Ok, can't find a manual anywhere only some "release notes" online and a website on how to get it running with a ProDos GS
I want to see if I can get it running on my II. I have the following setup.
Slot 0- Apple Rom card set to AppleSoft
Slot 1- 16k RamEx card (no morherboard jumper language card)
Slot 2- Willegal Super Protoboard
Slot 3- super serial
Slot 4- The CPM card
Slot 5- disk II
Slot 6- CFFA3000
Slot 7- open
I'm using the ALS disk images on the CFFA from Asimov.
I get a bunch of characters on the screen and when I press reset it says can't find the ALS card.
What am I doing wrong or does someone have a copy of the manual?
Thanks,
Corey
Hello Corey,
Probably you missed to check my downloadpage.....
the correct images and the manual are availiable there.....
http://www.harrowalsh.de/Elektronik/APPLEBOX/appleboxdownload.htm
rather at the front part related to special cards....
general info:
the card has its own 64 kB RAm runs with 2Mhz / 4 Mhz and uses CP/M 3.01b
cheers speedyG
You seem to have the same information that I found. I need the actual manual for the card itself not CPM or at minimum someone who has done it with a II or II+.
Thanks,
Corey
Hello Corey,
it seems that the card only works in 80col mode......
so my advice:
protocard out from slot 2...
superserial in slot 2
and videx or similar card in slot 3 !
that should work....
it at least does the job in my system with a Videx Ultraterm clone....
but to say truth i´ve not tested it from the CFFA card .... i boot from DISK II with CP/M 301b Masterdisk and Utility Disk in Disk II - B position .....
The problem is that the CFFA must be treated from CP/M as a kind of SCSI emulation and i´m not sure that the firmware of the CFFA card does that with CP/M 3.01b..... probably Rich Dreher can tell morr about that topic.....
and if the card can handle that it might be needed to use the CFFA in slot 5 or slot 7...... like an additional SCSI drive...
sincerely speedyG
GOT IT!!!
It was the card. I took a can of flux remover and cleaned it out very well, there must have been some "crud" preventing it from working. I let it dry for about 2 hours and blew it out with 150 psi of air and it worked in slot 4.
Cheers,
Corey
Hello Corey,
just for the "recall".... did you use it in 40 col mode or did you add 80 col card ?
does the cp/m 3.01 accept the CFFA and in which slot ? Did you boot from CFFA or from Disk?
sincerely speedyG
It's my II not plus so I kept it at 40 column. My CFFA is in slot 6 and disk II in 5. I primarily use the CFFA now so it doesn't make sense to keep the disk II controller in 6. So no disks involved. Just CFFA3000 and a USB key.
Speedy - recall that the CFFA3000 can emulate two Disk II drives (in addition to hard drives), so it would not require any special drivers for floppy emulation work the way CP/M expects out of the box.
Hello David,
my question targeted to another aim:
I have started up till now the cp/m always from disk II in slot 6. But i have up till now never tried to format a USB or a CFcard from cp/m 3.01b ( the one with ALS CPM card at 2 Mhz and 64kb on Card in slot 4 ). But i intend to make a CF-card as backup from all my CP/M disks in few months - so my question is :
if i boot from CP/M 3.01b disk ( from Disk II ) and CFFA is in slot 5 or slot 7 - can i treat the CFFA like a SCSI disk as c:\> and toss over my files with FID or the copy command ?
sincerely speedyG
As far as I know, only the PCPI Applicard has a driver that can use ProDOS-partitioned hard drives (like the kind that both the CFFA and CFFA3000 supply). See:
http://applecpm.blogspot.com/2011/12/up-and-running-with-cpm-on-cffa.html
It's still not clear to me that you are drawing the distinction between the original CFFA and the CFFA3000... the 3000 has the additional ability to emulate floppy drives that the original lacks.
Hello David,
the link has in the followup one interesting point: the sourcecode of the PCPIdriver.....
and the disk-emulation feature of the CFFA3000 has nothing to do with the question.....
i have quite a lot of "large bolck device controllers":
the RAMfast SCSI card Vers.D ; the Apple SCSI Card II ; the old profile controller;
the CFFA vers.2.0 as well as the CFFA3000 ( of which i never use the emulation feature ... )
and 2 or 3 other SCSI controllers and the FAST IDE controller from Dipl.Ing. Lange
( one of the very first advanced IDE controllers for the Apple II )....
Up to the moment i reliably know that the most different SCSI Controllers like the
RAMfast and the Apple SCSI II work together with CP/M ( at least CP/M 2.20 b ) in different stages of ability
( meaning that there are different limitations ... ) this is also valid to the FAST IDE controller
from Dipl.Ing Lange ( though for that one i had to write a own driver for cp/m years ago )....
in fact CP/M while loading at the end of the bootstage loads data from the track zero, which indicates
to the system the size of the current volume and it´s "access-regulations" ( i.e. How manc byte per sector,
how many sectors per track, how many tracks, how many heads / sides , how many dir entries, etc. .... )
thats valid to both : access to disks or large block devices.....
the infos on this parms are set by the formatting-program of the currect OS ( not only CP/M )...
i´ve got into that stuff decades ago when i first started using larger disks on the ehring FDC4 controller
with patched OS-systems, where i had to tell the OS the parms of the disks to get access to the entire 640 kb
per disk, it was also again a topic to be treated when i changed to the erphi autopatch controller
where the parms have been set by dipswitches and the controller - after loading the OS aet the parms by reading the switches and then setting the parms in memory instead of changing bytes on the disk... - with the result of not
needing to handle dozends of different kinds of patched disk for different configurations...
In fact it´s without any importance which kind of OS is used - except that the OS-systems themselves have internal limitations ( by being able to translate virtual blocks or not and limitations by handling the total amount of availiable blocks or sectors by the limitation to the count of 65535 or skipping beyong that count by using indirect
translation methods....
so the question itself targets to the ability how the large block device is treated.....
with SCSI the limit is given by the border of 32 MB due to the fact that it´s the largest amount of parms it can handle... and if a controller can handle that ( and the CFFA can do that at least with proDOS ) then there is no reason that it can´t handle it within CP/M except of the fact that there is no driver availiable within the OS ( but that does not limit the possibility to modify an existing driver to do the similar thing - independent if it´s proDOS, UCSD pascal system or CP/M ) but in fact the question is - if somebocy has done it or not.... it´s rather teameating task to invent ( reprogramm a driver ) this - or use something that allready is existing.... why invent the wheel twice ?
At the moment i know the with SCSI and with normal CP/M card ( talking about CP/M 2.20b ) the use of large disks and partitions is possible.... but i don´t know if anybody has done this with CP/M 3.01 b that is used with most CP/M Z80B cards with own 64kb on board like the card from ALS or IBS ( AP22 ) ....
if it has been done - it should be rather easy to modify source to also do the job with the CFFA 2.0 or the CFFA3000....
anyhow... at the moment my priority tasks are up with the VCFe ( occurs at 27th / 28th of April and the task of the Apple 1 cards... so it was just curiosity to ask this in the moment - to find out if something like that had been done...
so i´ll turn back to this point and this thread with this topic after VCFe has passed over....
to say it with "Arnie" "I´ll be back.... "
sincerely speedyG