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My New Old Apple IIe Computer

charlieharrington.com

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Re: My New Old Apple IIe Computer

#31

Post by StillBored »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #9
user_0x wrote: post #6

I totally agree with you about the awesomeness of the software manuals from the time. The whole aesthetic is so much warmer then it is now.

Because there were no websites, blogs, podcasts, or other sources of information about these devices, the manuals had to be thorough. You should see how amazing the manual for my Amdek monitor is, or the Grappler + graphics card for the Apple // (allows you to print graphics from your Apple // to a dot matrix printer): https://apple2online.com/web_documents/Orange%20Micro%20Grap... If you were lucky, other authors ma…

I'm not sure dearth is the right word here. Sure the total volume of information was less, but the quality was massively higher. Sure, you might get incorrect information from BBS's or friends, but the manuals were detailed, technically accurate, and usually complete. AKA, you didn't get through reading one and go "but what about..." only to discover a dark hole. There was a bit of that, but usually 3rd parties stepped up and wrote books to fill in obvious gaps. The whole "Beneath Apple DOS/PRODOS" series is an example of that.

One only needs to spend about 10 mins on stack overflow to see that much of it is the blind leading the blind, where most of the answers are incomplete, biased, outdated, wrong, etc.

Re: My New Old Apple IIe Computer

#32

Post by rbanffy »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #8

The easiest and fastest way to get software onto your new beloved: Search the internet for the FTP Apple Asimov server (there are http mirrors if you don’t want you use ftp). This is an archive of many thousands of Apple diskette images and software. Download stuff from the archive onto an SD card. Then purchase an SD to Apple disk emulator card (plugs into one of those 7 slots and emulates an Apple disk drive). You…

I also suggest the CFFA hard-disk emulator. I always wanted a hard disk for my Apple II.

Re: My New Old Apple IIe Computer

#33

Post by rbanffy »

hnaa wrote: post #25

Hey this is a former coworker of yours from GU back in the day. Nice post! Hope you're doing well and congrats on the IIe. I grew up coding on one of these as well. :)

My first paid job was writing educational software for Apple II's. Those were pretty awesome machines for the time.

Re: My New Old Apple IIe Computer

#34

Post by StillBored »

rbanffy wrote: post #32
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #8

The easiest and fastest way to get software onto your new beloved: Search the internet for the FTP Apple Asimov server (there are http mirrors if you don’t want you use ftp). This is an archive of many thousands of Apple diskette images and software. Download stuff from the archive onto an SD card. Then purchase an SD to Apple disk emulator card (plugs into one of those 7 slots and emulates an Apple disk drive). You…

I also suggest the CFFA hard-disk emulator. I always wanted a hard disk for my Apple II.

I have one of the old ones, its good, but the new ones look even better because you can copy images from the internet directly to it.

OTOH, I also have the https://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/ for that.

The CFFA is better as a HD, while the floppy emu is good for just plugging into random disk ports (IIGS/IIC/laser 128).

Re: My New Old Apple IIe Computer

#35

Post by StillBored »

mattlondon wrote: post #22
mjg59 wrote: post #19

> Some wizards at work told me that I probably cannot just plug this into a modern phone line and expect it to work, though. Is this true? I can't think of any immediate reason it would fail, but finding something to actually dial into seems like a harder problem.

Pulse Vs tone? Is that a thing or did my brain just make it up? :/

Probably doesn't matter (although that is a genuine Hayes so it probably supports both) because a lot of those old modems were capable of "operator dial". AKA you dial the phone manually then you tell the modem to start negiotiation. AKA ATDT is a tone dial, while ATDP is a pulse dial, or just plain ATD to start negotiation.

Re: My New Old Apple IIe Computer

#37

Post by PebblesHD »

Amazingly, this is exactly how I acquired my SE/30, sitting on the side of the road in a pile of other junk. Had the keyboard and trapezoid mouse! I was still at university at the time and took great joy in writing an essay about wiretapping on it, then spending nearly a week trying to get the floppy drive working to get said essay off the machine...

Re: My New Old Apple IIe Computer

#39

Post by isolli »

whatrocks wrote: post #5
StanislavPetrov wrote: post #4

You mention that you don't have any games for your Apple II. If you go the used game route and want to get the full experience be sure to check out Wizardry and Zork!

Will do! Someone also just turned me onto this site: https://asciiexpress.net/diskserver/ where you can connect your laptop or phone's headphone jack with a 3.5mm audio cable to the Apple II cassette-in port, and just play the audio files to transfer over games and other software. This is the magic I was hoping for.

I would recommend Lode Runner as well!

Re: My New Old Apple IIe Computer

#40

Post by apple2ta »

Ha ha that SIN function on the screen reminded me of how slow operations like SIN and COS were on the old BBC Computers. You had to think before you did stuff like that. I remember figuring out that using pythag x^2+y^2 =1 therefore y=sqrt(1-x^2) was a much faster way to draw a circle than SIN/COS.
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