That’s right – we are emulating the Apple ][ computer, running the ancient weather program, and “printing” tables of old weather data to text files on the lab iMac. Here’s what we did:
Setting up the connection
The Apple ][ serial card cable has a 25 pin female end. We hooked that up to a 25 pin male adapter, which we hooked up to a 9 pin male adapter, which connected to a 9 pin female null modem cable, which in turn we were finally able to hook up to our Keyspan 9 pin male serial port/USB adapter (plugged into the Mac USB port). We then booted the Apple ][ and started up ADTPro (version 1.1.9) on the Mac and were ready to go.
Sending ProDOS and ADTPro to the Apple
After starting up the Apple ][, we hit “control+reset” to get to the command prompt. On the Mac end, we selected the “Serial” option in the ADTPro window, kept the default highest baud port settings when prompted, then under the “Bootstrapping” menu we selected “ProDOS” and “Send ProDOS”. We were then prompted (on the Mac screen) to type the following into the Apple command line: IN#2, return, then command and A, and 14B, return. We could then click “OK” in the ADTPro dialogue box on the Mac, and the ProDOS kernel started streaming to the Apple. When this was done, we could do the same thing for the ADTPro program (“Bootstrapping”>”ProDOS”>”Send ADTPro Serial Client”). The steps were the same for this data transfer, and afterwards we had the ADTPro program installed on the Apple ][ atop the ProDOS kernel. We made a copy of the program on a 5.25″ floppy so that we can reload it whenever we need to – we typed “F” on the Apple to format a blank disk, “R” for receive and “ADTPro-1.1.9.DSK” in the filename prompt, then pressed return and selected our formatted disk as the transfer destination.
Getting weather files on the Mac
Back on the ADTPro main screen on the Apple, we typed “S” for send. When prompted we provided a filename with a .DSK extension and pressed return. We inserted the disk we wanted to copy into one of the disk drives and scanned the drives. We selected the disk we wanted to send to the Mac, and the data from the disk was transferred to the Mac as a .DSK file. Once we had a weather data file and the weather utility program on the Mac as .DSKs, we ran the Virtual ii Apple ][ emulator and inserted the weather utility disk file into the virtual drive. The program then ran on the virtual Apple ][ as it would on the real one. Now in Virtual ii we clicked on the “setup” icon and under “Apple][+” clicked “Slot Connections”, then “Grappler+card”, and then deselected the Epson printer and instead set the connection to “Text printer”. After this, we could choose to print a weather table with the weather utility program, select a monthly data disk as we would on the Apple ][, and the data is printed to a beautiful tab-delimited text file on the desktop rather than to a pdf from the virtual Epson. We also selected “Maximum speed” in the Machine menu so that printing out a month’s worth of data to a text file only takes perhaps 30 seconds. Very cool!
This is absolutely the neatest thing ever. Tomorrow I’ll bring in a camera and take some pictures of our setup to post here.
-Katherine