On Sunday, May 5th paulie420 said...
Hmmmm - I've heard a lot of good about the Big Mess O Wires one... I just haven't had the $ to order one yet. You know... I saw another youtuber product that converts a 5.25" metal drive shell into a floppy emulater -
for it. Let alone a fair price ($50) but ... $440??? Freaking insane IMO.
Yes, I agree. Too much money, I was also looking for the STL files. Too much! Not at all worth it.
Anyway, there is little use for FloppyEMU once you have a hard disk, folks like "qkumba" have made just about every single game and software title PRODOS compatible and so it can be loaded onto a hard disk.
But FloppyEMU is useful for many other things, it can also act as a hard disk with the right card on an Apple IIe, and also on the IIgs and macintosh computers, I use it on many different computers for all kinds of purposes, worth every penny.
The best hardware add-on for Apple IIe, in my opinion, is the ReActiveMicro Drive/Turbo IDE Controller, $95, and the Phasor v1.0, $135 (kit), and the replacement PSU board $70, though, I only did this one time so that I could have a spare board that I can recap at my leisure for the other apples. I think the "super serial card" is the best ebay purchase you can make, its better than using any kind of WIFI Modem and has multiple uses.
For example, you can run "unix" on your apple IIe, "a2osx", and, host a serial tty so that you can "login" to your apple 2 over serial from another computer. A WIFI modem can't do that. It's also better to just use a linux host as a serial tty login, and then use it as a jumping point to telent or ssh to a BBS, because you have full software control of everything, and you can write software to transliterate for incompatible character sets, etc.
The other card I'd *like* to get but is also too expensive, is an apple II mouse card, used on ebay or $80 new from maceffects, it has very little use except for "a2desktop", which also has very little use, but it is fun to show the evolution of "desktop GUI" from apple IIe, IIgs and early 68k Macintosh.
Anyway, I've gotten into this retrocomputing thing, particularly apple computers, because that's my nephew's interest right now. He's 9 years old.
Kids don't really understand 6502, 68k, or x86. They just know brands, and Apple is popular among kids. He also likes IBM and Microsoft, and so he's got an old Thinkpad with windows XP.
I'm trying to encourage it, he's had this interest for about a year and a half now. He's also into retro game handhelds (gameboy etc) and old mobile phones.
I really don't understand those myself, I got him a $50 alibaba handheld that can play any gameboy/sega/snes game he wants and he barely touches it, he just wants to *have* the real things, even broken and battered.
He doesn't care that the cellular phones are too old to work with the cellular network, or that he doesn't have any games for the gameboy, he just likes showing off that he *has* it. This is something youtube culture has really brainwashed our kids with, we have grown men making content for children, and their excitement for nostalgia has looped around onto the zoomer generation.
He and his brother were into Pokemon cards, something that was a little bit popular when I was their age. They care about *having* them, but when I taught them how to *play* it, they lost all interest in it! It took all of their fun out of knowing *why* a card is rare or expensive, that it is because they are useful in a deck. They only cared about *having* them, they sort of role play what youtubers do, to open a pack and get really excited when they find a rare card. They could care less what the fine print says about what makes it rare!
But with computers, he's learned DOS commands to play simcity 2k on his thinkpad and he's learning Mac OS system 6 with his Macintosh SE, I was humored to see his simcity save games stored in random folders, but he's beginning to get the hang of folders and files. Even though these "skills" aren't directly useful, the concepts will certainly give him an advantage if he wants to persue a path in computing or electronics later.
--- ENiGMA 1/2 v0.0.14-beta (linux; x64; 18.18.2)
* Origin: Xibalba -+- xibalba.l33t.codes:44510 (21:1/121)