The dawn of the personal computer age really started around 1977 with the introduction
of the Commodore PET, Apple II, and TRS-80.
These were the first truly affordable computers that didn’t require a customer to assemble
it from a kit.
All 3 of these computers had some success in the education market.
But during the 1980s, Apple managed to almost completely take over the educational market
from Commodore, Tandy, and even IBM.
This strategy was good for Apple, as it meant that students who learned on Apple computers
might be more likely to buy an Apple themselves when the time came.
The Apple II series was manufactured from 1977 all the way to 1993.
That’s around 16 years, a pretty impressive lifespan.
Even the Commodore 64 didn’t last that long.
Of course, in 1984 Apple introduced the Macintosh, which they figured would eventually replace
the Apple II.
However, sales weren’t what they initially hoped and the Apple II continued to keep the
company afloat for many years after its introduction.
In 1986, Apple released the successor to the Apple II, the Apple IIgs.
This was a 16-bit computer, and while it does bear the name of the Apple II series, it’s
actually almost a completely different architecture, featuring vastly improved graphics and sound,
a faster CPU, and just about everything about it was improved.
However, there’s one particular chip I want to bring to your attention.
All of the chips on the board are labeled with their functions.
For example, this one says it is for sound.
These here say ROM, this one is clearly a graphics chip, and so on.
But what is this chip here labelled MEGA II?
Well, believe it or not, this chip basically contains almost an entire Apple IIe motherboard
on a single chip.
Now, that doesn’t include things like the CPU and RAM, but basically everything else.
This chip allowed the Apple IIgs to be backwards compatible with software for the original
Apple II series.
However, as you can see by the time line here, the Apple IIgs never entirely replaced the
Apple II systems, and in fact, ironically, it was discontinued a year before the IIe.
Apple also had a really expensive desktop system called the Macintosh II, but it saw
very little success in the education market.
Many school districts had invested heavily in the Apple IIe and Iigs systems and the
vast majority of the software they used in the classrooms was designed for the original
Apple II.
And so it could be difficult to convince some schools to upgrade to Macintosh computers
because they would no longer be able to use the large library of Apple II software.
In 1990, Apple released the Macintosh LC, which stands for low-cost.
This finally gave schools, businesses, and home users an option for a Macintosh computer
that had color and an affordable price tag.
But the LC also had something else.
Inside it had something called a PDS slot.
In time there would be a variety of peripherals designed for this slot, including ethernet
cards, processor upgrades, and of course, the topic of this video… the Apple IIe card.
Taking a closer look at the card, this large chip here is called the Gemini chip.
This is actually a slightly revised version of the Mega-II chip that I showed earlier
in the Apple IIgs.
So, again, it’s basically most of the logic chips of an Apple IIe combined into a single
chip.
This next chip here is a 65c02 microprocessor.
It looks a little different from the earlier models because it is in a square package instead
of the usual DIP package.
Over here is 256K of RAM.
Apparently 128K is used by the Apple IIe system, and the other 128K is used by the Macintosh
side for some reason or another that I don’t fully understand.
And this chip over here is called an IWM or an Integrated Woz Machine, which is basically
a disk drive controller all integrated into a single chip.
And so that’s all of the important stuff on the card.
What I’m going to do next is go ahead and install this into my Macintosh LC-II so we
can try it out.
On the back here it has a proprietary connector where you can install this breakout cable.
One of the cable ends is for connecting to an Apple II disk drive, and the other end
is for connecting an Apple II joystick.
I’m going to go ahead and connect up a 5 and a quarter inch floppy drive here since
most Apple II software was distributed on this format.
However, these drives can be daisy chained.
In fact, you can connect up to 3 drives to it like this, including the 3 and a half inch
drives.
And you can also make use of the internal disk drive as well, which technically makes
4.
OK, let’s fire this thing up.
I’m going to put in a fresh COPY of the Oregon Trail.
Unfortunately, I don’t have an original of this disk.
And I’ve already got the necessary software installed on the Mac, so I’m just going
to start the IIe application.
And there we go.
So, there’s a few things I want to tell you about this.
First of all, this always runs full-screen.
It cannot run in a window.
Plus, the Macintosh is no longer multi-tasking any other applications during this time.
While the card technically is running the software on real hardware, it’s not an emulation
as such, the video however is technically emulated.
The video is drawn by the Macintosh and it is actually a little slower than the real
video system on an Apple II.
The audio, on the other hand works a bit differently.
I noticed something recently when looking at the schematics of an LC system that I was
troubleshooting.
This section here is basically the audio portion of the schematics.
This part here is the main sound chip, and it’s output goes down here to the amplifier
portion of the circuit.
If we take a closer look at just the amplifier, you can see it has 2 sound sources.
The first one comes from the Macintosh’s sound chip, and the second one down here actually
says it comes from the PDS slot.
So, that means the Apple IIe card produces its own sound and it goes straight to the
amplifier.
Anyway, let’s see if we can setup a party here on the Oregon Trail.
I’ll enter my name as the 8-Bit Guy.
It appears it won’t accept numbers, so I’ll have to spell it out.
And I’ll need some other people, let’s add LGR and Techmoan.
Then let’s do Doctor Mix… ok, well, that won’t fit, so I’ll shorten it.
OK.
And we need one more.
How about Look Mum No computer.
That sure won’t fit, so I’ll abbreviate that too.
OK.
So we’re going all the way back to 1848.
I can only imagine the 5 of us trying to survive in that time.
Anyway, if you want to exit the IIe session, you can press control-apple and then escape.
This will bring up the preferences menu.
There are actually quite a few things you can configure here about your emulated Apple
IIe.
For one thing, you can actually substitute native Mac sounds for the simple Apple II
beep.
Over here you can setup memory expansion for the Apple II, and this will actually use RAM
from the Macintosh to emulate a memory expansion board.
You can pick anything from 256K to 1 megabyte.
Here you can change the settings for the mouse emulation.
Although, I am not even sure I have any Apple II software that uses a mouse to even test
this with.
There are various other things you can configure, this is one of the more interesting ones.
Slots.
This allows you to select a startup slot.
But more importantly, you can move things around.
So these slots represent the 7 expansion card slots you would have on an Apple II motherboard.
You can move things around to better suit certain software configurations, although
most software is standardized on a certain layout, so I’m just going to leave it as-is.
And here is smart-port.
This emulates a smart-port card and you can select what sort of drives you would like
the Macintosh to emulate.
Right now, drive 1 is the internal drive on the Macintosh LC and then I have two ProDOS
partitions mounted as well.
Anyway, let’s try some other software.
Here’s Donkey Kong.
I actually can’t figure out how to control this.
I think it requires a joystick, which I don’t currently have plugged in because at the moment
I can’t find my Apple IIc joystick.
Well, let’s try something other than a game.
I want to see if AppleWorks will load.
We actually used this software back in my Junior High in the computer lab on our Apple
II systems, mostly for the word processor feature so we could type in our essays and
things like that.
However, it does work in 80-columns mode and I wanted to see how that looked.
It wants me to put in a date.
I guess this is a good opportunity to see if AppleWorks is year-2000 compliant.
So, I’ll put in August 22, 2019.
And nope.
It doesn’t like that.
So I guess we’ll put in March 20, 1986.
Ok, well, other than that, it appears to be working fine.
The 80 columns is actually more readable here than it would be on the original composite
monitors.
Of course, that’s the thing about the video here.
The video looks almost too good.
That’s because it’s being emulated and thus it looks almost just like a modern emulator.
So, I want to try a few other things, including BASIC.
I’ll just write a little program here.
OK.
Now one of the things I wanted to try was increasing the speed.
So, apparently the emulated Apple II can run at 1 MHz or 1.9 Mhz.
So I’m going to put it into fast mode.
Surprisingly, I don’t see much difference here.
And I suspect that’s because the bottleneck here is the screen drawing routine, which
I have read is actually slower than a real Apple II.
So, maybe some other programs that do more number crunching would speed up more.
There’s another interesting feature I want to try.
I’m going to load up Ultima IV here.
And this looks really great, better than it would on a real Apple II, I believe.
Anyway, you can change it to a monochrome monitor, which would certainly be useful for
some applications.
But I just wanted to see how Ultima would look.
And yep.
This is exactly how I would expect it to appear on a monochrome monitor, with the vertical
striped lines instead of colors.
I did a whole episode on how Apple II graphics worked if you haven’t seen it, but it’s
really bizarre as all of the color is achieved by NTSC artifacts and timing gimmicks.
And, of course, the software here is having to emulate that effect on this RGB monitor.
But it is really convenient to be able to change it on the fly like this, it’s almost
like having two different monitors for your Apple IIe.
Speaking of monitors, the Apple II series had a resolution of 280 pixels across by 192
pixels tall.
Or, if you had the 80-column card, it could technically be double the horizontal resolution
making it 560 pixels.
However, this creates an interesting situation with the LC series computers.
While they can technically display 640 by 480, the default and most common monitor used
with the LC can only display 512 by 384.
And so, if you look at the numbers, you can see that the vertical resolution is perfect
because the Mac is exactly double that of the old Apple II, so this is easy to scale.
But the horizontal resolution is a different story.
In fact, the LC monitor technically can’t even display all of the pixels of the Apple
IIe’s 80 columns mode.
They won’t even fit.
Steve Jobs was very picky that Macs have square pixels, and with an aspect ratio of 4:3, that
means you have to have 512 pixels to match.
So how, then, was this situation handled, as you can clearly see the 80 columns mode
working fine in AppleWorks as I showed earlier.
Well, it turns out, the LC and its monitor have a hidden graphics resolution of 560 by
384 and the only thing that can access this resolution is the Apple IIe card.
Of course, the LC series was not the only computer that could run the Apple IIe card.
In fact, another popular computer that has a PDS slot is the Macintosh Color Classic.
So, I’ll show you how to put the Apple IIe card inside the color classic.
Just turn it around to the back, and this little cover pops off.
Then you just grab and pull.
It requires no tools, similar to the LC series.
This particular board has an ethernet card sitting in the PDS slot.
And since there is only one slot you sort of have to decide which card you’d rather
have.
For the moment, we’ll just put the Apple IIe card in its place.
Then just shove the board back in, and replace the cover.
And here we go.
The color classic up and running.
I already have the IIe application installed so we’ll just start it up.
I still have Ultima IV in the disk drive.
And here it is on the tiny little color screen, and it looks absolutely fantastic.
Very sharp and bright.
Again, this looks actually better than on a real Apple II.
There’s one thing I want to show you.
This happens really fast, so I’m going to do a freeze frame right here.
Notice that the screen appears to shrink and move to the left very briefly?
Well, this is the Color Classic also entering the special 560x384 mode, which was designed
into the computer specifically for this purpose.
So, which other models will it work with besides the LC series and the Color classic?
Well, it also works with the Quadra 630, and the all-in-one LC520.
However, one limitation is that it does require system 6 through 7.5.5.
So, it won’t run on anything newer.
Also, there are some other Macs it will physically fit inside but is not actually compatible
due to those Macs being 32-bit or PowerPC Macs.
This card sold for $250, which was actually a pretty good deal compared to buying an entire
Apple IIe setup at the time, which could easily cost 5 or 6 times that amount.
And it’s a pretty nifty piece of hardware and it probably did help convert quite a few
Apple II customers into Macintosh customers, which was part of the goal of this card.
It’s actually kind of a pity that Commodore didn’t have a similar device for the Amiga
like the 1000 or 500 that would allow it to run Commodore 64 software.
I think that would have gone a long way towards helping to convert the Commodore 64 base into
Amiga users a little faster.
Anyway, that about wraps it up for this episode.
So, as always, stick around for the next one and thanks for watching.