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Apple II Workstation Card (ie AppleTalk) dongle / connectors
Posted by: micheledipaola on 2022-09-11 02:59:56
Hi,

I am looking for information about the external dongle sold with the Apple II Workstation Card.

The card, actually working only on enhanced IIe with 128k+ , was a late addition to the Apple II family to add a LocalTalk port and a printer port, both with round miniDIN connectors, to Apple IIe computers. The manuals and software are preserved, and they show how the card is adding AppleTalk and AppleShare capabilities to the Apple II family.

The miniDIN connectors are enclosed in an external box (see pic) :

306271343_10229418111261914_2733056707913414706_n.jpg

and the box is then connected to two separate connectors on the card's end.

I found pictures of a case-less dongle too:

apple-ii-workstation-card-iie-network_1_8ee7e0bbed335d9d2a9bc9f322e1e451.jpg


But I am not able to find more detailed information, schematics etc about these dongles.

As it often happens, these cards resurface here and there, but always without the connectors' dongles, so I wonder if and how difficult it could be to re-create them.
Has anybody tried something similar already, or could you maybe provide more information about the pinout / board and how to build one from scratch?

Thanks in advance!
Posted by: cheesestraws on 2022-09-11 04:13:01
Can you attach a picture of the card itself?
Posted by: Phipli on 2022-09-11 04:47:06
The sockets look purely to be a breakout. The card will be interesting. Guessing it will be a reasonably simple board with a Z8530 sat in the middle 🙂
Posted by: Phipli on 2022-09-11 04:48:25
FFS Apple

@cheesestraws

downloads.reactivemicro.com

Downloads

downloads.reactivemicro.com
Posted by: Phipli on 2022-09-11 04:51:12
That is a whole computer, a 3MHz (!) CMOS 6502 two 8k RAM chips, a ROM, a Zilog SCC, bit of glu... and a /thing/. Custom chip of some kind.

That last thing is the difficulty.

So what else did this card do?

Edit : added manual
Posted by: micheledipaola on 2022-09-11 05:26:43
@Phipli I found a ROM dump here:
mirrors.apple2.org.za

Apple II software mirrors

A collection of past and current Apple II FTP sites. ftp.apple.asimov.net is synced daily.
mirrors.apple2.org.za mirrors.apple2.org.za
Posted by: micheledipaola on 2022-09-11 05:29:21
Can you attach a picture of the card itself?
@cheesestraws the most complete source of infos I found on it is here:
mirrors.apple2.org.za

Apple II software mirrors

A collection of past and current Apple II FTP sites. ftp.apple.asimov.net is synced daily.
mirrors.apple2.org.za mirrors.apple2.org.za
Posted by: cheesestraws on 2022-09-11 09:15:41
That board looks like it has the relevant drivers and filtering on the board itself so agreed, the breakout is probably just the connectors
Posted by: NJRoadfan on 2022-09-11 09:23:03
A good first attempt would be to wire the pins 1-to-1, so header pin 1 goes to DIN-8 pin 1. There shouldn't be any pins carrying power, just standard RS-422 serial signals.
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