Date : Mon, 03 Jun 1985 22:00:15 GMT
From : "R.Thomas" <rbt%sftig.uucp@BRL.ARPA>
Subject: Re: Wordstar/Appli-Card offer query
The time has come for me to summarize what I have learned about the PCPI
Applicard for all you folks out there who have helped me in my search for
information.
First -- The manuals that come with the Starcard (The name for the
Applicard when it is bundled with Wordstar.) are full of typos and not
exceedingly detailed. If you can read around the typos, they are reasonably
good cook-books for getting CPM and Wordstar up and running, but they will
not make a CPM hacker out of you. I have not heard that PCPI's own manuals
are any better. All is not completely lost though, because there is a friendly
person at the end of a PCPI technical hot-line who can send you xerox copies of
various napkins (and such) on on which the software/hardware developers have
scribbled down the real poop. In addition, there is an 'OEM Package' that
PCPI will sell you for 50 bucks which consists of a double-sided disk full of
software and about 35 pages of badly xeroxed notes. The above mentioned
napkins are in addition to these notes, and necessary for a real
understanding of what is going on. If you have looked at all of the above
and are still curious about what is going on, you can offer to sign a
non-disclosure agreement, and they may consent to send you the source code
for the various drivers. Then again, they may not. I haven't gotten my copy
of the non-disclosure agreement yet, so I don't know how stringent it is, or
what happens after you sign it and send it back to them.
Second -- It runs CPM2.2 just great. I have Turbo Pascal for CPM/80 running
on it and am much impressed with the speed and convenience of the package.
The 6MHZ Z80B processor is *FAST*. On the other hand, since the Z80 and the
6502 do not share any memory, (The Z80 has its own 64K of fast DRAM. You can
buy a piggy-back card that will expand it to about a half-Meg)
the communication between the two cpu's is restricted
to a single one-byte-wide I/O port and a couple of flag bits. Even with a
dedicated server running on the 6502, this means that the Z80 can't write on
the Apple's 80col screen at higher than a few hundred characters/second.
(Disk accesses are significantly faster, because they use block-mode transfers
in
which the Z80 tells the 6502 how many characters to expect then sends them all
in a burst. Character devices like the 80col screen are restricted to a
single byte at a time, so the overhead is much higher.) Since the nitty-gritty
I/O is all handled by the 6502 side, the BIOS on the Z80 side can
afford to be very small. This leads to a remarkably large 57K Transient
Program Area. You can run larger programs on it than you can on the
Microsoft card. (Further comments on differences between this card and the
Microsoft card later.)
Third -- The terminal emulator that runs on the 6502 side and manipulates
the Apple 80col screen is excessively dumb. It seems to lack character/line
insert/delete sequences. If anybody knows differently, please speak up. It
hurts to watch the screen get repainted just to insert a line at the top. I
sincerely hope that this is just a misfeature of the Turbo Pascal editor,
which I otherwise like very much.
Fourth -- it is *not* compatible with the Microsoft CPM card. It will not
run anything that assumes hardware features of that card. However, it
*will* run just about any generic CPM program, of which there are a
multitude! The price you pay for the blazingly fast CPU is incompatibility
with the 'standard' Microsoft card. The worst part of this is that
it will not run the drivers that give you access to the Profile hard
disk from CPM. (Does anybody know if the Sider has a driver that runs on the
Applicard?) The person on the hot-line hinted that PCPI would
sell you a driver written by someone in Australia that gave the Applicard
access to a Profile, but he didn't make it sound like it was compatible
with much. In particular, I think he said that if you used that driver,
you couldn't use your Profile with Prodos. He didn't know for sure,
but I expect that there is no provision for partitioning the disk.
I asked about software from third-party sources, but (while he said
they did keep a registry of such) he couldn't point me at anybody
who could help me with my specific problems. Which brings me to --
Fifth -- They supply a driver that runs under DOS3.3 and turns the Applicard
into a ramdisk, with up to a half meg of memory if you buy the piggyback
cards (300 bucks for 256K -- a trifle expensive for today's market -- maybe
mailorder places have them cheaper.) However, they do not supply a
corresponding driver for Prodos. I assume that the Prodos driver would be a
snap, given the code for the DOS3.3 driver, but nobody at PCPI has seen fit to
do it yet. Sounds like a market for a 3rd party in there somewhere!
I have used the DOS3.3 driver, it works very well.
Sixth and finally -- They supply a printer driver that uses the left-over
6502-side ram (including the Alternate bank on the 80-column card, if one
exists) as a printer buffer (up to 80K in my configuration, IIe with
extended 80 Column color card.) But it seems to me that a much better use
for that memory would be as a ramdisk for CPM (with maybe a 16K buffer
reserved for the printer driver.) The tech-support hot-line person did not
know of any such driver -- sounds like another 3rd party opportunity!
>
> I recently received an advertisement from Broadreach
> for Wordstar and the Appli-Card CP/M card for $164.95.
This is a very good price!
> It lists features of the Appli-Card, but doesn't specify
> whether all the software and manuals necessary to use
> the features are included in the package.
If this is the Micropro Starcard package, they are included, but
see above. The manuals are not very detailed.
> If anyone has experience with the Appli-Card, or this offer,
> please send me your opinion.
>
> In particular, does the 6Mhz Appli-card run all CP/M software?
> Are preboots needed?
Runs everything I have come across, but I have not experimented widely.
Also, see above regarding Microsoft compatibility.
> Is the manual sufficient to learn CP/M?
No. Go buy a good book. Don't count on the manuals.
> Are there needed utilities that are not included with Appli-Card?
Everything you need to configure it and get CPM up and running is included.
There is the DRI assembler and editor and DDT (and PIP and stat, and so on)
but no 'higher level' languages. I recommend buying Turbo Pascal.
> The ad says the 64K ram on the card can be used as
> RAM/Disk for DOS3.3. Has anyone used the Applicard in
> this way?
Yes, see above.
>
> Thanks,
>
> David Lazar
> ihuxk!dcl55611
Rick Thomas
{ihnp4,akgua,sdcsvax,just about anywhere}!attunix!rbt
(201)-522-6062