Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
Tube❄️Time

i've heard a lot about this MS-DOS thing, and i want to give it a try. my Apple IIe Platinum should be perfect for this, right?

an Apple IIe Platinum with two 5 1/4" disk drives on top, and two more 5 1/4" disk drives next to it. there is a monitor behind it with the text "HELLO MASTODON" written in BASIC.
17 comments
Tube❄️Time

and i've got an MS-DOS 5 boot disk. it says there is BASIC on it as well, so i'll give that a try

closeup of the Apple IIe Platinum showing a floppy disk partly inserted into a 5 1/4" disk drive.
Tube❄️Time

hmm, must still be booting. this is just regular ol' ProDOS, not MS-DOS.

Apple II boot screen showing the PRODOS banner.
Tube❄️Time

oh here it goes. it just took a while to find the MS-DOS disk, i guess. time to try out BASIC.

the apple IIe platinum with four 5 1/4" disk drives. the monitor, oddly, is showing an MS-DOS 5.0 banner and prompt!
Tube❄️Time

i actually like this BASIC a bit better, see how the text is 80 columns? there's also a nice menu bar at the bottom. well, it would be nice if the Apple IIe had function keys.

GW-BASIC 3.22 on the Apple IIe platinum.
Tube❄️Time

let's pop the top and see how this thing can run MS-DOS. now that's a rather long expansion card there on the right...

Tube❄️Time

it is a PC Transporter card! there are a bunch of custom chips on the board. CGA graphics, glue logic, floppy controller...

an long and narrow expansion card with lots of chips and a skein of cables coming out of the right edge
Tube❄️Time

the CPU on the card is an NEC V30. it is a faster clone of the Intel 8086. the ceramic chip you can see on the left is an 8087 floating point coprocessor.

Tube❄️Time

oddly, the floppy chip is from Apple. the part number is 010-0101-0, which is a special floppy controller chip that supports both GCR (standard Apple II) and MFM. the card has a separate 19-pin floppy port.

VGC7240-0684
010-0101-0
©ⓂAPPLE 1987
yakkoj 🦊

@tubetime thats the SWIM chip (or some version of it), with Woz's GCR stuff and Wendell Sander's MFM stuff on it. Wendell had been running The Engineering Department, which did work leading up to this PC Transporter.

bitsavers.org

@tubetime

It isn't jumping out at me, but wasn't the card designed by the Engineering Department (ie. the Saunders)

Tube❄️Time

@bitsavers ahh that explains a lot. the card really feels like it was designed by Apple so i figured it was done by ex-Apple engineers.

DELETED replied to Tube❄️Time

@tubetime @bitsavers
So apple engineers in 1987 producing an MS DOS card for the apple ii

Wonder how hard it'll be to make a Macintosh card for the apple ii

AJ

@tubetime ooooh you got one of the ones with the ~weird ram~. Mine is the deeply normal looking one. I really want to hunt down one of the early gold chip models.

F4GUK Kryss

@tubetime
I think i still have2 of them in my atic.

Jon Hendry

@tubetime

Think you could hack an ISA slot onto the PC Transporter card? Then you could put a Quapple card in your PC in your Apple II.

Chip

@tubetime I actually tried this on the Apple //e’s at school because I wanted to bring some games from home and did not yet understand what computer architectures were.

Go Up