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Trackstar 128 requires a capacitor for Apple Drive Compatibility

M

mojorific

Experienced Member
Joined
Nov 1, 2013
Messages
254
Location
Ontario, Canada
Hello my Tandy friends,

I recently acquired a very good condition Trackstar 128 board with all the manuals and components (which allows you to emulate an Apple II on your Tandy). It's all hooked up in my Tandy 1000 SX, and appears to be working (video passthrough works). However, the kit was missing a 'capacitor' that is to be used on the TEAC floppy drive in order to read apple formatted disks. According to the manual, for the TEAC FD55BV-75-U drive, I need to locate TEST PINS 1-8 on the underside of the floppy drive, and connect the capacitor between TP4 and TP5

Does anyone know what kind of capacitor I need to acquire in order to make the Tandy TEAC drive compatible with the Trackstar 128 and Apple II disks?

The other option is to install an original Apple II drive (it has a connector on the board) to it, and try that. I would prefer not to have to find an Apple II drive it I can help it.

I appreciate any replies. Thanks.

Note: The reason I ask in the Tandy forum is because the Trackstar 128 was designed for Tandy machines.
 
Very interesting...I had not heard about that modification before. I wonder if it would work at all without it?

I would love to have one of those cards for my Tandy collection...though I guess they aren't really a Tandy item specifically as they were made by Diamond. Awesome that you have all the manuals and such. Any chance you could post a PDF of them? Assuming they aren't really long documents that is!

I wouldn't think an Apple II drive would be all that expensive...but I haven't gone shopping lately either. Not sure if you need the 20-pin internal header or a DB19 style connection, but if it's the 20-pin header, I believe you can get a newer drive and an adapter to make a DB19 type drive work...though it may be cheaper just to get the right thing to begin with...

Please let us know how it goes...I've always wanted to try out one of those cards...

Wesley
 
I am also interested how well this card works and how compatible it is with the A2 software...Also how accurate is its display emulation...And what options does it provide for A2 <-> PC data transfer...
 
It doesn't allow for transfer from PC to A2 or vice versa. You can read/write apple disks once it activates however.

There is a disk that you run a STAR.EXE from, and then it activates the card and sends video output to the Tandy display (similar to how a 3dfx card works, it has a pass through video connector on the back).

The application then asks you to insert an Apple 2 disk (such as an apple dos disk), and then it boots the disk.

There is a video of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f1_SMG8Wzg
 
I saw when executing a CATALOG command on that video the floppy drive reads the catalog with a pause (you can see the drive light goes ON, then OFF for a while and again ON). I guess this approach of drive emulation would lead to many incompatibility issues with the existing A2 software. If there is no data sharing between PC & Apple and there is no easy switching of both platforms then this is rather simple card, e.g. just an apple 2e compatible computer in a form of an ISA card that uses PC's power supply and is activated from PC's DOS. How would it work if there is a VGA adapter and VGA monitor used in the PC? I guess it won't...
 
I didn't see that in the video - it looks like a normal Apple catalog. There is a pause while it waits for keypress to continue the catalog so it doesn't scroll past the screen size...
 
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