Apple II Support

[Verault]

Sorry to jump into this thread. I created my own looking for help and noone replied. So I finished building the cable to connect the gotek to the Apple II. The gotek comes on but cannot see the usb stick. I tried the usb stick in my pc and its fried. I checked the power coming in to the gotek power input via the cable I made and its gets 12V instead of 5v.

What am I missing here?

[Verault]

I solved it.. I went over this thing 3 times and found issues. (because I was tired and frustrated... two very good reasons to walk away from something and I didnt).

The 5v was supposed to come from Apple 20 pin header Pin1 to Gotek Pin 11 but I had it hooked up to pin 15 (12V)!!!

So I remedied that messup..... It was getting the right voltage but still wasn't reading my USB stick..

REMOVE THE JA JUMPER!!!

And its now working. I tell you we have made leaps and bounds in the past 5 years on disk imaging and emulation. A gotek, a kryoflux/Greaseweazle.. You can do just about anything now!

There is one trange thing though, the HXC website says you can use .PO disk images (but you need to convert them to .HFE format using the HXC software). The HXC program wont allow me to even load up a .PO file so Im not sure about that.

.DSK files convert fine and thats what I have been using.

[Verault]

After reading the rest of this thread it seems there are some problems. The user with the IIGs has some facts wrong. The Apple IIgs IS NOT the only apple II thst can read 800kb disk images. Any apple ii computer can use a unidisk 3.5" floppy drive which is 800kb if it has the correct floppy controller (asco floppy controller) Even the apple 3 /// can use that controller. Ard and use 80kb disks. And .2mg ARE NOT the only disk format for 800kb disks. .PO disk images can be 800kb. (.WOZ and .NIB van be 800kb as well)they can be 800kb to 32MB at maximum.

Also apple sold a 1.44mb floppy drive for the apple ii.. the super drive.. i dont own one but they are out there..

I like the OP look forward to having support of those disk images as well.

[Jeff]

After reading the rest of this thread it seems there are some problems. The user with the IIGs has some facts wrong. The Apple IIgs IS NOT the only apple II thst can read 800kb disk images. Any apple ii computer can use a unidisk 3.5" floppy drive which is 800kb if it has the correct floppy controller (asco floppy controller) Even the apple 3 /// can use that controller. Ard and use 80kb disks. And .2mg ARE NOT the only disk format for 800kb disks. .PO disk images can be 800kb. (.WOZ and .NIB van be 800kb as well)they can be 800kb to 32MB at maximum.

Also apple sold a 1.44mb floppy drive for the apple ii.. the super drive.. i dont own one but they are out there..

I like the OP look forward to having support of those disk images as well.

have you some technical information about the 800kb compatible controller ? schematic ? signals description ?

[Verault]

Jeff we can get you anything you need for this. I have a thread open on an apple support forum about this matter now: https://www.applefritter.com/content/ha ... ent-104687

Me and the folks there should be able to get you whatever information you need.

Its amazing the gotek works on an apple II as is but it would be so much more usefull if it supported all the types.

Can you message on the applefritter board or do you want me to pass this on so folks there can post only here on the HXC forum?

[Jeff]

First point : Apple II controller / drives compatibility Chart :

Screenshot at 2023-10-12 22-10-28.png (158.13 KiB) Viewed 4324 times

[Jeff]

Apple Drives :

Image2.jpg (249.52 KiB) Viewed 4323 times

[Jeff]

Some notes :

- Never connect an Apple II 5.25" drive to a Macintosh 19 pin floppy port.

- Apple II and III 5.25" drives are all 140K in size and use the GCR recording technique. GCR
disks cannot be read by standard PC disk controllers.

- 3.5" 400K and 800K drives use the GCR recording technique. GCR disks cannot be read by
standard PC disk controllers.

- 3.5" 1.4M drives can use both GCR and MFM recording techniques; the MFM technique is
used to create 720K or 1440K PC format floppy disks. MFM disks can only be read/created by
an Apple II with the "Superdrive" controller or a Mac with FDHD ROMs.

- 3.5" drives designed for use on the Apple II have eject buttons and pass through connectors
for daisy chaining drives.

- Drives often have a paper label such as "Drive 1", "Drive 3" etc. This label is for the benefit
of the computer user. Drives are identical no matter what the paper label says.

(source :
https://web.archive.org/web/20160330200 ... rives.html)

[Jeff]

More infos :

3+1⁄2-inch drive

In 1984, Apple had opted for the more modern, Sony-designed 3+1⁄2-inch floppy disk in late-model Lisas and the new Apple Macintosh. Accordingly, they attempted to introduce a new 3+1⁄2-inch 800-kilobyte floppy disk format for the Apple II series as well, to eventually replace the 140-kilobyte Disk II format. However, the external UniDisk 3.5 drive required a ROM upgrade (for existing Apple IIc machines; new ones shipped after this time had it from the factory) or a new kind of disk controller card (the so-called "Liron Card", for the Apple IIe) to be used. The much larger capacity and higher bitrate of the 3+1⁄2-inch drives made it impractical to use the software-driven Disk II controller because the 1-megahertz 6502 CPU in the Apple II line was too slow to be able to read them. Thus, a new and much more advanced (and correspondingly expensive) hardware floppy controller had to be used. And many original Apple IIs could not use the new controller card at all without further upgrades. Also, almost all commercial software for the Apple II series continued to be published on 5+1⁄4-inch disks which had a much larger installed base. For these reasons the 3+1⁄2-inch format was not widely accepted by Apple II users. The Apple 3.5 Drive used the same 800-kilobyte format as the UniDisk 3.5", but it did away with the internal controller, which made it cheaper. Unlike all earlier Apple II drives, it was designed to work with the Macintosh too, and among Apple II models, it was compatible only with the Apple IIGS and the Apple IIc+ models, which both had a faster main CPU. On the Apple IIGS, whose improved audiovisual capacities really demanded a higher-capacity disk format as well, the 3+1⁄2-inch format was accepted by users and became the standard format. Though Apple eventually offered a 1.44-megabyte SuperDrive with matching controller card for the Apple II series as well, the 5+1⁄4-inch Disk II format drives continued to be offered alongside the newer 3+1⁄2-inch drives and remained the standard on the non-IIGS models until the platform was discontinued in 1993.

Officially, the following 3+1⁄2-inch drives could be used on the Apple II:

Apple 3.5" External (A9M0106) – Designed for Apple IIs with the Liron or Superdrive controller or all Macintoshes with an external 19-pin floppy port (Mac 512s must be booted from the internal 400-kilobyte drive with the HD20 INIT, which provides HFS file system support – the Macintosh 128K will not work with this). The drive can be daisy chained, however this feature is not supported on the Macintosh.
Unidisk 3.5" Drive (A2M2053) – Designed for Apple IIs with the Liron or Superdrive controller (not compatible with Macintoshes) Recommended only for 8-bit Apple IIs as the A9M0106 operates faster on the IIGS
Apple FDHD External (G7287) – Supports 720-kilobyte/1.44-megabyte MFM floppy disks in addition to 800-kilobyte GCR. Designed for Apple IIs and Macs with the Superdrive controller, but will also work on machines with the older 800-kilobyte controller (as an 800-kilobyte drive – note that the G7287 is not compatible with the Mac 128/512)

The 400-kilobyte and 800-kilobyte Macintosh external drives (M0130 and M0131) are incompatible with standard Apple II controllers as they do not support the drives' automatic disk-eject feature, although they could be used with third-party controllers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_II

[Jeff]

So to sum up :

- All 5.25" Apples drives are 140KB sized at max. (Disk II interface)
- To have more than 140KB -> 3.5" Drives -> These drives use the Smartport protocol.

This seems to be a very different project than a simple Disk II emulator. The timings needed to capture and acknowledge the bus commands and the very different signal usage versus the Disk II interface seem to be quite challenging to make it work on the gotek. I don't say this is impossible - but sound challenging.
Anyway this is far to be just an image support problem.

It's compatible, but it was extended with the IWM chip. The 5.25" drives
work just the same as they did when Woz designed the original Disk II
controller, and 3.5" drives aren't much different. But Apple also added
the SmartPort packet protocol (see David Empson's post) which allows a
computer to communicate with intelligent drives. This works completely
differently from the way the non-intelligent drives work but was
cleverly implemented so all three types of drives can be daisy-chained
from the same port. It turns out that Apple documented the protocol in
the IIgs Firmware Reference, which is fortunate since Jim Sather never
wrote an 'Understanding the Apple IIgs'!

Function PH3 PH2 PH1 PH0
Enable 1 x 1 REQ (handshake output)
Reset 0 1 0 1
It uses the "write protect" signal from the drive as an ACK handshake
line.
The drive select line is not activated (so 5.25" drives do nothing,
and ignore the strange combinations of phase signals).
If you can't find an online copy of the relevant section, I'd be happy
to photocopy that part of the IIgs firwmare reference and post it to
you.

https://comp.sys.apple2.programmer.nark ... el-details

The first set of squiggles there on WRDATA (channel 08) is the computer assigning address 1 to the Unidisk with an init command. The following squiggles on RDDATA (channel 07) are the Unidisk’s reply, which is “OK, and there are no more Smartport devices after me”. The next command on WRDATA is a request to read sector 0 from the Unidisk, so Floppy Emu was completely ignored.

Determining what those squiggles mean is a tedious process. I have to zoom in until I can see each positive and negative transition of WRDATA. Every 4 microseconds there will either be a transition (a logical 1 bit) or there won’t be any transition (a logical 0 bit). I have to write down the bit sequences, frame them properly into bytes, and then consult the Smartport spec to make sense of it all. Maybe someday I’ll write an automated tool to do all this, which would make the debugging process dramatically faster. For now I’m happy simply to graph all the signals, because there was a time when I didn’t have even that much.

So why doesn’t the Floppy Emu get assigned a Smartport address? If I were designing the Smartport protocol, I would probably have it send as many init commands as necessary to give addresses to all the drives. Just keep sending init commands, incrementing the address each time, until all drives have received an address and no more init responses are received. But Apple chose a different solution, where each Smartport device is expected to know definitively whether or not there are more Smartport devices behind it in the daisy chain.

[...]

Input Becomes Output

[...]

https://www.bigmessowires.com/2017/08/0 ... -trombone/

[Verault]

I think for the most compatibility we need to focus on the unidisk 3.5" drive. Exclude macintosh drives for the moment and focus on apple II support.

The unidisk 3.5" is 800kb and requires the Liron controller card. This drive can work on an apple II, apple II plus, apple IIe (any version) and apple IIc (with a more recent rom upgrade) and the apple IIc Plus which comes with a 3.5" unidisk drive built into it already. The unidisk 3.5" floppy drive can be connected to an apple IIgs but the a9m0106 3.5" floppy drive released for the IIgs ONLY WORKS ON THE IIGS, that is why I think the Unidisk 3.5" drive is the most practical to emulate. it works on everything.

So people have gotten smartport devices to work on the Apple DISK II controller card (140KB 5.25" controller card) using a rom. I own one such rom, the KbooHK Smart SP card which is just a rom on a card in the apple II: https://ct6502.org/product/softsp/

This card ads the smartport support in ram. With it you can boot 800kb, 1.4mb, and external hard drives from even the disk ii controller card.

Unidisk drive analog board schematics https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_a ... 3/mode/2up

I am having trouble locating schematics for the LIRON 800kb controller card maybe I can find someone else who can locate it.

[aotta]

If i can give my little help, Liron's schematics will not help, since the board use a custom IC (the famous IWM, Integrated Wozniak Machine) that decodes the floppy handling.
If Jeff wants to integrate the smartport protocol in his emulator, i think it's more useful documentation about the smartport protocol itself, and it can be found in other open project like mine smartportsd (you can find a port here, for example: https://gitlab.com/nyankat/smartportsd) or in Fujinet Apple II).
Of course, even if smartport's protocol will be integrated in HxC, it will work only in Apple II and higher WITH A LIRON (or the new Yellowstone by BMOW) card on board.

[Jeff]

And i indeed have to find a Liron card + a Unidisk 3.5" drive to capture all the require signals...

[aotta]

And i indeed have to find a Liron card + a Unidisk 3.5" drive to capture all the require signals...

As i mentioned, i could suggest you the Yellowstone card too (https://www.bigmessowires.com/yellowstone/), it cost less than a Liron card and has some more feature. I own both a couple of Liron cards and the Yellowstone, and they all works fine with my smartportSD, with Fujinets drives and, of course with the original Unidisk drive 3,5".
And, the original 3,5" smartport disk drive i'm afraid it's the hardest (and more expensive) piece to find.

I'd permit to remind you that Apple IIc and Apple IIgs have native smartport support, but i don't know if you have one of them.

[Verault]

If i can give my little help, Liron's schematics will not help, since the board use a custom IC (the famous IWM, Integrated Wozniak Machine) that decodes the floppy handling.
If Jeff wants to integrate the smartport protocol in his emulator, i think it's more useful documentation about the smartport protocol itself, and it can be found in other open project like mine smartportsd (you can find a port here, for example: https://gitlab.com/nyankat/smartportsd) or in Fujinet Apple II).
Of course, even if smartport's protocol will be integrated in HxC, it will work only in Apple II and higher WITH A LIRON (or the new Yellowstone by BMOW) card on board.

Quite honestly that is not true about needing a Liron card or other controller card other than a Standard Disk II card to emulator a unidisk or smartport device. Yes the emulator will need the smartport protocol but you should NOT NEED anything other than a disk II controller card and a Soft SP card. I am using my Apple II plus right this moment with a standard Disk II Controller card hooked up to one of my Floppy EMUs. The newest firmware of the floppy emu has a emulation type "UNIDISK 3.5" and I am booting an 800KB prodos image from a standard disk II controller card (with the SOFT SP card/ROM).