CompactFlash drive controller for Apple II

[DaMadFiddler]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-IIe-IIgs- ... SwDk5T4RJu

People have produced some crazy accessories for the Apple II line, ranging from ethernet cards to a high-fidelity sound card with an integrated tube amplifier (though I have to imagine that puts a strain on the power supply).

This is another in a long line of many, but given the age and unreliability of the world's floppy disk supply, this seems very useful for anyone interested in keeping these old machines in service (e.g., |darc|... though IIRC yours is a IIe, and I think this card is only compatible with certain revisions of the IIe).

[|darc|]

Yeah mine is a IIe, but AFAIK it has all the enhanced ROMs installed.

[Calavera]

I've been wanting to buy the SD card one for my Commodore 128D

[DaMadFiddler]

I'd love to see how far you can go in tricking out an Apple II. VGA card, sound card with speech synthesizer, mass storage controller, SD adapter, Internet connection, massive RAM upgrade, maybe even one of those janky old Apple graphics tablets. And if you want to cheat, someone made a version of a Raspberry Pi that works as an Apple II expansion card and uses the Apple II's keyboard and I/O systems.

[DaMadFiddler]

Something like this might be even more desirable:

http://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/

It emulates a 5.25" floppy drive, 3.5" floppy drive, or floppy-port hard drive and can be configured to work with Apple II, Lisa, or classic Macs. It's got a screen and selector buttons so you can choose a disk image to load, and it will work as a boot device on everything except the Apple IIc (due to the way drives are configured on that machine).

I'm strongly considering one of these for my Mac Plus.

[DaMadFiddler]

I'll be honest... seeing all the crazy stuff people have come up with is kinda making me want to collect more vintage computers.

[DaMadFiddler]

So I got a Floppy Emu, and I've been using it with my Mac Plus for the last day or so. I've used it both as a virtual floppy drive and as a floppy-port hard drive. It's a bit slow (as expected for something on the floppy port), but it's really easy to set up and it works great. It also uses the same type of disk images as Mini vMac, so you can use that (or other classic Mac emulators) to set up and manipulate volumes for it.

[|darc|]

That's pretty cool. I want a classic Mac like that, but I have enough shit as it is and can't really be throwing more money at vintage electronics

[DaMadFiddler]

Understandable. I bought a Mac Color Classic a few years ago that had both the "Mystic" upgrade and the VGA mod, but I was only able to get it because the seller was asking WAY less than what such a setup typically goes for. And that was shortly before my employer at the time went belly-up and started withholding paychecks, so I ended up having to sell it a few months later. Really wish I'd been able to keep it, but I just couldn't justify sitting on the money.

This Mac Plus is actually something I saved from going to the dump; someone in my neighborhood was throwing it away, so I asked if I could take it. The Floppy Emu is the only part of it that cost me any money.

As someone into vintage computers (and specifically Apple vintage computers), the Floppy Emu may well be worth your money, though. In addition to emulating both an external Mac floppy drive and a Mac floppy-port hard drive (the HD20, though you're certainly not restricted to 20MB volumes), it can also emulate both a Lisa drive and an Apple II drive, and you can use it as a boot volume for any of those systems.

[BlueCrab]

Just to chime in with another potential option that ends up being a bit cheaper (brought to my attention by the guy who gave me the IIe that |darc| has now):
http://tulip-house.ddo.jp/digital/UNISD ... index.html

[|darc|]

As someone into vintage computers (and specifically Apple vintage computers), the Floppy Emu may well be worth your money, though. In addition to emulating both an external Mac floppy drive and a Mac floppy-port hard drive (the HD20, though you're certainly not restricted to 20MB volumes), it can also emulate both a Lisa drive and an Apple II drive, and you can use it as a boot volume for any of those systems.

It doesn't really let me do much that I already can't do with ADTPro though.

[DaMadFiddler]

Well, it doesn't require an active connection to another computer; once your data is on the SD card, it's fully autonomous, plus it can store as many disk images as you want on the card, where you can switch between them at will using the onboard controls.

It also supports the Lisa (because we all have one of those) and the Macintosh. The Floppy Emu is ideal for my Mac Plus, since that system has no hard drive and the SCSI port is temperamental. (When the Plus came out, SCSI specifications were still in draft form.)

I loaded up an SD card with disk images (which are also compatible with Basilisk II and Mini vMac), plugged the Floppy Emu into the Plus' external floppy port, and the Mac Plus can now be used as a fully autonomous computer, even without disks.

The Floppy Emu can also emulate the HD20 floppy-port hard drive, with disk images as large as the given computer and OS version can handle. I have my Floppy Emu set to default as a 200 MB HD20, and I used Mini vMac to copy all of the software from those other disk images into the "hard drive." So now when I turn my Plus on, it sees the Floppy Emu as a hard drive, boots from the HD20 partition, and all my software is there and ready to go.

On a side note: System 7.5 is DAMN slow on a Mac Plus

I set it up to boot to 7.5 for software compatibility reasons, but I may go back to System 6 due to the enormous speed difference.

[Eviltaco64X]

That's Useful! I used to have an Apple IIGS setup, one of the biggest problems came from old floppies losing their data.