srj@spam.scs.com (Stephen Jamieson) (11/08/90)
I am posting this for a friend and am by no means an
apple expert.
My friend is looking a getting a PC transporter board for
his enhanced Apple IIe. The machine currently has a Sony
Trinitron, Sider 20M hard drive, floppies and some sort
of ram drive called "Ramworks" or something. He is interested
in any experiences with the product including pricing,
compatibility with existing peripherals, good mail order
vendors, etc.
Some of his immediate questions are:
1. How does it boot ? It seems to have to boot from
a MS-DOS floppy drive so that must be purchased as
well ? Transdrive ?
2. How does it take advantage of the hard drive ? Could
you boot from there or just store programs ?
3. How does it access the Trinitron ? They mention an
adapter board to understand PC analog output or
something. Is this needed ?
4. How well does it run PC applications ? Performance ?
Please mail all responses to me and I'll forward them on via sneakernet.
Thanks in advance.
Stephen Jamieson | (()) | Mentor Graphics
srj@sdl.scs.com | | | Don't have | Silicon Design Division
uunet!sdl!srj | <00> a cow man! | 15 Independence Blvd.
(908) 580-0102 | | >| / | Warren, NJ 07059
| |_C' |
+--------------------+
wogg0743@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (William Shakespeare) (11/09/90)
The PCTransporter (I have one and I love it) does not require that you have a TransDrive (you can boot from the hard drive), BUT you will need a drive capable of reading/writing MS-DOS disks in order to get MS-DOS and any other programs you intend to run onto the hard drive. On a GS, you can just use a 3.5" drive hooked up to the PCTransporter, but since non-GS machines don't usually come with such, you would have to buy it seperately. The PCTransporter will run an 8086 (or 80186) MS-DOS application and reasonably fast (much faster than an IBM XT). The one hitch is the graphics. CGA only. That's the bottom of the line for the IBM, not much better than an old AppleII. Hope this helps, Bill Gulstad