Jolt Country

The hardware does to a certain extent, give me a hard on: in highschool, I had Apple IIe drives and systems sprayed across my room because I was trying (and failing) to solder together an Apple IIe to IDE solution so I could backup files from random discs I found laying around a PC junk store.

So that is the perspective I'm coming from but the other side of the coin is, do I have or am I involved a project that necessitates the ownership and usage of such hardware? I'm not currently trying to learn bass, so I haven't and won't allocate the room to owning that instrument and all the accessories associated with it. Then why would I have an Apple IIe laying around the house?

Trust me, the thought is attractive but I just can't justify having gear that I will do little or nothing left or use for something greater than playing the occasional bout of Oregon Trail. (This is a similar argument for my Japanese practice armor: there are people who own it just to own it, but then what is the point if your not actually using it for its intended purpose or something more?)

You can always argue emulation vs. the real thing. I mean, look at arcade games. Even in Invading Spaces, the book I wrote about collecting arcade games, I could not honestly justify or defend the collecting of arcade games as a sane hobby.

Take, oh, Rampart for example. Rampart's a fun game. With one player it's okay, but with two people it's really fun and with three people, it's a freakin' blast. My buddy Jeff and I used to play Rampart all the time. It's one of those games that strengthens the bond between friends by getting you extremely pissed off at them over a quarter's worth of pixels. One well placed cannonball shot in that game can make the difference between riding and walking home from the arcade, I assure you.

Prior to MAME, if you wanted to play Rampart at home you had a few options. According to Mobygames, Rampart was released for the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, DOS, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Genesis, Lynx, NES, SEGA Master System, and SNES. Some of those ports are better than others. The 8-bit versions, like those for the NES, SMS, and GBC, are passable. Fun, but not particularly accurate to the arcade version. By the time you hit the 16 bit versions, like those for the Amiga, the Genesis, or the SNES, they're essentially indistinguishable from the original.

Of those systems, by the way, I own Amiga, C64, DOS (of course), Genesis, NES, SMS, and SNES systems. For most of them, I'm sure I could round up a copy of Rampart and be playing it within the hour. Throw emulation into the mix and I'm sure I could be playing any version of Rampart ever released within minutes.

And now of course we have MAME. MAME emulates Rampart 100% accurately. The original cabinet was available in both joystick and trackball versions. If you don't have a trackball, you can play using your mouse. Still, it's fun and close enough.

For anyone getting a random hankering to play some Rampart, there is no reason on earth to go buy a Rampart arcade cabinet.

I own a Rampart arcade cabinet.

I bought it because Jeff and I used to play it all the time. Back in the day we spent hours upon hours standing side-by-side playing Rampart, alternating between laughing and cursing one another while blowing the shit out of each other's castles and occasionally throwing elbows into each other's ribs or stomping on the other guy's toes. Whatever it takes to win, man.

Even though mine's not in an original Atari cabinet, I still know every inch of it. Since it's not original there's no real reason to "restore" it per se, but I have done a little work on it. I pulled the joysticks out one to clean the switches. I replaced a couple of the buttons, and some of the t-molding that got scuffed up when I was moving it. One of the coin mechs is a little messed up ... a rainy day project, waiting for a rainy day.

I have played Rampart so long that I have become physically uncomfortable. The cabinet's too wide to really support three players, especially three adults, so it's cramped. You can't spread your legs wide in a Rampart stance, so first your legs start hurting, then your back. In my old arcade room with all the machines turn on, it got hot, and pretty sure you you were standing uncomfortably close to someone else, trading elbow sweat and back pains with fellow combatants.

On paper, there is really no way to justify owning arcade cabinets, especially non-popular or non-valuable ones. Up until a few months ago, I owned 30.

That's a long way of saying, "I'm the wrong guy to talk you out of buying stupid stuff."

Before I moved, this was one corner of my old attic:



Can't justify owning a lick of it.

Can't tell you how much I enjoy owning them.

Quinn DeAngelo wrote:

Flack wrote:Out in the garage, I have a Franklin Ace 1000. I believe it is 100% Apple II compatible, so I'm hoping the card works on it.

Almost certainly it should work, although I've never seen one personally, I suspect the slot should work. I mean, Franklin simply wholesale copied the entire Apple II ROM and used it in their computers so I can't see them not using the hardware connections.

The name sounded familiar and I looked it up on Wikipedia to confirm what I thought it was. Franklin got sued by Apple. They won in the trial court and lost on appeal. Theirs was the first case to rule that an operating system (the Apple II ROM) as a binary program was copyrightable, and thus Franklin's pure copying of the internal ROM was infringement.

They eventually created a non-infringing bios but it was only partially compatible. The reason this didn't work as well as the non-infringing bios' on IBM-PCs was that programs that used the Apple Rom did so by calling absolute addresses; if you couldn't hit those exact spots for code, programs wouldn't work the same.

IBM-PC programs were designed to use interrupts, which then any competing ROM could just install their own interrupt in its place, and the program would not know the difference.

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Nobody can get no sleep, there's someone on everyone's toes. But when Quinn DeAngelo gets here, everybody's gonna wanna doze.

TSUMMARY: "I didn't have any personal knowledge to add to this thread, so instead I got some information from Wikipedia and pasted it here. Also, I created a another fake persona in hopes of tricking Flack into chatting with me after he said he would never chat with me. I added a signature to the post to make it seem more believable."

Quinn DeAngelo wrote:

Flack wrote:I don't know what it is about charging these things by the way, but once they get so low, you're right, a standard USB port doesn't seem to wake them back up. Even worse is the iPad, which says that it will only charge from "high output" USB ports (I've yet to find one).

Originally I wasn't sure, and I thought, "does this mean direct connect to the ports on the case as opposed to a hub?" I know there are some devices that say specifically not to use a hub, to only hook the thing into the USB ports on the case itself. Or maybe it does mean a USB hub that has its own power supply? It's hard to guess what they'd want.

Then again, it is Apple, and everything they make has two objectives, to screw you over buy making you pay Apple extra for something that you could get from a third-party if it worked the same as a PC device, for about 1/10 as much, or to screw you over by buying something a third party has figured out how to reverse engineer, for a mere three times as much as a PC-equivalent item.

After I wrote all that I did a Google search. A "high output usb charger" (use that string and you'll find many references) is one that delivers 2.1 amps. It's a travel charger like something you'd use when you want to plug an American electric shaver in a European hotel bathroom wall socket. They're about twenty bucks.

TSUMMARY: "I have no experience in charging Apple products, so instead I made up some gobbledygook about USB ports, slandered Apple, and (once again) drew from Google to have something to add to a conversation that I know nothing about."

Got the card in today. Doesn't appear to work on my Franklin Ace 1000. Is working on an Apple //e. Still figuring it all out. Will post more about it tomorrow or over the weekend.

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Does this card perform the same function as the 1541 Ultimate, but on Apple machines? Cause it would seriously replace the Apple disc drives and make it worthwhile to provide desk space for the computer again.

Also, after hooking the card up, would you use the computer more? Can you run a telnet board on the Apple?



THE
LETS GO RETRO
BOOM, BOOM, BOOM-BOOM-BOOM
AARDVARK

Essentially, it does the same thing the 1541 Ultimate does. You can copy .DSK files over to a USB stick, plug them into this card, mount them and play them.

The menu is not quite as slick or polished as the 1541u's, but the basics are there. You can mount floppies from a USB stick (or compact flash card), and you can also (from the menu) copy between real floppies and disk images and back. If you don't plan on converting disks to and fro, then you wouldn't need real floppy drives hooked up at all. Currently I don't have any hooked up (the whole thing is currently set up on my kitchen table -- I'll have to migrate upstairs this weekend).

I don't know a lot about Apple hardware so this is a little confusing, but I guess the Apple II has 7 hardware slots and each one has its own address, so it's not like a PC where any card can go in any slot and be addressed the same way. I think, based on what I can find, most floppy drive controllers were in slot 6. The instructions of this thing say to install the card in slot 7, and then you have to use a "virtual" slot to address the new virtual floppy, so slot 6 is taken but you can't have a card there. At that point do I move the physical card to slot 5? Will I be able to access those floppies still? This is stuff I'll have to figure out. They have some forums online but I need more of a dummy's guide.

Out of 5 Apple II machines I own that are easily accessible, I got the card working on 1. 2 systems wouldn't recognize the system at all, one had serious keyboard issues, and one had serious video issues. The one it worked on still has $2.98 written on it in grease pencil from the thrift store where I bought it. Sadly, the card doesn't seem to work in my Franklin Ace 1000 at all. The part where the card's menu is supposed to come up just gets bypassed.

I only got to mess around with it for about 2 hours last night so that's all I have at the moment. I need to start digging and find my old Apple II joystick and figure out more about the floppy drive situation. Once everything's said and done I also need to get rid of all this broken hardware. Storing a stack of broken Apple II machines is fairly pointless.

Oh, one other thing. The card is designed so that the Compact Flash slot faces "up" (toward the top of the machine) and the USB port faces "forward" (toward the front of the case, not the back). In other words, you cannot access either of those slots with the Apple case closed. The instruction manual does say that you can use a USB extension cable, which is the only saving grace of this design.

Just how Woz would have done it! Would not have done it I mean!!

My initial thoughts, along with a few pictures:

http://www.robohara.com/?p=4919