MicroDrive IDE Turbo
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Developers: Joachim Lange
Publisher: ///SHH Systeme
Year: 1994
Download 2image Archive (590k)
Download the manual in PDF format (1551k)
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The MicroDrive IDE Turbo is quite possibly the fastest card available for use with compact flash card storage on the Apple II as it's RAM fast. It's available from Reactive Micro with a compact flash card and a USB compact flash card reader for a PC/Mac to get you started straight away.
To get up and running with as much IIGS software as possible, this is a video showing how to copy over the contents of 32meg disk images (found here) to preformatted 32meg partitions on a CF card.
At time of writing, I've found these IIGS titles are incompatible if stored and launched on a MicroDrive Turbo (whether DMA is turned on or off, from GS/OS or ProDOS 8, with a 3meg RAM expansion versus an 8 meg RAM expansion) whereas they run fine from a CFFA3000, CFFA2, Vulcan hard drive:
Games:
The Bard's Tale (original ProDOS 8 version)
The Bard's Tale II (original ProDOS 8 version)
Apps
The majority of these titles start to load, but a text based dialogue appears soon after asking to insert the disk they are actually already on. RastAn however simpLy crashes during the Fun Time Arcade load screen.
The pattern seems to be for IIGS programs that can run from ProDOS 8 alone, but there are exceptions – Tass Times in Tonetown, Gauntlet and Paperboy can still run on a Micro Drive Turbo. However, I think I can narrow it down a little further. Most of these games, "out of the box" wouldn't work when run from System 6 and the Finder. They have additional ProDOS executables that load first and somehow patch memory to make them work with launching within GS/OS System 5 and 6. You can find them and a little bit of documentation on the Games with Path Name Modifications volume. Go to G/Game.Utils/Deprotects/GAME.FINDERS folder to see the files. Perhaps disassembling these ProDOS 8 applications can reveal more – I don't know, I'm certaInly not at a skilled enough level to understand.
I plan to test whether these games also have problems with an Apple High Speed SCSI card and a SCSI2SD drive. I do not know if the same programs are non-functional on RAMFast SCSI cards, as I have none to test.
