An Apple IIe in a Lisa?

[jamesdenton]

Imagine for a second the Mac didn't exist, the GUI never took off, and Apple doubled down on the Apple //e. Could our Lisa's have had their life extended the other direction?



Or maybe those landfill Lisa's get their day next to LCs in the classroom?



Who needs LOS when you have AppleWorks?

[stepleton]

Ha. I'm inclined to believe that it's real. What does it do with floppies? What environment is the Lisa-side UX running under?

For a high score: some versions of the Lisa Monitor spoke to an Apple II over the serial port. Set up the Lisa so that an emulated AII speaks to another Lisa running the Monitor.

[jamesdenton]

Yes, it's very real!

This is a homebrew project consisting of an Apple IIe on a Lisa expansion card, with a 6509 and some SRAM, Apple IIe ROM and character ROM. There's 3 different software 'entries'.

The first is via the Startup From menu - from there you can launch the IIe and it takes over the screen. The IIe can interface with the Lisa hardware (serial, kb, etc). There's an alternate startup into the config settings. Those can also be invoked within the running Apple.

The other two methods are via a Mac app and a LOS app, but these are still being worked on. These would essentially access the IIe from within a window and take advantage of their respective OSes capabilities (ie. Copy/paste)

Floppy disks are stored as images on an SD card. This includes 140k and 800k disks, and profiles.

The inspiration here was the IIe card for the LC. I don't have any Apple II's or any desire to have one, really, but the IIe card has always intrigued me.

Today was the first hardware test; pretty stoked that it worked without much trouble. More details upon request.

[jamesdenton]

Ha. I'm inclined to believe that it's real. What does it do with floppies? What environment is the Lisa-side UX running under?

The screenshots show a LOS-like interface but it's all hand drawn. The overlay within the IIe app is similar.

[stepleton]

I was curious as we see the classic Office System menus-and-dialogs font. I assume that this is resident in ROM.

Any interest in driving the real floppy drive or a real ProFile?

[jamesdenton]

I was curious as we see the classic Office System menus-and-dialogs font. I assume that this is resident in ROM.

Any interest in driving the real floppy drive or a real ProFile?

It is resident in the card's own firmware, not the Lisa ROM. There are some inefficient drawing routines doing some heavy lifting.

I hadn't really considered "real drives", given folks are probably more likely to use something like a FloppyEMU or ESFloppy, now. So the built-in SD card is sort of a nod to that. I could probably drive the Lisa's floppy drive, but am not aware of any 400K Apple II drives. I don't think a real Profile would be too difficult, but that would have to travel the bus.

I do have some planned integrations with other cards I'm working on, but not sure how those will work out, yet

[ried]

I love stuff like this.

[bmwcyclist]

Wow nice!

[jamesdenton]

For a high score: some versions of the Lisa Monitor spoke to an Apple II over the serial port. Set up the Lisa so that an emulated AII speaks to another Lisa running the Monitor.

So, I've been digging into this a bit more and it looks like the interface between the Lisa and the Apple was via a PIA on an expansion card. This was likely mentioned already in a thread here. In fact, I think that @compu_85's card here at https://lisalist2.com/index.php/topic,97.0.html is the LISA side of that connection. The Monitor documentation implies that there's an equivalent Apple card on the other end.

Now, this has been quite the rabbit hole and might be someone's life goal to resurrect, so I don't want to ruin anything. Based on what's been posted here already though, and some tidbits in various docs, the process likely looked something like this:

~1980-1982 - Lisa boots via Apple II using the PIA connection. The early Lisa ROMs enable boot from Apple.
Mid 1982 - Monitor 10.x ships with both Twiggy and Apple boot media
Late 1982 - 1983 - Monitor 11.x drops the Apple boot media (maybe)

I think Corvus disks and early Profile (Pippin) disks were able to attach to the Lisa using this card or something like it before transitioning to the common parallel port(s) the Lisa shipped with. So, they could be used for data but not for booting.

The Monitor documentation mentions 'male' and 'female' throughout. As DFinni alluded to previously, this refers to the byte order: male (Apple II) being little endian and female (Lisa) being big endian. Each volume holds a single directory, and that directory would be male or female based on the byte order.

This is all to say that from the looks of it, the Apple could host data on its own floppies or connected hard disks that, when marked as "female", could be presented to the Lisa via Monitor and treated as a "remote volume", so to speak, over the PIA connection. The Apple itself wouldn't be able to read the files, but served it up nonetheless. The opposite goes for the Lisa, too.

Anyway...

Set up the Lisa so that an emulated AII speaks to another Lisa running the Monitor.

I definitely think this is possible, but without the actual PIA card there would need to be some modifications to make Monitor use a normal Parallel port instead. Same for the Apple side. I think it could be done, though. I'm happy to try if there's any interest.

As for booting the Lisa from the Apple -- that would need the ROM recompiled. It mentions '.IF AAPL = 1 ... "APPLE MONITOR CODE - ENABLES COMMUNICATION VIA APPLE ][").' but I'm not sure if everything is there to make it go.

[TorZidan]

I think Corvus disks and early Profile (Pippin) disks were able to attach to the Lisa using this card or something like it before transitioning to the common parallel port(s) the Lisa shipped with. So, they could be used for data but not for booting

James, I guess the title "corvus hard drive conrtroler" at https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/X2436.2002D/ confused you.  The title is wrong. This is not a Corvus card. This is exactly the "umbilical cord" that was used on the Lisa to boot from an Apple II (you call it the PIA card). And yes, we can see another version of it at https://lisalist2.com/index.php/topic,97.0.html .

The Corvus card is at https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102719928/?media=119767 (lower port is for Corvus hard drives, upper port is for ProFile (also known as Pippin in the early Lisa days).

Note that they could also attach a Corvus to the Apple II (using a different card commonly found on ebay), and boot from that Corvus via the "umbilical cord".

The video at https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102792814/ has more info.

Male/female are code names  of two floppy disks used on the apple II (one in each floppy drive) that were used to boot the system. See page 6 at https://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/lisa/pascal_monitor/Lisa_Development_System_Manual_Mar85.pdf

[jamesdenton]

James, I guess the title "corvus hard drive conrtroler" at https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/X2436.2002D/ confused you.  The title is wrong. This is not a Corvus card. This is exactly the "umbilical cord" that was used on the Lisa to boot from an Apple II (you call it the PIA card). And yes, we can see another version of it at https://lisalist2.com/index.php/topic,97.0.html .

The Corvus card is at https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102719928/?media=119767 (lower port is for Corvus hard drives, upper port is for ProFile (also known as Pippin in the early Lisa days).

Note that they could also attach a Corvus to the Apple II (using a different card commonly found on ebay), and boot from that Corvus via the "umbilical cord".

The video at https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102792814/ has more info.

Ivan - Thanks for the corrected link. I'd had both but had the wrong one on the clipboard. I corrected the post.

Male/female are code names  of two floppy disks used on the apple II (one in each floppy drive) that were used to boot the system. See page 6 at https://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/lisa/pascal_monitor/Lisa_Development_System_Manual_Mar85.pdf

And thanks for the video! Can't remember if I've seen that or not. And yeah, those were the docs I was referring to, just putting the summary here to close the loop.

[stepleton]

Male/female are code names  of two floppy disks used on the apple II (one in each floppy drive) that were used to boot the system. See page 6 at https://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/lisa/pascal_monitor/Lisa_Development_System_Manual_Mar85.pdf

I don't think the two interpretations (gender == disks in a pair) and (gender == endianity) are in conflict. If the Apple II is essentially behaving as a fileserver, it might make sense for one of the disks to be little-endian to boot the Apple while the other big-endian disk is serving files to the Lisa.

Note also references in that bitsavers-linked doc to "male byte sex machines" (PDF p.35; words I never expected to write on LisaList2) and the binary-gendered explanation of Lisa vs. Apple II on PDF page 55.

So, I've been digging into this a bit more

Meanwhile, thanks for this most informative investigation! I had thought that the link was over the serial port; my mistake!

[TorZidan]

My understanding is that in the early Lisa development days the ProFile, Corvus and Twiggy peripherals were not yet available, so software developers were working on LOS 1.0 on a stripped-down Lisa, in Monitor, by booting into Monitor from the Apple II somehow. So can anyone explain how the Lisa could boot into Monitor from the Apple II, given that the Lisa-to-apple-II expansion card has no ROM? Does the Lisa ROM have any code to facilitate this? Maybe they used a custom ROM?

And does anyone have a backup of these Apple II male & female floppy disks?

[jamesdenton]

So can anyone explain how the Lisa could boot into Monitor from the Apple II, given that the Lisa-to-apple-II expansion card has no ROM? Does the Lisa ROM have any code to facilitate this? Maybe they used a custom ROM?

Best I can tell, it was built into the Lisa ROM itself, not the expansion card. APPLE-A on the Lisa would put it in a state waiting for the Apple to load Monitor into its memory and go.

There's reference to an Apple II disk named 'REL10BT' that contains the Apple-side app(s), but I can't find it.

[sigma7]

booting into Monitor from the Apple II somehow. So can anyone explain how the Lisa could boot into Monitor from the Apple II, given that the Lisa-to-apple-II expansion card has no ROM? Does the Lisa ROM have any code to facilitate this?

I don't believe the common CPU ROMs have support for something like that, dunno about early ones.

IIRC, disassembling the EPROM from a Lisa test card revealed that it loaded code into Lisa RAM through a parallel port and executed it. For some reason, I had thought it loaded from an Apple ///, but could just as well have been an Apple ][.