30 May
1997
30 May
'97
12:51 a.m.
On Fri, 30 May 1997, Paul E Coad wrote:
The last one is an IBM type card which was with the
Apple cards. It
has 2 9 pin female connectors and an RCA type jack. The board has the
words "DIAMOND COMPUTER SYSTEMS INC" and "TRACKSTAR 128 TM" silk
screened on the board. There are two EPROMs, a 6502, 65SC02, 2 EPROMs,
8 socketed AMPAL16L8LPCs (memory?). There is another socketed IC
which is labeled DISK. I'm guessing that this is some sort of Apple II
on an ISA card.
The Trackstar was basically a complete Apple II on a card that went
into a PC compatible. Well, it didn't have much expansion, so you
you couldn't add a Z-80 SoftCard, but that wasn't the market that it
was aimed at anyway. It required an actual Apple disk drive, since
PC drives require a format that respects the existence of the sector
detect hole. It was mainly aimed at the educational market, since
many schools had a lot of old Apple hardware and software. To the
best of my recollection, it was at least as Apple II compatible as a
clone could be -- I don't remember _any_ programs that couldn't be
made to run, and a lot of games looked mighty cool on a Tandy 1000
display. (While it would go into any generic PC compatible, Tandy
made a specific effort to market and regain market share lost with
their stupid decision to abandon the old Z-80 product line).
--
Ward Griffiths
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within
the system, but too early to shoot the bastards." --Claire Wolfe