Apple III & Profile

From: Julian Richardson <JRichardson_at_softwright.co.uk>
Date: Wed Aug 12 03:32:00 1998

>>> Hmm, well I don't know about Prodos or the 'catalyst' proggy that people
>>>are
>>> mentioning, I know I managed to get directory listings from my drives
>>>without
>>> either, although it *may* have been using a diagnostics disk that came
>>>with
>>> the drive.
>>
>>That's what I thought. I don't have Prodos or catalyst, but the SOS
>>utilities disk with the drivers and setup programs seems to indicate that
>>I should be able to access the drive without anything fancy.

hmm, I should hopefully be going up to my folk's place in two or three
weeks time - if I do and this is still a problem then I'll try to get
access to my /// and see what's what (I can't remember how far back in
the pile it is though :)

>> The READY light doesn't go out, it just stops blinking. It stays *on*. I
>> hope I didn't imply otherwise in my original post, else that could be a
>> source for confusion.
>> It makes sense to me that the READY light would stay on when the drive is
>> ready.

that sounds right to me, too :) But at least it's changing state - I
guess I'd expect it to carry on blinking if there was a fault. (Out of
interest, how long was it blinking for? Seem to remember it used to be
somewhere around 30-40 seconds on my drives)
>
>> I played with it again, and I CAN get it to run from slot 3. But I have
>> to use the Profile controller board that was originally in slot 4, into
>> slot 3. Only one of the controller cards gets a response from the drive,
>> so I guess one is dead.

Interesting. My problem was probably that more than one card couldn't be
configured at once then (maybe I should get hold of a copy of prodos
from somewhere and that'll sort things out? I can't imagine the firm
that originally used this machine swapping drives around all the time!)
>
>> Unless the cabling is wrong. :) I'm using a straight-through 25-pin
>> cable, and it's 6 feet long. Maybe the Profile doesn't like cables longer
>> than a foot in length or something? Or maybe it's supposed to have
>> different wiring?

well, I remember the cable didn't have any twists in it - ie. it was
either a full crossover or straight-through. One of my cables is
original, and it's no more than a foot long. Chances are these things
would suffer from interference - try a shorter cable and see if it
helps.
>
>> Thanks Jules, you're the only one not to try to involve Prodos so far. ;)

ooh, give me time... :)
really must get back into using the /// and finding out what there is
available for it - everyone seems to hate the machine, but it seems an
interesting beast to say the least!! (Last time I used it though it made
me realise how used I was to MS-DOS, SOS being the nightmare that it
is...)

cheers

Jules

>
Received on Wed Aug 12 1998 - 03:32:00 BST

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