Ye olde apple II clone's treasures from 1983

[goathead]

As we've been going thru and clearing out the spare parts room of obsoleted gear, I came across most of my first personal computer and boxes of it's floppy discs.

For shits and giggles I wanted to see if any of my old executables and text files were still stable on the floppy media. Ideally I would love to have that stuff transferred to CD for a memento of my first days of keyboard banging and peeks and pokes.

I know theres likely all of my ucsd pascal programs, ascii box schematics, and my D&D characters stored in a crap dbase.

It would be a kick to wander through the old media for sure.

So how am I going to accomplish this... well based on the assumption that mounting the ancient media to a new box would be a challenge in hw interfacing as well as OS access to the drive. Although I've seen a potential apple emulation program solution (A2win), that would likely allow me to play a bit but still not access my nostalgic archives.

The less painful option that I see at this time would be to get the box (Franklin Ace1000) up and try to modem the interesting files off the machine directly to a host. I know thats not going to be much fun at 75baud... but seems possible.

So far hitting up my cadre here on campus has only yielded the obvious suggestion of leave it alone.

Any other ideas which would be constructive?

Thanks!

-gh

[TheCotMan]

Re: Ye olde apple II clone's treasures from 1983

As we've been going thru and clearing out the spare parts room of obsoleted gear, I came across most of my first personal computer and boxes of it's floppy discs.

For shits and giggles I wanted to see if any of my old executables and text files were still stable on the floppy media. Ideally I would love to have that stuff transferred to CD for a memento of my first days of keyboard banging and peeks and pokes.

I know theres likely all of my ucsd pascal programs, ascii box schematics, and my D&D characters stored in a crap dbase.

It would be a kick to wander through the old media for sure.

So how am I going to accomplish this... well based on the assumption that mounting the ancient media to a new box would be a challenge in hw interfacing as well as OS access to the drive. Although I've seen a potential apple emulation program solution (A2win), that would likely allow me to play a bit but still not access my nostalgic archives.

The less painful option that I see at this time would be to get the box (Franklin Ace1000) up and try to modem the interesting files off the machine directly to a host. I know thats not going to be much fun at 75baud... but seems possible.

So far hitting up my cadre here on campus has only yielded the obvious suggestion of leave it alone.

Any other ideas which would be constructive?

Thanks!

-gh

Heh. Franklin Ace, Laser 128, Apple ][c... oh wait, the ][c wasn't a clone. :-)

I've migrated stuff off Apple disks using the serial port. ASCII dump over serial to capture on the remote box. (Even Applewriter and AppleWorks docs.) I used a multi-port serial terminal server (Lantronix, I think) to connect my old Apple box to a PC.

For .dsk images, there was this apple emulator ISA card with drive card to allow for direct dump of disk images in linux. (Maybe it was Windows 3.11) (It either came with a special 5.25" drive or allowed the daisy-chainable external ][gs / ][c drives.) The resulting images had to be altered in some way to work with the apple2 emulators.

Words of caution: old disks (5.25") appear to degrade with long term storage. Several of my old disks allowed me to read them once when I was migrating content to my PC. Future attempts to read them with the Apple failed. So, you might want to make sure you have a procedure that works and is tested on new disks before trying to import images from old disks, as you may only get one pass/chance per disk.

For the above, I found various Apple2 emulator FAQs useful. There was one that is linked in the documentation with the packaged apple2 emulator for Debian/Ubuntu.

[Added:]
http://adt.berlios.de/

More supporting:
http://www.apple2.org.za/gswv/a2zine/Sel/ADTWin.html
http://home.swbell.net/rubywand/Csa2FLUTILS.html#007
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-gro...tors-faq/part1
(I've not yet found the old FAQ for the newsgroup that included great information on dsk image creation)
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/comp.sys.apple2/
http://home.swbell.net/rubywand/A2FAQs1START.html

[goathead]

Re: Ye olde apple II clone's treasures from 1983

Beautiful.. thanks for the tips Cotman.

I was also concened about the magnetic media degrading. Similar issues when I was transferring my father's 1960s era magnetic tapes to my studio workstation. The first pass was the best it got... the interaction with the read write head assembly caused the metal oxide material to delam from the tape leaving a buildup of moldy oldies lol.

I am tempted to see if I can fire up locksmith 2.0 or another sector copy routine to xfer to newer media, but still no guarantees that the dual floppy mechanisms have not corroded over the last 20 years... many of our reel to reel machines suffer that failure mode.

Anyway thanks for taking the time to post the links. Its much appreciated.

-gh