[P] MECB Z80 Banked Memory CPU Card

[epaell]

Wow, you have been busy!

Thanks for the links - those will be handy if I consider adding more cards to my existing Apple IIs.

Great that you managed to get the Z80 card working - another mystery solved (I do seem to recall that an 80 column card is required for it to run).

Ah, the A2pico card is the one I have as a mouse card ... and it can also function to provide Smartport access via the disk drive adapter on the IIe (which is needed to get Fujinet running on that Apple variant). I seem to recall that my VGA card could also be programmed with alternate firmware to allow it to act as a Z80 card - though I haven't tried that.

Thanks for the offer of blank boards - I don't have any immediate plans for my Apple II's at the moment but may consider looking at getting them connected via Fujinet at some point (though I can test that with the IIc pretty much out of the box first without any modifications).

[djrm]

Hi Emil, Even more off topic comment: I'm trying to use A2pico-lite as a mouse on AppleII+ / Apple IIe and have a problem when running MousePaint. It starts ok, I can run the mouse demo properly, or click to mouse to start Paint, but the mouse pointer never moves away from the top left corner when paint is running. (If I pull the mouse the pointer jumps and that all I ever see) Have you seen anything like this - I have no idea how to try and diagnose the problem. Yours, very frustrated, David.

[epaell]

I'd have to admit that I had never tried MousePaint I mainly got the card to try out with the ESP32 SoftCard. Anyway, I found my card again (and spent ages trying to work out which way around it had to go into the Apple IIe - unlike other cards my one doesn't have an arrow pointing to the keyboard direction). I also found a copy of MousePaint ... after going through a long tutorial on how to use a mouse (sigh) I finally got to the application - it seemed to work fine. BTW something I noticed when I was searching for MousePaint in my archive of Apple II disks was the follow note:

Note: This disk image is not the joystick-modified version posted on the Asimov Archive. This is the original version that can only use mouse input.

Is it possible that you have the "joystick-modified" version and that only works with a joystick?

[epaell]

In case it is helpful I've placed the disk I used over here:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ac0tut85 ... 841t4&dl=0

[djrm]

Thanks Emil, I'll try that image. I have tries all the others I can find. Do you have the A2pico or A2pico-lite?
Did you test the mouse with Basic? I couldnt get that to work either.
I'll be out this morning but will report back later today. David.

[epaell]

Hi David,

The one I have is this one:
https://www.8bitdevices.com/product/a2u ... ple-and-e/

I haven't tried it extensively (basically just with the ESP32 SoftCard) and this morning with MousePaint. If you happen to have an example program I can try run it tomorrow morning (or I can try look something up).

[djrm]

I've had confirmation from the author that there is a flaw in the version I'm using, thanks for the help. Your version behaved just like the ones I had already tried. I found a 64k expansion card for the IIe at the museum today. Also a cable to connect the ieee488 card to the hp multimeter so I'll be trying it this week

[epaell]

Cool, great that you worked out what the problem is.

BTW, I did try it in BASIC this morning (before seeing your post) and it seemed to work using the following:

Code: Select all

10 PRINT CHR$(4) "PR#4"
20 PRINT CHR$(1)
30 PRINT CHR$(4) "PR#0"
40 PRINT CHR$(4) "IN#4"
60 INPUT X, Y, ST
70 PRINT X, Y, ST
90 IF ST = 4 THEN GOTO 60
100 PRINT CHR$(4) "IN#0"
110 END

I had trouble getting the original code I found online to work https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/ ... lesoft.php. For some reason it reported a syntax error in the line with the poke - I'm not sure why.

[djrm]

Not sure if I was clear, its the a2picolite version which has the problem, not the mousepaint.
Thats the basic program I was testing with, the poke worked for me, I looked up the purpose of the poke, it makes all the HGR screen hi res, removing the bottom text part.
I'm going to switch to the a2pico instead of the a2picolite for now, it turn out the lite version is severely limited on i/o because it hasnt got the multiplexing which the buffer chips provide, i.e. cant use the sd card. The a2picolite will hopefully be fine for a rom only application like the bios update.

[djrm]

I have a new version of Mouse firmware for the A2Pico2Lite and it now works as expected in both Basic and MousePaint.