Hi fans -
it has been a tradition for me that on every April fool's day, April the 1st, I would present one of my ongoing projects to the Applefritter crowd.
And here it is my project for April fool's day 2025: the 'IWMless':
Those of you who have followed my "IWM reverse engineering" thread will recognize that this one has no programming connector anymore, and no flight wires. This is how the finished version would look (if it's using the RC motor timers).
What is the 'IWMless' ?
It's a small and cheap module that goes into the place of an original but dead IWM of any Apple IIc or Liron card for the Apple IIe. As the tongue-in-cheek name implies, it's l e s s than a real, original IWM, so it can't be used in the Mac nor in the Apple IIgs, nor in the Apple IIc+. The technical reason is that the M8 / FAST modes of the original IWM are of no use with a 6502 CPU running at 1 MHz, so they were left out of the 'IWMless' which is meant only to repair Apple IIc and Liron cards, and nothing else. The advantage of trimming these excess functions away is to get to the finish line sooner and to be able to use a low end CPLD which costs less. Or are you one of these fools who want to pay more of your hard earned money to buy features you will never use ? (Oh, the consumer product industry l o v e s these fools - I don't).
So, why do I publish this on April fool's day ?
Same reason as with all of my previous projects I presented on Applefritter in the last five (or so) April fool's days: these are foolish projects which don't make me a dime of profit, and which - typically and so far - use to draw immense crowds ("crowds" size 3 to 5 people from 8+ billion people worldwide) who are interested in acquiring one of these foolish gadgets I've put together as a foolish hobby to kill my spare time - every useless retiree like me has plenty of.
Interested in getting your own 'IWMless' ?
So, if you are interested in acquiring one of these 'IWMless' modules to fix your Apple IIc or Liron card, comment here, ask any questions you have in mind, and let's see if this time it's more than 3 people, worldwide, who are interested.
You can also state (with no obligations, this post is not a trap) how much you would want to pay for one of those - this is worth to discuss openly as if it ever comes to production involving assembly service companies, an acceptable price point must be known in advance. I can only hand solder maybe half a dozen together by myself, and these will go exclusively to beta testers (you can volunteer).
- Uncle Bernie
P.S.: No obligations for any side and no warranty or fitness for anything given or implied - I don't guarantee I'll make any of them available to anyone, and I can't guarantee they are a good replacement for the real IWM. If you become a beta tester, you will find out sooner or later, and at your own discretion and your own risk. Testing such poorly documented peripherals is very tedious and time consuming, and the sooner beta tests start, the better.
The only thing I know for sure at this point in time is that my three 'lab rats' work well enough to fix my own Apple IIc and to build one or two Liron card clone(s) for my Apple IIe. If I had gotten a dime for each hour I put into this project I could have bought a BMOW "Yellowstone" controller, which, IIRC, seems to support FAST mode on 1 MHz machines using the same trick I used on my Apple-1 floppy disk controller (pulling the RDY line to replace a polling loop). But replacing the "Yellowstone" never was my mission objective. All I wanted is to fix my Apple IIc. And here we are ! I can fix it now, by putting a 'IWMless' in, and the open question is what happens with the leftovers of this project. You decide !
I wish I had a //c to help test. I have a LiRON, but the IWM is soldered on it and I'm not gonna desolder it unless it fails, which hopefully it won't.
Maybe there is someone out there with the bandwidth to create a KiCAD project with Gerbers for tabbing LiRON clone PCBs? If so then IWMless would have a pretty significant interest from a lot of people I'd think.
I'd also love to see a clone of Apple's 5.25" controller card that used the IWM of which prototypes exist but never went into production. With the mod of using a 2716 instead of the BiPolar PROM the original carried over from the Disk ][ and Apple 5.25 Controller card that used 74LS and the Woz state machine in another PROM like the Disk ][ Controller Card.
I'd love to test one but my Apple //c is in storage until I find a new place to settle. Maybe in a few months.
How do we buy one?
I would love to test this in a IIGS...
Someone here made an adapter board for installing the DIP version of the IWM into a IIGS and I have one with a damaged IWM.
You did read that this is only a partial substitute for the IWM (thus IWMless)? Uncle Bernie specifically said it won't fully work on a IIgs, like it won't support Apple 3.5 drives.
Edit to add, that was in another thread, so maybe you hadn't seen it.
Anyway, this is intended to replace the IWM in a //c or maybe a LiRON card or to be used for that functionality in clones thereof.
In post #4, 'baldrick' asked:
" How do we buy one ? "
Uncle Bernie comments:
Purpose of this thread is to lure in beta testers for the 'IWMless'. Once I think the design is ready for beta test, beta tester volunteers will be able to buy a 'IWMless' for $10 plus postage (I will even try to support beta testers outside the USA, but be aware the postage will exceed the price for the 'IWMless' by far - and those to the EU must be smuggled in, no way to clear EU customs if sent as a parcel, because use of non-RoHS 'certified' vintage parts).
And just to make sure: you can't use the 'IWMless' to fix Macs or IIgs, as these need the FAST mode not implemented in the 'IWMless'. I have made this clear in every thread on my IWM work. But what a typical collector could do is to use an Apple IIc or Liron card as the 'organ donor' for a real IWM, use it to fix the Mac or the IIgs, and then put the 'IWMless' into the IIc or Liron card, which don't use FAST mode (AFAIK, tell me if you can prove it does).
On the (very) long run, I may make a 100% compatible IWM substitute, which has all the modes implemented, and I do have the RTL for that, coming from my IWM reverse engineering project. This RTL is able to run in lockstep with a real IWM in all modes. But synthesizing it into a CPLD or FPGA and testing all these modes in all machines (IIgs, Mac, all I don't have) is so time consuming I can't do it before Y2027 even if I had the target machines (IIgs, Mac).
Still looking for more beta testers !
- Uncle Bernie
I'd be interested in testing one. I have a iic that needs resurrecting and this would be great for that. It would need to be shipped down under, happy to pay whatever the shipping ends up.
/Rob
Always on the hunt for one of these as I repair my IIC's an inevitably I find it's a bad IWM!! Please count me in on the beta.
Excellent !
Once the 'IWMless' is ready for beta testing, I will contact you all via PM.
Shipping to down under is so expensive that I'd recommend 'rjustice' of post #7 to wait a little bit until the first beta testers have done some tests and the first results are in.
U.S. based beta testers have the advantage that the could send me their 'IWMless' for reprogramming, if this is necessary. See, I can't test it very much as I have no 'SmartPort' peripherals except for the BMOW Floppy Emu, and I also don't have many original floppy disks with legacy copy protections to test if they work on the 'IWMless' - which they should, as it is no IWM, but a DISK II substitute onto which the IWM specific functions needed for 'SmartPort' were grafted. This strange, hybrid animal promises some advantages (better compatibility with legacy copy protections ?) but also bears some risks to be incompatible with original Apple II "SmartPort" devices, which I can't test as I don't have any.
But I think if you have a useless ('dead') Apple IIc (or Liron card) because of a blown up IWM, just bringing back the ability to read and write real 5.25" floppy disks is worth it (IMHO). If some obscure Apple II 'SmartPort' peripheral does not work, I could try to find out why, but for this I'd need that peripheral to do tests, so very likely, such an issue, even if it could be fixed, won't be fixed due to lack of that peripheral.
My own tests are ongoing, I run TOTAL REPLAY 24/7, but I'm still struggling with moving the design from an ispLSI1016E to a ispLSI1016, which has a smaller GRP (global routing pool) and hence has fitting issues for the same logic ! So what I do is to reconstruct the design step by step - there are many ways to skin a cat. The real irony is that if I do the design morphing by hand and turn the optimizer OFF, I can fit more in than if the optimizer does the partitioning and fitting, where it fails to fit, for the same logic, except partitioned by hand into different equations. But if I take these and merge them again, the optimizer / fitter fails to find a solution. So it is a P.O.S. - if I can find a solution by hand, the software should be able to find it too - or is all this CAD stuff a scam ? - Who knows.
The reason for this struggle is that I have lots of ispLSI1016, leftovers from back in the day, but only a few ispLSI1016E which I bought recently just for this project. These ispLSI1016E are not rare (despite they were discontinued about 15 years ago), but they are expensive if sourced from U.S. based IC brokers, and since I refuse to buy any ICs from Chinese sources (risk of counterfeits too high) there is no cheaper alternative. (This is not an exaggeration, as each and every time I bought ICs from China they turned out to be re-labled counterfeits, and it's simply not worth my time and effort, despite I always was able to claw back the money via the credit card company).
So , stay tuned !
Oh, and I need more U.S. based beta test volunteers !
- Uncle Bernie
I'm game. I'm in the US, have a stack of //c's I can test with, including one that has a dubious IWM. Count me in if still available.
In post #10, 'CT100' wrote:
" Count me in if still available. "
Uncle Bernie answers:
Great ! But please be aware they are not available yet ... I'm still moving the design from the 1016E to the 1016 which is tedious and I don't know if it is feasable. If I need to stay with the 1016E, further delays for buying a few more of them. I also need to do some other lab work to investigate if I could use a physically smaller capacitor so no washers on the disk drive posts are needed to increase headroom. The problem with this is that decreased physical size means decreased C and increased R, which already is in the Megaohms, so leakage currents start to play a role and the whole RC motor timer gets sensitized to that. Not a big deal, but still requires careful lab work to get it right.
So please be patient ... and continue to volunteer as a beta tester - I need more such volunteers !
- Uncle Bernie