The Yellowstone card does not play well with the McT SpeedDemon accelerator card, even setting its slot to "normal" speed.

It remains somewhat possible that essentially upgrading the IIe to the "enhanced" version may resolve the issue. But the Yellowstone card doesn't require a 65c02, so that isn't the incompatibility.

BMOW points out that there is an incompatibility with an unenhanced IIe and the Yellowstone insofar as the "unenhanced" IIe will not boot from the Yellowstone card automatically. You can issue a keyboard command "PR#n" (where n is the slot number), and it'll boot. The ROM update might be my last hope, if it is compatible at all.

I've got a ROMxe coming, so I'll be able to switch between the "unenhanced" ROM and the "enhanced" ROM.

As I had the IIe configured today, I had the Disk II controller in slot 7, the Yellowstone in Slot 5 and the SpeedDemon in Slot 4. At first, I couldn't boot from the 5.25" floppy, until I recalled I hadn't set the dip switch for Slot 7 to "normal." After I did that it booted right up. Scared me at first, because the drive would spin with a strange sound, and I'd get an "Unable to load ProDOS" error message. I didn't associate that with an accelerator incompatibility at first. How was it able to realize it was a ProDOS disk?

Anyway, once I set the dip switch correctly, it would boot to the ProDOS splash screen, then crash into the monitor. (I didn't pay attention to the memory location. I may do that if the 65c02 and enhanced ROMs don't work.)

Removing the SpeedDemon, I'd get a normal boot from the 5.25" drive, and it did automatically recognize the Floppy Emu with a 32MB hard drive image mounted in Slot 5. So, while it may not boot unenhanced, without a keyboard command, it's otherwise recognized automatically by ProDOS.

I think having the Yellowstone's smartport capability is more useful than having a faster cpu. But the faster cpu makes things more fun. With the smartport, I should be able to boot into Pascal 1.3 from a 3.5" floppy smartport image, and run a script to move everything to the RAM disk and run the OS from there. (The 800K 3.5" floppy is large enough to contain all the files you need to run UCSD Pascal on an Apple II.)

That makes doing anything in Pascal a lot quicker and more convenient, especially compared to using a pair of 5.25" floppies.

But the ideal case would be able to do that with the accelerator. The great advantage of Applesoft as an interpreter in ROM is that you get immediate feedback from any changes in your program. With Pascal, there's moving back and forth between the editor and the compiler. It's almost transparent with the RAM disk and the accelerator; less so without it. But still far better than relying on floppies.

It is something of a small disappointment, but I can't say enough about how valuable it is as a way to occupy my time.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 11:07 Tuesday, 15 October 2024