As a distraction from everything else that's going on in the world, I played around with the Apple IIc and Apple IIe yesterday.

I can sit in the recliner with the IIc in my lap and type in little BASIC programs to draw lo-res graphics on the screen. I have a composite to HDMI adapter connected to the video expansion port on the IIc, and it does a pretty great job. The only weakness is that it's essentially doubling the screen and outputting a 640x480 signal. The TV doesn't really recognize that aspect ratio, so it's somewhat stretched. Not a big deal, it's not really noticeable.

The thing that was useful, in terms of improvement, was turning up the settings in the TV to "Vivid." Much better. I'm even able to read 80-column text sitting in the recliner.

So I did that for a while, but I still find myself running out of gas at some point. I didn't sleep well on Friday night, so I spent a lot of time napping yesterday. (I also still have some residual crud going. Yesterday, I was hoarse and had to keep clearing my throat. Tooth is still sensitive, but seems to be improving, albeit slowly.)

Anyway, I rallied yesterday evening and decided to go look at the IIe. I hadn't checked out the disk drives on it yet, and I wanted to see if they were working. I have a diagnostic program on a 5.25" floppy, and it booted that okay. I ran through all the CPU tests, and they all passed, as I'd kind of expected.

I wanted to do a read/write test on the drives, so I needed to format a blank 5.25" floppy. I just got a box of 10 "new, old stock" disks on Friday, so I pulled one of those out and stuck it in Drive 1 to format it. The drive made all the usual noises, so I went on to do the read/write test.

Failed.

Hmmmm...

I figured I'd try Drive 2, and since Drive 1 had failed, I'd do the format all over again with Drive 2. Well, looking at the disk I'd just removed from Drive 1, "Saint Hopper be praised!" there was a desiccated dead long-winged fly on the disk. Probably from inside the drive. Now, I don't know if that was the source of the failure, because it was on top of the disk and it's read from the bottom. But I blew the corpse away and stuck the disk in Drive 2.

All tests passed.

Figured I'd try Drive 1 again, and likewise.

So far, everything on this machine has checked out. It came with a parallel interface card, two 1200 baud internal modems (one just lying loose inside the cabinet, a 64K Aux Slot memory card, and the drive controller. I'd removed the cards but the Aux Slot and drive controller, and it works like a champ.

I bought a new-production 8MB Aux Slot memory card and installed that in place of the 64K card and ran the memory test again. The diagnostic software only seemed to recognize the first 64K, but it passed the card.

It's awkward working on the IIe with the monitor stand and the System Saver, so I decided that was enough for one evening. I figured I'd play with it a bit this morning.

I'd spotted an McT SpeedDemon accelerator card on the auction site, and one thing led to another and I bought it. A pretty good deal, compared to the Applied Engineering Transwarp, and the Titan accelerators. They each have onboard memory that essentially replicates the IIe's motherboard memory. The Transwarp actually has 256KB, and will use the additional memory as a RAM disk, or to "expand" AppleWorks (allow you to have more files active on the desktop). The SpeedDemon has 16KB of cache memory, 8KB of code, and 8KB of "tag" memory. In terms of performance, it's usually just as fast as the others, sometimes faster. If you're really bored, or interested, you can check the comparison here. Note that it includes a number of "modern" accelerators. I had a FastChip before, and it was a screamer. The SpeedDemon is impressive though.

It has a built-in self test, and it'll test Aux memory. It's running now. It's either hung, because of an incompatibility with the modern card, or it just takes a long time to test 8MB of memory. It hasn't failed though, because that would give an unambiguous result. I'm just going to let it run for a couple of hours and see what happens. When I turn the machine on, I get the little SpeedDemon accelerated Apple logo on startup, so I'm pretty sure it's working just fine.

My big challenge now is to get it into the office somehow. I recall really enjoying playing with Apple Pascal on the IIe I had back in 2019. It ran out of a RAM disk, with the Transwarp accelerator. It wasn't as fast as using a ROM-based interpreter, like Applesoft, but it wasn't unbearable either. All the modules were available on the RAM disk, and the accelerator made compiling tolerable. I expect a similar experience with this setup. Just need to make space.

Anyway, a harmless distraction from all the awful going on in the world. Grateful to have it.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 10:28 Sunday, 6 October 2024