Intel processors.

Another option would be network booting, though I don't have any personal experience with it.

I'm sure there ARE other ways, but those are the only ones I can think of.

Great to see I'm not the ONLY person still alive who uses old Apples!

(btw, the Mac II used 5.25 floppies? I have an SE and a Classic that both use 3.5's. The Classic can even read/write the 1.44 Mb format.)

[mart_man00]

Maybe i can find a mac guy to make the disks for me.

I have some kind of card to let me plug in a apple 5.25 drive to a old mac ls, i dont know if it works. i dont have the software.

I need a mac friend or money to buy the ide card thingy.

Thanks guys

[mage492]

As for software, there are a lot of low-end-mac sites out there that have huge collections of stuff. You might find what you're looking for at one of them.

[kevinalm]

The apple 2 series typically used 5.25" floppies in an apple specific format. As I recall about 130kb written single sided in (I think) 35 tracks. We used to save a couple of bucks by buying double sided disks, cutting a write protect notch in the floppy casing and flipping them over. Incidently, there was no floppy controller per se, software and the cpu directly controlled the drives. Which made for some very creative copy protection on commercial software. And also makes it nearly impossible to use any "normal" drive on a 2/2+/2e . The controller cards were basically a set of buffers and a rom to extend the bios.

[mart_man00]

So doesnt that mean theres a chance kevinalm?

If its software thats doing the magic and not hardware im surprised i cant find something. Like a program that will have me plug the drive into my parellel port of something.

Is it that hard to pull of or are there that little people?

[kevinalm]

Could it be done? Probably, but I suspect it never was done. Remember, this was very early home computer history. To the best of my knowlege, Apple held to this floppy format until the macs came out. There was very little insentive to use imb drives with an apple 2. The drives were hardware incompatable, 35 tracks verses 40? tracks, and the contemporary ibm's didn't hold that much more data. The connectors were different and used a different signal set. Apple was VERY proprietary. And fixated on developing the lisa and mac.

I could be wrong, maybe someone did make an interface card to use an ibm drive, but I don't recall ever hearing about it. They did make some odd aftermarket stuff. There was a pc on a card as I recall that would turn a 2e? into a pc with the flip of a switch. And all manner of ram expander cards.

To do it yourself would be a major developement project. You would have to design a custom interface card and write the software. Anybody feel like hand assembling and debugging a few thousand bytes of 6502 machine code? Ouch. ;) I actuall did about 1.5 kb once for a eprom programmer for my own use. Got it to work too but I wouldn't recommend it.

[mart_man00]

There is a card that you can put in the apple so it cad read a ide hard drive and compact flash cards. its made by this one guy(not a company) for like $200.

i was wondering if i could use a apple drive on a pc, not the other way around. i have like 20 of them, id dont care if i blow one :D

id like to learn assmebly on the 6502s, maybe ill have a project in a couple years. i hope some one beats me to it soon.

kevinalm, you dont like the 6502s or is it just how long it took?

Thanks

[kevinalm]

Well, using an apple drive on a pc runs into most of the same problems. In fact, it might be even more difficult, since the bios/os is written to talk to a floppy controller and not to the drive.

Actually, I kind of liked doing 8 bit code. The problem was that I didn't have an assembler program, just apple's machine language monitor. So I wrote the code on paper in assemby in one column, and hex in another, writing the memory addresses in the left margin. Worked pretty good really. Then typed the hex into the mlm, and saved to a binary file on a floppy. Broke it into subroutines, read, write, verify, etc. and linked it all together with a user interface written in applesoft basic. You could call machine language subroutines very easily in applesoft basic. It was time consuming but I learned a lot. Go for it if you want. As for me, been there, done that, got the t-shirt. :D

>> edit I meant to ask, what software are you trying to load onto a 2 series from an imb floppy? It would be very unlikely for anything that would run on a 2 to ever have been in that format.

[banzaikai]

Howdy.

Would it be possible to download to the Mac/PC, then transfer to the 2/2+/2c over a serial direct-connect using a term program (with Xmodem/Zmodem protocol)?

This is how I got things done for my PET/VIC/C64s before I slapped a Go64 interface on the Amiga (which allowed connecting drives, printers, and plotters).

You'd need something like MacTerm/QModem on the big box, and AppleTerm on the little guy. Get (or build) a serial null-modem cable, set baud rates and protocols, and you're golden.

65xx ML programming is a snap for me. Just don't have the time for it - winds up being a couple thousand bytes of $EA :D

Hope this helps...

banzai "commodore" kai

[kevinalm]

I thought about suggesting a serial link, but the 2 series didn't have serial ports unless you added a serial card. And then you'd have to find a terminal program for a 2.

Yeah, 6502 programing is not very difficult, just time consuming. And a bear to debug if you made a mistake.
:D