A Quick Look at the CFFA3000

Well on friday my CFFA3000 cards turned up .  Now for anyone who hasn’t been aware of these cards the official site is http://tinyurl.com/3cmqb. Rich has been producing the CFFA (in a few revisions) since 2002 and I have several of his existing cards. The original CFFA 1.2/1.3 and the 2.0 allowed a Apple II user to use an normal IDE HD or a CF Card to act as a HD to the host machine (utilising several 32mb partitions as well as 2 x 1GB with a driver). Now there are other cards similar to the CFFA i.e MicroDrive, but Rich with its primary focus on CF and pricing made the CFFA more attractive to me at the time ($99). This provided a whole new way to use my GS and using Ciderpress (http://ciderpress.sourceforge.net/)  for Windows allowed me to backup and convert my real GS to 2mg files for use in emulators.

In 2009 Rich announced the new CFFA, and when he announced what he was trying to do with this card I knew I would have to get one. The card has surpassed what i was expecting. This new revision is extremely well polished, with a nicely featured and easy to use boot menu that is also accessible via control panel, and bridges the gap between real GS and the emulator world. Unlike the previous cards the new one has removed the IDE connector and its been replaced with a USB port.

In a nutshell the CFFA3000 lets you use pretty much any disk image in an Apple II as well as still supporting the raw partitions from previous CFFA cards. The card can be configured to offer both SmartPort Devices as well as a virtual Disk II. As a test I took my existing CF that had 6 RAW Partitions which contains 4 x 32MB (Prodos) and 2 x 1GB (HFS). I then used Ciderpress to make 6 image files (2mg) and copied them onto a FAT32 formatted 4GB CF  (can be FAT16 as well, but not FAT12 or NTFS). Using the boot menu i assigned each image to a SmartPort and the system booted exactly like my original CF, but now with more flexibility :).

Doing so uses up the physical slot of the card itself as well as another slot virtually (must not contain another card, well one that interacts with the bus for example my TDX sound card would be fine as that uses the slot only for power).

Another thing that is great to see on the card is that both  CF and USB are  hot pluggable and the card will detect and refresh the contents in the menu system. A double beep will notify you that the card has detected new media (On boot with both USB and CF you should hear a double double beep).

Some screen shots below of the menu system accessible by pressing “m” on startup of via the desk accessory. On disk assignment screens pressing space bar will flip between USB and CF listings. Also you can assign more than the standard 6 SmartPorts and you will see these in GS/OS.

You will notice in the pictures an accessory that Rich is also selling called the CFFA3000 Remote & Cable . I have yet to use this as haven’t play much with the Disk II support, mainly as my GS is full of cards. The board has two push switches that correspond to Disk 1 and Disk 2 and it can be used to toggle through sets of disk images.

Basically if you haven’t bought one of these yet then you need to get yourself on the list for the 2nd batch . Contact Rich via http://shop.dreher.net/

 

Samsung T200HD

The issue of IIGS modern screen replacements came up in discussion again on CSA2, and it made me think about the Samsung T220HD LCD I had tried a while back. The Samsung as you probably gathered is a 22inch monitor with TV capabilities plus a load of different connection options including RGB Scart.  At the time i was impressed with the output of the IIGS on the monitor, but 22inch’s and the price (was ~£330 at the time) made me return it. I always said to myself i would pick up the smaller version when prices came down on ebay…well the post on CSA2 made me go shopping . The screen itself was £139 delivered and as  I was also looking to make my PC dual screen it was a good excuse to spend some money

Now as anyone who has looked at modern alternatives to a monitor for the GS will tell you RGB Scart is the closest you will get in terms of native output, mainly due to RGB scart supporting 15Khz. Unfortunately this is only really available in Europe and Australia. I have posted some pictures of the TV/Monitor as well as GS screen shots for anyone that is interested.

One thing to point out is initially though i got a GS output the LCD kept complaining that it had no signal, to resolve it i had to change the video sync to pin 3, which iirc is sync over composite (will update post when I confirm).

Drew ][ TDX and HeadPhones

The TDX card is designed to work with power speakers. Though you can use headphones you can’t obviously adjust the volume . I was looking around on ebay and came across a smart little headphone amplifier by FiiO  that works very well with the TDX card. It is the E5 model and has volume control, and bass switch as well as a re-chargable battery (via USB) that apparantly gives you about 20 hours of use. Quite handy if you want to use headphones when the misses doesn’t want to hear the tink tink of 80′s computer music . It was only about £9 here in the UK and looking at the USA Ebay site think you can get it cheaper.

Drew ][ TDX 1.1 now available to order

The Drew ][ TDX version 1.1 board are now available to order

www.drew2gs.com

Drew ][ TDX 1.1 – First Board Complete :)

First board completed all ok, had a small issue with holes being too small for the PCB jack, but was quickly resolved by a pair of wire cutters (will look at sorting that out next run…if there is enough interest still). Again will update when ready to ship/sell.

Drew ][ TDX 1.1 – Boards Arrived

The version 1.1 boards have turned up. This is another 20 board run, and will post more details once I have confirmed costs and when I can get them ready. I am aiming for £26.99 (this is without back plate, but has an onboard 3.5mm jack and a connector for backplate from version 1.0 card). This card will just be stereo output only, and will include the better demux chip.

Drew ][ TDX 1.1

While I wait for the speakers to turn up for the laptop GS card, I have decided to look at the redesign of the TDX version 1.0 board. I am now looking at smaller board, with 2 layers (one for gound plane) and an onboard jack. I will also leave a connector on their so if anyone has a version 1.0 board they can use the existing connector (I will also be offering the connectors as well). This is an effort to get the boards cost down and offer them at a better price. Though the first board was offered for sale, this time round i would like to cover most of my costs .

Currently looking something like this :-

www.drew2gs.com …looking less like a 5 year old put it together…

Well I realised the main site for the Drew ][ TDX was a bit shocking in terms of its look and feel. I had thought recently that one wasn't needed due to my blog, but felt that the Drew ][ TDX does in fact need a home . The new site was put together with RapidWeaver on the Mac, so now has a more professional feel and a shopping cart thanks to the RapidCart plugin (supports Paypal only).

No doubt over the coming weeks the site will go through more tweaks, but am happy that it is a 100% improvement over the old one .

www.drew2gs.com

Drew ][ TDX – New Demux Switch

Ever since I started this project I had noticed a small issue where occasionally you would hear sound/artifact on the wrong channel. I noticed this most notably in the game Silpheed on the intro music…(believe me I spent a lot of time just sitting there listening to it lol). I had chosen to ignore this as my Audio Animator also did this, so I chose to accept that either I was hearing things and being rather anally retentive or hardware does something a little differently to emulation (All I could compare too). With the Apple IIGS Hardware guide also suggesting to use the MC14052 Demux I concluded that its just the way it is…

Well it seems the I chose to ignore my advice and recently picked up some other newer demux chips by Philips (74HC4052N and/or 74HCT4052N). These have a quicker switch rate than the MC15042B and are pin compatible and I was pleased to hear that the issue went away

I will look at sending out replacement demux switches FOC to everyone that purchased a card over the next few months and once the laptop cards gets all completed. You will then be able to just remove the MC14052 and drop in the new one. You probably won’t even notice the issue on your card when you using speakers as I spent a lot of time with headphones, which makes it more noticeable, so don’t panic

TaifunBoot

I have been looking at Taifun Boot after finding version 1.7 that worked on ROM03 and decided I would post something about for anyone that hasn’t come across this nice little utility.

TaifunBoot is a OS selection tool that installs on to your boot volume and then allows you to config booting into different OS versions (supports GS/OS, ProDOS 16 and 8 ) via a menu system or via press of key. It also provides the ability to change the system configuration of GS/OS. This means you can then enable or disable CDA, NDA, CDevs, Inits, Drivers and FSTs.  Its final feature is the ability to boot off Slot 5 and 6 via the menu if need be rather than having to configure it via control panel.

My test system was Sweet16 with ROM03 and GS/OS 6.0.1 with ProBoot installed. Installation was quick and all you have to do is run the “Install.TFB” file and select the boot volume you want TB to be installed to. The only issue i had here was having TCP/IP connected as the system would just prompt to say that TCP/IP won’t work under Prodos 8 and I couldn’t go any further. The work around was just to disconnect TCP/IP before installing TB.

Once the system rebooted TB will automatically prompt the menu. The initial configuration has the first entry (0) pre filled in with the default OS that was installed when you installed TB. On installation TB will copy itself to the boot volume and rename the standard “PRODOS” to “PRODOS.” and put itself as “PRODOS”. This means to simply remove TB you just need to reverse that.

To install a new OS you just need to copy over the necesssary system files to the boot volume (making sure they are renamed accordingly). I decided to create a System 5.0.4 entry and copied over PRODOS, SYSTEM folder and ICONS folders to my boot volume. Before I copied them I labled them for the 2nd menu item which means they were labeled as PRODOS.1, SYSTEM.1 and ICONS.1. Subsequent OS installs will follow the same pattern until .9 which is the maximum number that is supported.

Once you have labeled them reboot the system and at this stage the TB menu will still pop up. To add the new system highlight the menu on the left and click “Add System”. You will be prompted with add new system dialog window and you can just enter the name you want it to be listed as. Make sure you click save config to save the changes otherwise when you reboot it will be gone

Once you have setup your menus you don’t have to always be prompted with the TaifunBoot menu.  There is an option under “Activate Menu”  called “Activate always”.  If this is unticked then the Menu won’t be displayed but just a boot message. This will wait the designated time (3 secs is default) for a specific key press. At this point if you don’t press anything it will just boot into the StandardSystem (again this is configurable). If you press one of the number keys it will boot the corresponding OS and finally you can press Ctrl,Shift, Option or Open Apple to bring up the Menu itself.

For GS/OS you can also configure what gets loaded or not loaded when booting the OS by configuring the “System Config” option. Though this seems flakey on the 1.7 ROM03 version i tried. In an emulator I was not able to untick/tick anything but on a real GS i was able to, but had to click it a few times. It seems on a ROM01 this isn’t a problem with the 1.7 version or the 1.8.

Finally you can reboot to slot 5/6 via the Reboot option without the need to configure the GS control panel

There does seem to be several versions around. 1.8 doesn’t work with ROM03 properly  and there are versions of 1.7 that don’t work either, so you might need to have a play till you find the right one. If anyone wants the version i have been using on a ROM03 drop me an email and will send it on. I also have 1.7 for ROM01. 1.8 is available from Ninjaforce’s website (http://www.ninjaforce.com/), but it doesn’t contain any documentation. I have emailed them to see if a 1.8 version is availablet that works correctly with the ROM03, if they come back with a new version I will post it.