Gregory's Serverand 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
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16 comments
Tube🌱Time
oh here it goes. it just took a while to find the MS-DOS disk, i guess. time to try out BASIC.
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.
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...
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.  
bitsavers.org
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 Wonder how hard it'll be to make a Macintosh card for the apple ii
Jon Hendry
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.  |
hmm, must still be booting. this is just regular ol' ProDOS, not MS-DOS.