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CFFA for Apple II

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CFFA FAQ

FAQ

Q: Why?

A: Why Not? Ok, a better answer: To learn how to interface IDE-ATA devices to 8 bit micros. The 65C02 from Western Design Center and many other 8 and 16 bit microcontrollers, by Atmel, Freescale, and others are excellent platforms for embedded projects.

Q: Are you taking orders?

A: No, CFFA run #6 is closed!

Q: How much does the CFFA cost?

A: 1 CFFA and User Manual on CDROM: US$99.95 + Shipping charges. (Does not include a CompactFlash card.)

Shipping to any location in the US is a flat US$5. Shipping to foreign countries varies with country. But is usually between US$18 and US$33

Q: What payments methods will you accept?

A: I will accept:

PayPal

My PayPal ID is: rich@dreher.net. Fastest way to get order processed

Money order

Typically faster than a personal check.

Personal Check

Once your check clears the bank, I will process your order.

Payments can be sent to me at the following address:

R&D Automation
5102 Blazing Star St.
Wausau, WI 54401
USA

All payments must be in US funds.

Q: What kind of return policy and guarantee will you offer?

A: You may return the product undamaged for any reason within 90 days of receiving it. I warranty the product to be free from defects for 1 year. Warranty returns will be either repaired, replaced, or refunded based on my discretion. If you want to return something, please contact me via Email: rich@dreher.net

Q: Can I use a IBM microdrive in place of a CompactFlash memory card with your board?

A: Yes! They have worked fine for me.

Q: How fast is the board. Will it support DMA and Interrupts?

A: Here are are the results of a simple test written in basic. This test was run on my Apple IIe Platinum @ 1Mhz
Write 32k bytes ten times to a file: 28 seconds or 11.4 kBytes/sec
Read 32k ten times from a file: 9 seconds or 35.5 kBytes/sec

No, this project does not use DMA or Interrupts. If you need those features you will have to look elsewhere.

Q: What support does your hardware have for hard drives?

A: The CFFA board has support for IDE hard drives that support ATA mode 1 and LBA.(Logical Block Addressing). That means that many of the early small IDE drives that only supported CHS (Cylinder/Head/Sector) addressing will not be supported. Typically drives that are larger that 528Meg will support LBA. There is also a power connector to supply +5v, +12v, and GND for the IDE drive. It will be up to the user to determine whether or not the drive they want to use will exceed the Apple power supply ratings. Use Caution!

Because other high-speed IDE interface cards exist for the Apple II, I am expecting most people will be using the CompactFlash memory cards with my board. To my knowledge, everyone who has tried using a hard drive has been successful. I have been using my hardware with an IBM 1.6gig 2.5" harddrive model: DDLA-21620 and it has been working fine.

Q: So, what size devices can I use?

A: Depends:
The default firmware selected on the card supports four 32MB drives, for a 128MB total. A second user selectable version of the firmware will support eight 32MB drives for a total of 256MB. The reason for not going with the 8 drive version is that ProDOS 8 only supports 13 total volumes, including the floppies, etc. So if I take up 8 drives, I may cut off access to some other hardware you already have, like a SCSI drive. That is why I will have two versions of firmware that are user selectable. This is all documented in the CFFA user's manual.

Note: If you are going to use Dave Lyons' GS/OS driver you should configure the CFFA to its default firmware that supports 4 drives. When the GS/OS driver loads, if it sees you have jumper-seleteced the 8 drive version of firmware, Dave driver will not load. In that case you will see all eight partitions via the GS/OS's "generated" drivers.

So, using Dave's GS/OS driver with the 4 drive firmware selected, you will have access to the same 4 drives listed above, PLUS two additional drives that are up to 1 GB each. This will only be possible with Dave Lyons' GS/OS driver, which you can download from this site or from Dave's site

Q: If I use a flash memory, won't it wear out after a certain number of write cycles?

A: Very unlikely. Flash based memory does have a finite number of write cycles. So yes, it is possible that after heavy usage, a flash card could become un-writable. I believe most users will never run into this situation unless they are running software that is writing data with a very high frequency. The SanDisk brand flash card has a sector write endurance equal or greater than 300,000 writes. It also features an error detection and correction feature which automatically implements advanced wear leveling. Drivers/firmware no longer have to worry about doing manual wear leveling any more, at least with SanDisk CF products. Sectors that wear out are automatically detected and removed and replaced from the pool of reserve sectors. Under normal usage, it would take thousands of years to produce enough writes to wear out a CF card.

Q: Which model Apple II does this project currently work in?

A: Using 65C02 Version 1.2 or 6502 Version 1.0 of my firmware...

Model Type	Compatibility Comment
Apple IIgs ROM3	Working. No problems with on-board firmare or Dave Lyons' GS/OS driver
Apple IIgs ROM1	Working. No problems with on-board firmare or Dave Lyons' GS/OS driver
Apple IIe Platinum w/ 8Mhz ZipChip	Working. No problems
Apple IIe Platinum	Working. No problems
Apple IIe Enhanced	Working. No problems
Apple IIe	Working. Requires V1.3 EPROM and v1.3 CPLD or later Works with regular 6502. Use ProDOS v1.9 or earlier
Apple II+	Working. Requires V1.3 EPROM and v1.3 CPLD or later Works with regular 6502 or later
Apple II	Vince Briel reports: Yes, it works. He had to take the Applesoft ROMs out of II+. Since ProDOS requires Applesoft

Q: Will it work with ProDOS 8?

A: Yes. I have used it extensively with ProDOS version 2.0.3, without a single problem

Q: Will it work with Apple DOS 3.3?

A: No. This is ProDOS and GS/OS only. But that doesn't mean it could not be made to work by some crafty hacker... but it would be a serious hack.

NOTE: I have been using the late Glen Bredon's DOS.MASTER software and have been able to copy a version of RobotWar on to a DOS 3.3 partition on a ProDOS disk. Check out DOS.MASTER if you want to have DOS 3.3 volumes on ProDOS formatted disks. Very cool.

Q: Can I load up the CompactFlash / Harddrive with all of my old Games and run them from there?

A: Probably not. Most of the old cool games were DOS 3.3 based and had some form of copy protection. So unless it is a ProDOS compatible game, you can probably forget it. But also see "Will it work with Apple DOS 3.3? above"

Q: Will it work with GS/OS?

A:Yes. It has been tested on both a ROM1 IIgs and a ROM3 IIgs. It has been tested with both ProDOS 8 2.x.x and GS/OS. If you use ProDOS 8 you will get four 32MB drives. If you use it with the GS/OS driver, you will get four 32MB drives plus, up to two 1 GB drives. These last two drives have been limited to 1 GB each due to limitations in the HFS file systems' cluster size. At 1 GB, the cluster size is 16384 bytes, therefore a 1 byte file would consume 16384 bytes of disk space.

Q: Will it work in a //c?

A: No. There are no expansion slots in an Apple //c to place my hardware in. It will not work with the SmartPort on the back of the //c. It needs an expansion bus slot, like the Laser 128 had.

Q: Do you need to format the CompactFlash or HardDrive before use?

A: Yes. Once connected to the interface, I have found Apple System Utilities 3.1 or later (I think that was the last one) to be best choice for formatting. When formatting the partitions 3 and 4 in certain slots, you may run into a bug that exists in both Apple System Utilities 3.1 and Copy II+ (all versions I believe). See this post in my forum for more details on working around this problem.

Q: Can I take the CompactFlash out of my Apple II and read it with my Mac?

A: Yes! Using a CF card reader you should be able to mount the CF card on your Mac and access your data. This seems to work on Mac OS9 with the ProDOS Extension. I don't know of any way to directly access the CF card from OSX currently. But please note that the Mac will probably not see the multiple partitions on your device and may treat it as one large partition. So be careful to only write to the first 32 MB from your Mac, or better yet not at all from the Mac.

Q: Can I take the CompactFlash out of my Apple II and read it with my Windows/DOS based PC?

A: YES!!!! Now you can read your CFFA formatted CF cards in your Windows based PC. Andy McFadden has written a Windows program that will let you read, write, backup, and restore CFFA formatted CF cards!. I recently got a chance to test his program and found it did everything he advertised. You can find more information on his site

Q: What about the Apple II+ and the un-enhanced IIe?

A: The Apple ][+ and //e are supported. You must have at least version 1.3 EPROM and 1.3 CPLD or later.

Q: I took the CF card that I was using in my CFFA board and put it back in to my Camera, PDA, Gizmo, etc. and it doesn't work. I can't format it and nothing seems to work with it. Did the CFFA board hurt my CF card?

A: No!!!! The trouble you are having probably is due to the fact the the MBR (master boot record) has been overwritten on the CF card. On the very first sector of any HD in the PC world, resides the MBR. This is where the inital boot code and the main parition table is normally stored. The CFFA card has no use for this information and allows ProDOS or GS/OS to use that space as normal data storage for the file system. When you go back to using your CF card in another device, it may not like the fact that it can't find that MBR information, and refuse to work with that CF card. So you will have to re-write the MBR back to the CF card and then you will be able to re-format the card using your favorite camera, or whatever device has that capability.

How you go about getting the MBR back onto a flash card can be quite tricky. I may not know the easiest way, but I have done it. I used a CF to IDE convert board and hooked up the CF card to a PC as Master drive 0. I REMOVED ALL other Hard drives so that there was NO chance I would blow away the MBR on another drive. I then into booted into MSDOS from a DOS floppy and at the A:> prompt I typed:

fdisk /mbr

This action will cause fdisk to write a new MBR to drive 0 (C:) and quit back to DOS. It will not write the MBR to another drive NO MATTER WHAT OTHER PARAMETERS YOU SPECIFY. So don't think you can say something like FDISK X: /MBR and it will affect the X: drive. IT WILL NOT. It will rewite the C: drives MBR. Potentially causing massive loss of your data.