On Jan 24, 8:51 pm, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> JackRubin wrote:
> > Anyone have one of these for sale/trade? Were there any other hardware
> > cards that let an Apple II coexist with a PC?
>
> IIRC, there were at least three models of the TrackStar, some sold
> under at least two other brands.
>
> They were being sold as "new old stock" at least up until 2000
> by the "Wizard of Oz".
>
> I can't say for sure about other Apple II cards for PCs, but it
> stands to reason that there would be other entrants in the market
> in the early-to-mid 1980s.
>
> I've always wanted to see some technical do***entation (like a
> schematic) on the TrackStar, but have never found any...
>
> -michael
>
> NadaPong: Network game demo for Apple II computers!
> Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
>
> "The wastebasket is our most im****tant design
> tool--and it's seriously underused."
I had one of these 10 years ago and resold it, and interestingly, it
passed through a number of hands and was recently resold on Ebay about
two months ago. I recognized my writing on the included disks in the
photo. Neat coincidence.
Anyway, I feel the utility of these things is very limited.
First, it is a full-length ISA card, meaning you need a PC that has
ISA slots. Good luck with that. Basically, this means you need an old
PC to run it, and if you're going to have an old PC just to run an
Apple II Hardware Emulator, you might as well just run a real Apple
II.
Second, its software runs in DOS, with all the fun that entails.
Third, you still need to plug in Apple II 5.25" disk drives into the
card in order to read and write disks - you can't use a PC's own 5.25"
drives. Can't use 3.5" disk drives either.
To be sure, it does work, and it lets you print to PC printers and use
the PC hard drive as an Apple hard drive, and it has a convoluted way
to transfer files from the Apple side to the PC side and vice versa,
but today's modern software emulators do just as good a job or better
on a current Windows (or Linux) PC or a Mac under OS X.
And if you have a real Apple II you can easily transfer disk images
over with a serial cable, ethernet cable with Uthernet network card,
or even via Compact Flash card with the CFFA project or a Microdrive
card.
So with that all said, do you still really want a trackstar? If so,
why?
-Warr
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