Karl Martino
10:24 Tuesday, 1 September 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 71.46°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 97% Wind: 9.01mph
Words: 125
Karl Martino is one of the original cohort of bloggers I interacted and corresponded with a quarter of a century ago. He maintains his blog, but he seldom posts.
It's a good video. The narrator sounds like Joe of Joe's Computer Museum.
Master Shifu in Kung Fu Panda put it well:
You are too concerned about what was and what will be. There is a saying: yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.
All we have are moments to live, and each other.
The only power that exists is the power to choose.
The finger is not the moon.
Always recall that everyone is giving you the finger.
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10:01 Tuesday, 1 September 2026
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This was during yesterday's effort to copy Total Replay v6 over to the MegaFlash IIc Plus. If I didn't have a IIc, I'd be confined to only using an emulator.
When the new house is done, The Dave Cave will have room to set up my two IIe computers, the IIgs, and all three IIcs. I have no desire to have an original Apple II or the Apple ][+, which is what I started out on back in 1982.
I do kind of want to own an Apple III, but they're pretty rare and pricey.
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08:16 Tuesday, 1 September 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 68.7°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 97% Wind: 5.99mph
Words: 1203
Bought a new gadget for the IIc(s), a FujiNet adapter. I have no insight into the origin of the appellation, but I now have some experience with the device itself.
One of the challenges of retro-computing is media management. Back in the day, there was a robust retail marketplace that distributed applications on physical media, usually 5.25" floppy disks, sometimes cassette tapes. Today, the market for physical media is far more constrained, chiefly on eBay, forum classifieds and sometimes shopgoodwill.com.
An enormous amount of old software has been preserved in the form of disk images available at archive.org and at other sites. This is a huge resource for emulators, but there's a barrier between a digital disk image, and the disk drive attached to most old computers.
There are a variety of solutions, one of which is to emulate the drive itself in modern hardware. One of the best-known is the Floppy Emu, from Big Mess o' Wires, heretofore my preferred method of using disk images with my Apple II computers. I wrote "heretofore," because I like that word, but also because I've learned that the FujiNet has some significant advantages over the Floppy Emu.
Let's double-clutch here for a second and discuss another challenge of retro-computing, and that is space. While originally described as micro-computers, old desktop boxes are now what we would consider enormous. I am space-challenged here in our present house, my workspace is confined to a rather small Home Depot Husky mobile workbench, which is home to my 14" MBP and 27" Benq LCD, along with the usual amount of clutter that seems to accrete wherever I set up shop. If I want to play with an old computer, I have to be content with an emulator, or something that I can fit on this desktop, after clearing away a certain amount of clutter.
Enter the Apple IIc, or, more specifically in my case, the Apple IIc Plus. The IIc has among its many virtues, the premiere virtue of being small. If I shove my keyboard and trackpad off to the side somewhere, I can fit the IIc in the remaining space on the desktop. The disk drive is built-in, the IIc Plus doesn't require a brick, so I have an ordinary power cord plugged into the power strip with the free end tucked under the monitor shelf, and I can just pick up the IIc Plus from the floor, where Mitzi tolerates its presence, plug it into power and connect the monitor to an HDMI adapter connected to the IIc's video port, and I'm instantly transported back into the Golden Age of personal computing.
The only thing that kind of diminishes this experience is a certain amount of fiddling with the Floppy Emu, which is a very small device with a rather long ribbon cable attached. But the utility of the Floppy Emu outweighs the fiddliness of using it.
But I'm always looking for ways to improve this experience, and one of those is the MegaFlash IIc Plus, which I installed a week or so ago. That device installs up to eight 32MB virtual hard drives internally. It comes with two virtual drives already formatted with a selection of software installed, one of which being the game collection Total Replay.
This leaves the challenge of populating the remaining six virtual drives. This shouldn't be a problem, because the Floppy Emu has the capability of emulating a 32MB hard drive. (I suppose I should stop saying hard drive. I suppose back in the day it would have been a hard drive, but it's perhaps more accurate to say a SmartPort block storage device.)
Here, alas, is where I've encountered another challenge. Because of the way the Floppy Emu is programmed, in order to mount a 32MB disk image, all the blocks must be contiguous on the microSD card inside the Floppy Emu. In the past I've been able to achieve that by moving all the files off the microSD card onto my Mac's desktop, deleting everything on the microSD card, and then copying everything back onto it.
The MegaFlash IIc Plus comes with Total Replay v5.something, and I wanted to replace it with the latest version, which I downloaded from the repo linked above. Try as I might, I couldn't get the image to be stored contiguously on the microSD card. I haven't looked for a utility that might consolidate it, but that might have solved the problem.
Instead, I tried the FujiNet, which I bought for a variety of reasons beyond simply getting Total Replay v6 onto my IIc Plus. One of the features of FujiNet ("the FujiNet"?) is that it has a microSD slot and a drive emulator. Much to my delight, it mounted the Total Replay v6 disk image without complaint. I used Copy II+ to copy v6 over the v5 volume on the MegaFlash. It took a couple of hours, but it works just fine.
I found that the FujiNet is a much better user experience in dealing with disk images on the microSD card. The Floppy Emu is controlled by the device itself, and you have a little screen to browse the contents of the card and you press various buttons to mount or eject disks.
With the FujiNet, you can browse the contents of the microSD card right from the Apple II's screen and control it with the keyboard. It's a much better user experience.
So at this point, I would say that if you're looking to get into retro-computing on an Apple II computer, the IIc with a FujiNet would be a good place to start. It doesn't have to be the IIc Plus, but it does have to have a SmartPort ROM. The original IIc didn't have the SmartPort protocol in its ROM, later versions of the A2S4000 (original model) added support for the 3.5" UniDisk along with the SmartPort protocol. It's a fairly simple task to swap out the ROM, and there are many newer versions to choose from, including some fancy ones that allow you to choose various ROM images.
If you start with a slotted Apple II with just a 5.25" disk controller card installed, the Floppy Emu is a better choice, because it'll talk to the disk controller without relying on the SmartPort protocol. You can get SmartPort cards, or use a 5.25" controller with a modified printer interface card. I gather you replace its ROM with one that hosts the SmartPort protocol code, but that's just a guess. But that's probably a bit challenging if you're just getting into this.
As far as these 32MB volumes go, you're limited to ProDOS only files and applications. For DOS 3.3, you're pretty much confined to 5.25" disk images. There were some modified DOS 3.3 compatible systems that could use up to 400K of data on one side of a 3.5" floppy, or the original Macintosh external 3.5" floppy drives. As of this writing, I don't know if or how any of those are emulated.
Anyway, pretty happy with two fairly new, modern devices that interface with the Apple IIc and help make using them more fun.
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