Some finds and a few questions

On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, David Williams wrote: Oh yeah, I think I remember you posting about the card trying to identify it. As far as drivers, everything you need is on the card and the hard drive. Remember, with the Apple ][, the "driver" software is embedded on a PROM or EPROM on the card itself which maps directly into a memory space dedicated to the slot the card is plugged in to. You should be able to just plug the card in (I suggest slot 7) and connect the hard drive to the card. Did you get the ribbon cable that connects to the end of the card and terminates with a DE-37 enclosed in a big metal bracket? Did you also get the thick black cable that connects from this DE-37 to the back of the hard drive? Finally, did you get the terminator that plugs into the other connector on the hard drive? (You are able to daisy-chain multiple hard drives together. I think the limit is 2 but don't hold me to that). Assuming you have all the required cables (my guess is that you a re missing the ribbon cable still), connect them all together and fire it all up. Hopefully the drive is not crashed and the OS installed will boot. The hard drive controller loads the first sector off the hard disk, which is the boot sector. That then loads the rest of the OS and then boots the OS. As far as I know, the initial boot is always into DOS 3.3. Then there is a First Class Peripherals menu that allows you to boot into other partitions (you could partition it for ProDOS, CP/M, and Pascal). I have all the formatting and installation software if you need it. But if it boots into anything then you're set. I modified the boot sector on mine to allow me to bypass the harddrive and boot to floppies if I held down the open-apple key. Open-Apple key for convenience. One of the ways to reboot an Apple //e is to hold down the Control and Open-Apple keys while pressing Reset. I added some code in the HD boot sector to look for Open-Apple being depressed. If it sees it, it then forces a boot to the floppy drive. So when I reboot my machine with Ctrl-OA-Reset, if I continued holding down the Open-Apple key I could boot right to floppies. If I let go quick enough I would boot the hard drive. It took only a couple practice tries to get used to it. As far as I know they only marketed the sider to the Apple world. The Sider is a 10MB unit, and the Sider ][ is 20MB. There's also the B-Sider which is a companion tape backup unit (I don't know the capacity). That explains it. I've been to pawn shops before where their prices were higher than retail!! It makes me want to strangle the owner just out of disgust. Well, don't get your hopes up about the games. They suck for the most part. I've had situations where the seller just wasn't receiving my e-mails. Give them one more chance and look up their number. If they were being asses about it, at least by confronting them on the telephone they will be more likely to tell you what happened as opposed to just hanging up on you. Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Always being hassled by the man. Coming in 1999: Vintage Computer Festival 3.0 See http://www.vintage.org/vcf for details! [Last web site update: 01/15/99]