Setting up a PC Trasporter on a IIGS

[micheledipaola]

I don't think on hardware there's gonna be any way to get EGA support. Given when the PCT came out it was surprisingly behind PC standards, although commercial PC games supported CGA and 8088s a lot later than I would've expected.

Yes I understand that hardware-wise it would be impossible to introduce such an improvement with the actual card... but maybe with the knowledge you gathered about its signals and communication, maybe someone could come up with some complementary module / PCB / Pico / whatever, doing the job? I really wish my electronics knowledge wasn't near to zero in these cases...

 

[kastegir]

Your project looks great. I had one of these, fully kitted out, back in the day. You can use the Apple 3.5 drive (the platinum one) with the PCT. That particular drive supports CGR and MFM, which is why you can use it to read PC disks on a Mac as well.
You can't use the Apple 5.25 floppy drive (any version) with it. They're completely incompatible, and may damage the board in the drive or the PCT if you try.

 

[micheledipaola]

Found a simple way to prepare disk images for the usb drive to plug in the Gotek:
Using WinImage (on Parallels with my Mac) you simply drag and drop in the window the DOS files inside the zipped directories which many abandonware files will give you as "disk images". Then you can save them as .IMA 360k 5.25" floppy disk images on the usb and read them on the Gotek plugged as disk B: in the PC Transporter.

I did this with some old games (Frogger Jr, Dynamic Basket, Transylvania etc) and they all boot and load.

I also found some abandonware repositories for DOS images, and one of them (The Old Flight Simulator Vault) has a cracked version of Flight Simulator 2.13 on a disk image - it seems that many people had trouble having this simulator running on the PC Transporter so far, but with this image on the Gotek...

 

[luvwagn]

I just got a transporter and messing with it now, following along...

 

[luvwagn]

@ushicow I pinged you on FB group, lots of nice goodies! Arigatou!

My board looks different, no zip RAM.


Need to repair the butchered db15 cable...

 

[micheledipaola]

@ushicow I pinged you on FB group, lots of nice goodies! Arigatou!

My board looks different, no zip RAM.
View attachment 78515

Need to repair the butchered db15 cable...
View attachment 78517

View attachment 78518

View attachment 78516

I would say also the video cable is different... If you have the ColorSwitch daughter board, usually there is a male cable from the card to the IIGS video port, and then a second port on the daughter card to plug the screen to. I have never seen this female db15 cable solution.

The docs I linked in the first post show an "original" card and rev. D... maybe this is an earlier revision or something in between? try to look for some infos on the back or somewhere on the card...

 

[luvwagn]

I would say also the video cable is different... If you have the ColorSwitch daughter board, usually there is a male cable from the card to the IIGS video port, and then a second port on the daughter card to plug the screen to. I have never seen this female db15 cable solution.

That isn't a female - that's a male where the pins and metal "collar" have been torn off You can see it embedded in the rear IIgs video connector. Came that way, I didn't do it. But probably made the machine tricky to test for an amateur, which is why I got a smoking deal for it

Apparently this rev of Transporter boards migrated from ZIPs to DIPs for RAM, so my model is likely later than yours

 

[micheledipaola]

Yes it's a torn connector! Thanks to the pics on FB I finally got it

I also have another card revision with a daughter card for RAM, but I never managed to make it work... so at least 3 different models are out there.

Now how to make it work: connected video and disks seems to be needed in order for it to boot.
You will also need the card software (2 or 3 different version are out, 2.0.5 is the last one) to possibly put on a GSOS hd image somewhere, and there you will have diagnostics, setup etc. (check my older post for explanations).

A couple msdos disks / images are included to install dos and some custom utils on a msdos image. You could also use a ready made msdos disk image: there is one linked below the YouTube videos I posted previously, which also includes a Windows 3 install.

If you cant manage the card to be recognized and plan to dive into hardware check, I will be very interested to learn what you will be checking and how, since as I wrote I have another card sitting there.

 

[micheledipaola]

Another summer is here, and again I have time to play with the PC Transporter

I have seen this on Ebay:


so the Applied Engineering TransDrive, expanded with a HxC drive by Lotharek. It is on auction together with a PC Transporter card at the usual crazy price, if you are interested here's the link: https://www.ebay.it/itm/277272646885 (not my auction FYI).

I am trying to contact the creator of the HxC drive to understand how this is connected. If they offer a plug that matches the cable inside the Transdrive (see previous post in the thread: https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/setting-up-a-pc-trasporter-on-a-iigs.45004/post-534973) without any daughter card in between, that would be great and I could finally have a easy way to run software from disk images on the PCT, simply connecting the TransDrive and without having to plug the TransDrive clone card and then the Gotek to it.

While I wait for an answer, I wonder if these FDC-PC34 to Shugart 50 connector designs exist also for a Shugart 34 that should be the cable in the transdrive? ->
https://retrocmp.de/kicad/pc34-to-sh50/pc34-to-s50.htm or https://oshwlab.com/hansel72/shugart50to34 or https://www.tindie.com/products/jurassicomp/8-floppy-disk-interface-50-pin-to-34-pin-adapter/ I need to check better.

PC hardware is definitely not my sweet spot so any hint would be appreciated

 

[micheledipaola]

[Update] - maybe this PCB

5.25" Floppy edge connector to 34-pin 3.5" floppy drive adapter - Share Project - PCBWay

IntroductionI have a number of older Japanese computers. This board was originally developed so that I could use a Gotek floppy emulator on my NEC PC-8801mkII, which only accepted 5.25" floppy drives ...

www.pcbway.com

could do the trick?

 

[micheledipaola]

Found an adapter from IDC 34pin PC floppy to card-edge 34 pin PC floppy (which I learned to be the internal connection of units inside the TransDrive box) - it's in Europe so just a few euros to get it assembled and shipped to Italy (less than ordering the PCBs myself anyway). Just counting the days until I get it so I can test and see if I can finally put a Gotek inside the TransDrive myself, instead of the 3.5" unit.

 

[micheledipaola]

Adapter arrived but TransDrive not working... maybe the unit is defective, I will check it more thoroughly and maybe try it with a simple 3.5" drive and not a gotek (which is confirmed working with the TransDrive card presented above).

Meanwhile, an interesting update found hanging online on Vogons for 2 years: it seems that someone patched APLCLOCK.EXE, that is the PC Transporter clock-setting program, which was not getting the date correctly from ProDOS due to some "Millennium bug" related issue. The whole thread is here:

Help w/patching an ancient DOS clock program for Y2K compliance? \ VOGONS

www.vogons.org

the patch is explained with this dump:

00000012: C2 35 ; 2 lines, EXE header CRC, should be irrelevant though, and could be omitted
00000013: 2F 13
0000056F: B8 E8 ; 3 lines, hijack the execution right after reading out the significant byte of the year
00000570: C2 2F
00000571: 02 1B
000020A1: 00 81 ; check the year in stack frame at [bp+16h] against 1980
000020A2: 00 7E
000020A3: 00 16
000020A4: 00 BC
000020A5: 00 07
000020A6: 00 73 ; skip if it's 1980 or later
000020A7: 00 04
000020A8: 00 83 ; add 100 years to the value in stack frame, because the year wrapped around the 1900
000020A9: 00 46
000020AA: 00 16
000020AB: 00 64
000020AC: 00 B8 ; perform instruction that was replaced with the call to the patch, and return
000020AD: 00 C2
000020AE: 00 02
000020AF: 00 C3

and the patched V. 1.4 file is available for download. I got it and inserted in a disk image using WinImage. This is the result:



Success! You can see in the pic that the patched v. 1.4 APLCLOCK is now pulling the Y2K date from ProDOS correctly!

If you move the patched file on your startup disk, and you want to get the correct date at startup, be sure to edit the AUTOEXEC.BAT file, which by default runs the one on the system disk D: (or you can move the patched file directly there. My disk D: is full and it was easier to put the patched version in the /AEPC directory on C: and edit the AUTOEXEC.BAT file to just point there).


Also, some more findings:
the issue of A+ dedicated to the PC Transporter launch is here ->

https://www.cvxmelody.net/PC%20Transporter%20-%20MS-DOS%20Comes%20to%20the%20Apple%20-%20APlus%20Magazine%20September%201987.pdf

 

[micheledipaola]

After some more testing and fiddling with DOS disk images and repositories, this is long due to @cheesestraws :





Finally I found a working disk images set for installing GEM 3.01! Of course it is on WinWorldPc : https://winworldpc.com/product/gem/3x
There are other versions too, in case someone will want to test them.
It looks SO much better than Windows 3.0 - which is the most recent Windows you can run on the PCT.

 

[cheesestraws]

Yaaay!.

Sorry, I do have a mild obsession with GEM.

 

[micheledipaola]

Yaaay!.

Sorry, I do have a mild obsession with GEM.

Now I can see why!
considered it is a cross platform desktop, it looks amazingly good, and surely much better than Win 3.0 .

I have already started growing your same obsession and collecting GEM software discovering a version of Ventura Publisher for GEM (I knew it from the PC days) and even a GEM version of Publish-it! , which I used back in high school and university to publish little newsletters and fanzines on the IIGS.

Now I wonder if the GEM and GSOS versions could exchange files or have some kind of interaction.
This will be something else to test.

 

[micheledipaola]

...aaaand done!
Night brings council as they say - I realised I was plugging the TransDrive unit in the IIGS SmartPort, but instead I should have plugged it into the DB19 port provided with the card, which then plugs into the card directly and it is meant exactly for plugging PC drives.

After doing that, everything works, units check disks at boot and react to path change, so if I enter B: at the prompt and then DIR /p (to get keypress and make it to read the whole file list) , this will happen:



BTW, if you want to boot the card from your DOS hard disk / special file on ProDOS volume, be sure to take the USB out of the Gotek or it will boot from there first - as usual, floppies come first in the booting sequence.

Now since I made it, here are some infos about how I wired the Gotek inside the TransDrive.

As I wrote, a card-edge to 34-pin adapter is needed to plug into the card-edge cable inside the TransDrive:



There is a PCB design of the adapter freely available (see previous posts) but for 18€ shipped from the Netherlands to Italy, I decided to get mine from https://www.gotek-retro.eu (which is the English version of www.gotek.nl ) . The website shopping system is quite... retro, too, as you will have to fill in a form to request your product(s), and then they will get back at you on email to arrange payment (PayPal only) and shipping. Anyway after a few days, here is the adapter I got:



In order to connect everything, I also needed a (female) molex to floppy power connector, and since the card-edge strip inside the TransDrive is quite short, also a 34-pin extension to connect the Gotek. Luckily I already had everything in my stash:



Then as you can see in the first pic, I used a 3d-printed bracket to correctly fit the Gotek inside the TransDrive unit.
Wish I had found a (matching) grey bracket, instead of this ivory one, but I guess there will be time for that.

So another success in the end! I am super happy!

 

[micheledipaola]

Now after solving the challenge with the TransDrive I can start dreaming of other possible developments

The first coming to my mind is networking... @Arbee care to share how is your work of reverse-engineering proceeding?

qkumba (Peter Ferrie) and I have been slowly reverse-engineering how the PC Transporter talks to the host Apple II and vice-versa. Everything will of course be documented in the MAME source as we get it running, and I'll probably put up a wiki article too.

Hopefully that would allow someone to write new software. The x86 BIOS is uploaded by the Apple, so all of the firmware is fair game too.

Now I am dreaming of an all-star collaboration between you two and Speccie, to create a new device driver which will interface the Uthernet II with the PCT and bring it under DOS / LAN Manager... is it too much?