The Beep Goes On

08:18 Wednesday, 7 October 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 44.42°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 77% Wind: 10.69mph
Words: 896

Yesterday was a productive day of peripheral card testing. Some frustrations, but that has always been the case when you're playing with >40-year-old hardware and modern devices.

The first challenge was to get video out of the IIe. I have three cards that will output HDMI. The most inexpensive is an A2DVI card. The problem with that card is that the HDMI connection faces the backplane of the Apple II, and there is no way to get a thick HDMI cable to bend 90 degrees to make the connection. When I was down at the storage unit, I found a small plastic container that had spare rubber feet, backplane cutout covers, and an HDMI right-angle adapter. I thought I took that with me, but I can't seem to find it.

So, Plan B was to use the A2FPGA, a modern device that simulates a number of old peripheral cards, like the Mockingboard sound card, a sprite video board, and a Super Serial card. It also outputs HDMI with the connector facing the keyboard, so there's plenty of room to route the cable.

I started with that. It connected up just fine and I got good video. Well, the colors are wrong, but it's clear. The first thing I did was run the self-test on the IIe, and that came up sat. Next I connected the Floppy Emu to the Disk II controller and mounted a 5.25" floppy disk image. I have a number of system maintenance programs and I ran a bunch of those and everything came up solid. Good so far!

I plugged Disk 1 of the two Disk II drives that came with the IIe into the Disk 2 port on the controller card so I could run some disk tests on that, and they all came up sat. I used a disk utility image on the Floppy Emu to make a physical copy with the Disk II. Then I unplugged the Floppy Emu, swapped over Disk 1 and connected Disk 2 to its port and ran the tests on that drive. Also sat. Amazing.

Next I plugged in an AST SprintDisk, a 1MB RAM-disk I purchased recently. I wanted to see if it worked. So I tried to boot my "ABIDE" disk (Apple/Beagle Integrated Development Environment), which is formatted to boot ProDOS 2.4.2, the modern version of ProDOS.

It crashed.

I spent most of the rest of the day troubleshooting. To make a long story short, the A2FPGA card conflicts somehow with ProDOS 2.4.2. This should be a known conflict, but I haven't seen anything about it. I will investigate in the various forums later.

In the course of that troubleshooting, I also installed the Transwarp CPU accelerator and verified that it works (3.6MHz). Then I installed an A2 Turbo I got from Ian Kim in Korea. It's a small accelerator card that'll run at 16MHz. (The Apple II's native clock speed is 1MHz.) It's presently configured for 8MHz, but it also runs well.

I got some early versions of ProDOS to boot, but I couldn't see the SprintDisk as /RAM4. When I went to bed last night, I figured it might be dead. And I couldn't figure out why ProDOS 2.4.2 wouldn't run, but early versions would. I suspected there might be some bad RAM in the "Language Card" area, the upper 16K of RAM in the Apple II that's switched out when ROM code is running. I wasn't sure if my diagnostic programs were checking all of that RAM. But the self-test came up good, so it was a head-scratcher.

During a bout of insomnia last night, I realized that the A2FPGA simulates slot access for the peripherals it's simulating. Which means that it was "using" slot 4 for the Mockingboard card, which probably precluded the SprintDisk from being recognized. So the first thing I did when I got up this morning was to pull out the A2FPGA and insert the VidHD card, which exclusively does video and has the HDMI connection facing the "right" way.

Booted a ProDOS 1.1.1 version of Apple's Apple II System Utilities disk and had it look for /RAM4. Sure enough, it was there and all 2048 blocks were accounted for! Now, I haven't tested all that RAM, but the firmware is running so I'm pretty confident it's all good.

That's when I got the idea to try to boot the ABIDE disk, and it booted up just fine, and now I know the A2FPGA is problematic in some way. It may need a firmware update or something. I'll investigate further later.

I have some more cards to "test" today, but I need to find an external speaker I can plug into a couple of audio cards I want to test.

My goal here is to, first, have some fun with an Apple II and, second, to get all this stuff checked out and then organized so I know where everything is. I want to make setting up the Dave Cave a relatively smooth operation. I'm going to have to box nearly all of this stuff up before Mitzi gets home and get it back into storage. I probably won't have an opportunity to play with it again until next Spring or early Summer, depending on how long it takes to get the basement finished enough to occupy.

✍️ Reply by email