IIgs - Where Do I Start?

[TheNeil]

My IIgs turned up yesterday and it's...interesting.

Sold as 'untested', this thing came with an Apple graphics tablet, twin 5.25" drives (incl. interface card), an external 3.5" drive, gamepads (plugged directly into the motherboard), the iigs RAM/expansion card, and an Orange Micro card with a cable attached that looks like it's for hooking up to a printer. That's the good news. The bad news...I'm stuck.

Got it all hooked up to my TV (none of my monitors wanted to know), got a picture on the screen and plugged in an ADB keyboard. So far so good but then I hit problems. With the 5.25" drives attached I get 'Apple ][gs' onscreen and the drive 1 spins...and spins...and spins (in fact it never stops spinning and the machine doesn't get any further).

Without the drives attached (i.e. the whole interface card removed) I still get the 'Apple ][gs' message but I also get an Apple logo bouncing back and forth and a message saying that the startup device couldn't be found. I also get this if I have the 3.5" drive hooked up and the 5.25" drives not connected.

As I've never had an Apple ][ before I haven't got the faintest idea what the hell I'm doing. So...anybody got any bright ideas?

 

[Unknown_K]

You need a bootable disk since you don't seem to have a HD installed. The machine is looking for a program to run.

 

[magnusfalkirk]

My IIgs turned up yesterday and it's...interesting.
Sold as 'untested', this thing came with an Apple graphics tablet, twin 5.25" drives (incl. interface card), an external 3.5" drive, gamepads (plugged directly into the motherboard), the iigs RAM/expansion card, and an Orange Micro card with a cable attached that looks like it's for hooking up to a printer. That's the good news. The bad news...I'm stuck.

Got it all hooked up to my TV (none of my monitors wanted to know), got a picture on the screen and plugged in an ADB keyboard. So far so good but then I hit problems. With the 5.25" drives attached I get 'Apple ][gs' onscreen and the drive 1 spins...and spins...and spins (in fact it never stops spinning and the machine doesn't get any further).

Without the drives attached (i.e. the whole interface card removed) I still get the 'Apple ][gs' message but I also get an Apple logo bouncing back and forth and a message saying that the startup device couldn't be found. I also get this if I have the 3.5" drive hooked up and the 5.25" drives not connected.

As I've never had an Apple ][ before I haven't got the faintest idea what the hell I'm doing. So...anybody got any bright ideas?

Since you obviously have either a PC or Mac, to be able to post here, go to:

http://adtpro.sourceforge.net/

and download a copy of ADTPro. Be sure to read the section of the website on 'Boot strapping' a bare metal Apple II. With this program, and the correct cables to hook the PC/Mac to the GS, you'll be able to transfer Apple II/IIGS disk images that you can download from the web to your GS via your PC/Mac.

If you have a Mac, and it's an old enough model, you can format 3.5 disks on it that the GS can read, making it even easier to transfer GS software to the GS.

Dean

 

[Rockin' Kat]

You should go into the settings to see how the slots are configured.

All Apple II's prior to the IIgs and excluding the //c do not have any built in ports other than game, tape drive(which the IIgs does not have), and composite video. All other inputs and outputs were acheived through interface cards. In order to be backwards compatible with the older Apple II software, the IIgs had to map the different ports on it's back to slots.

It may be set to only try booting off of slot 5, which is what the 5.25" drives are mapped to. The 3.5" drives are mapped to slot 6.

To bring up the control panel turn the computer on, once it is on, press the key combination, [apple]+[control]+[esc]

From there it's pretty easy to figure out how to change the different settings.

Also,it is possible to change settings so you can put actual cards in the slot s instead of having them mapped to the ports on back. If you have a printer interface card installed in the IIgs, I'd try removing it, checking the settings in slots, and trying to hook up an imagewriter II or other printer that'll work with the GS to see if the built in serial ports work... as having a printer interface card could mean that the built in printer/serial port doesn't work, because it'd just be redundant otherwise.

 

[chris]

Firstly: Get a second 3.5" drive. It will make your life SO much easier, and plenty of forum members will sell you one.

Then, get the disk images for GS/OS from Apple's site:

http://www.info.apple.com/support/oldersoftwarelist.html

Convert on an older Mac and use one floppy drive to install to the other (if you don't want to get another drive, I can make a Mac Disk Copy image of my IIgs boot disk(with half-working ImageWriter II drivers) and e-mail it to you)

Afterwards, I'd suggest getting Asimov and loading it onto a floppy along with disk images of whatever Apple II software you want (Asimov writes Apple II disk images to 5.25 disks)

http://www.ninjaforce.com/html/products.html

http://www.virtualapple.org/ (Games! Yay!)

 

[Rockin' Kat]

Firstly: Get a second 3.5" drive. It will make your life SO much easier, and plenty of forum members will sell you one.

If you ask for one on a Mac forum, just make sure you're buying one that has an eject button since Macs don't need their floppy drives to have eject buttons and the IIgs does. Apple made a few different models of external 3.5" drives and only the "Apple 3.5 drive", Unidisk, and Superdrive have eject buttons, the others do not because they were made specifically for the Mac.

 

[luddite]

In the meantime, hit control+reset while the disk is spinning and it'll dump you into AppleSoft basic... then you can stun your friends with the following:

] 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!"

] RUN

When the novelty has worn off you can go googling for program listings to play with until you get things figured out.

 

[applefreak]

apple IIgs documentation :

http://www.apple-iigs.info/doc/home.htm

 

[Rockin' Kat]

I love the copyright law warning on that website.

 

[chris]

Luddite:

http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/

 

[luddite]

Luddite:
http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/

That looks like a great place to start.

 

[chris]

Indeed, I've had a lot of fun with those on my C64 driving wheel(Hummer conversion)

 

[magnusfalkirk]

You should go into the settings to see how the slots are configured.
It may be set to only try booting off of slot 5, which is what the 5.25" drives are mapped to. The 3.5" drives are mapped to slot 6.

Rockin' Cat,

You're a little mixed up here. The 3.5 drives are slot 5 and the 5.25 drives are slot 6 on a GS not the other way around.

In the long run what he needs is software, since the computer does boot and accesses the disk drive, but since there's no software it just keeps whirring.

Dean

 

[Rockin' Kat]

Ah, woops. It's still good to know how to get into the system settings though.

 

[TheNeil]

I see. I thought that it would just dump me straight into the command line.

So looks like I should be able to just create a boot disk via an older Mac and off I go...hmm, sounds almost too easy

The 5.25" drives are connected to the Apple ][ disk interface card but the 3.5" drive just plugs straight into the back of the machine. I'll give the control panel a try if that doesn't work.

Thanks expertarinos

 

[Rockin' Kat]

You don't need a drive card for either the 3.5 or 5.25 drives.

Under normal cercumstances both 5.25" and 3.5" drives connect to the built in floppy port. You can connect up to two of each. It goes in the order of:

IIgs -> 3.5 #1 -> 3.5 #2 -> 5.25 #1 -> 5.25 #2

The only reasons you need a drive card:

The 3.5" drives are HD superdrives for reading 1.44MB floppies... then you'd need 'em.

The onboard drive controller is shot... in which case, it's fairly cheap to buy a replacement IIgs logicboard.

You don't have the newer 5.25 drives that have the same type of connector as the 3.5 drives.... so you eithe rhave the older Disk ][ drives, or you have a 5.25" duo disk drive with two drives in it.

I think I read somewhere that the old disk ][ cards prevent the computer from continuing to scan the slots for bootable drives. So you'd have to go into the control panel to set the computer to boot from the slot you wanted rather than just having it scan the slots.

I'd personally get that disk ][ controller out and hook up some newer 5.25 drives up along with the 3.5 drives to the smart port. The drives don't usually cost very much.

...I have a couple extra drives, though you could probably find some a bit closer to home for a better cost on shipping.

 

[TheNeil]

Ok. The 3.5" drive is a nice external unit but the 5.25" drives are both the older Disk ][ drives (hence the card). I'll try removing the card and hooking up the external 3.5" drive and see if that helps any

 

[david__schmidt]

I think I read somewhere that the old disk ][ cards prevent the computer from continuing to scan the slots for bootable drives. So you'd have to go into the control panel to set the computer to boot from the slot you wanted rather than just having it scan the slots.

Right - the behavior of the Disk II card firmware is to wait forever for media to appear under the read head. That would effectively stop the slot scan...

 

[TheNeil]

Well I managed to get some time yesterday to sit down with the box of tricks and...she's a winner.

Created a 3.5" boot disk from the Apple site, unplugged the Disk ][ controller card, re-configured the slots (set slot 6 to be onboard disk controller) and it booted up no problems. Then powered down, plugged the Disk ][ controller into slot 7 and the boot disk happily now sees all three drives. Even inserted my 5.25" Apple /// boot disk in and it spotted it (I know, I'm sad but I just don't have any other 5.25" disks lying about).

Mucho big thanks to all involved