Date: Monday, 3 June 1985
From: Rick Thomas
Re:   Wordstar/Appli-Card offer query

The time has come for me to summarize what I have learned about the
PCPI Applicard for all you folks out there who have helped me in my
search for information.

First -- The manuals that come with the Starcard (The name for the
Applicard when it is bundled with Wordstar.)  are full of typos and
not exceedingly detailed.  If you can read around the typos, they are
reasonably good cook-books for getting CPM and Wordstar up and
running, but they will not make a CPM hacker out of you.  I have not
heard that PCPI's own manuals are any better.  All is not completely
lost though, because there is a friendly person at the end of a PCPI
technical hot-line who can send you xerox copies of various napkins
(and such) on on which the software/hardware developers have scribbled
down the real poop.  In addition, there is an 'OEM Package' that PCPI
will sell you for 50 bucks which consists of a double-sided disk full
of software and about 35 pages of badly xeroxed notes.  The above
mentioned napkins are in addition to these notes, and necessary for a
real understanding of what is going on.  If you have looked at all of
the above and are still curious about what is going on, you can offer
to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and they may consent to send you
the source code for the various drivers.  Then again, they may not.  I
haven't gotten my copy of the non-disclosure agreement yet, so I don't
know how stringent it is, or what happens after you sign it and send
it back to them.

Second -- It runs CPM2.2 just great.  I have Turbo Pascal for CPM/80
running on it and am much impressed with the speed and convenience of
the package.  The 6MHZ Z80B processor is *FAST*.  On the other hand,
since the Z80 and the 6502 do not share any memory, (The Z80 has its
own 64K of fast DRAM.  You can buy a piggy-back card that will expand
it to about a half-Meg) the communication between the two cpu's is
restricted to a single one-byte-wide I/O port and a couple of flag
bits.  Even with a dedicated server running on the 6502, this means
that the Z80 can't write on the Apple's 80col screen at higher than a
few hundred characters/second.  (Disk accesses are significantly
faster, because they use block-mode transfers in which the Z80 tells
the 6502 how many characters to expect then sends them all in a burst.
Character devices like the 80col screen are restricted to a single
byte at a time, so the overhead is much higher.)  Since the
nitty-gritty I/O is all handled by the 6502 side, the BIOS on the Z80
side can afford to be very small.  This leads to a remarkably large
57K Transient Program Area.  You can run larger programs on it than
you can on the Microsoft card. (Further comments on differences
between this card and the Microsoft card later.)

Third -- The terminal emulator that runs on the 6502 side and
manipulates the Apple 80col screen is excessively dumb.  It seems to
lack character/line insert/delete sequences.  If anybody knows
differently, please speak up.  It hurts to watch the screen get
repainted just to insert a line at the top.  I sincerely hope that
this is just a misfeature of the Turbo Pascal editor, which I
otherwise like very much.

Fourth -- it is *not* compatible with the Microsoft CPM card.  It will
not run anything that assumes hardware features of that card.
However, it *will* run just about any generic CPM program, of which
there are a multitude!  The price you pay for the blazingly fast CPU
is incompatibility with the 'standard' Microsoft card.  The worst part
of this is that it will not run the drivers that give you access to
the Profile hard disk from CPM.  (Does anybody know if the Sider has a
driver that runs on the Applicard?)  The person on the hot-line hinted
that PCPI would sell you a driver written by someone in Australia that
gave the Applicard access to a Profile, but he didn't make it sound
like it was compatible with much.  In particular, I think he said that
if you used that driver, you couldn't use your Profile with Prodos.
He didn't know for sure, but I expect that there is no provision for
partitioning the disk.  I asked about software from third-party
sources, but (while he said they did keep a registry of such) he
couldn't point me at anybody who could help me with my specific
problems.  Which brings me to --

Fifth -- They supply a driver that runs under DOS3.3 and turns the
Applicard into a ramdisk, with up to a half meg of memory if you buy
the piggyback cards (300 bucks for 256K -- a trifle expensive for
today's market -- maybe mailorder places have them cheaper.)  However,
they do not supply a corresponding driver for Prodos.  I assume that
the Prodos driver would be a snap, given the code for the DOS3.3
driver, but nobody at PCPI has seen fit to do it yet.  Sounds like a
market for a 3rd party in there somewhere!  I have used the DOS3.3
driver, it works very well.

Sixth and finally -- They supply a printer driver that uses the
left-over 6502-side ram (including the Alternate bank on the 80-column
card, if one exists) as a printer buffer (up to 80K in my
configuration, IIe with extended 80 Column color card.)  But it seems
to me that a much better use for that memory would be as a ramdisk for
CPM (with maybe a 16K buffer reserved for the printer driver.)  The
tech-support hot-line person did not know of any such driver -- sounds
like another 3rd party opportunity!


> 
> I recently received an advertisement from Broadreach
> for Wordstar and the Appli-Card CP/M card for $164.95.

This is a very good price!
 
> It lists features of the Appli-Card, but doesn't specify
> whether all the software and manuals necessary to use
> the features are included in the package.

If this is the Micropro Starcard package, they are included, but see
above.  The manuals are not very detailed.

> If anyone has experience with the Appli-Card, or this offer,
> please send me your opinion.
> 
> In particular, does the 6Mhz Appli-card run all CP/M software?
> Are preboots needed?

Runs everything I have come across, but I have not experimented
widely.  Also, see above regarding Microsoft compatibility.

> Is the manual sufficient to learn CP/M?

No.  Go buy a good book.  Don't count on the manuals.

> Are there needed utilities that are not included with Appli-Card?

Everything you need to configure it and get CPM up and running is
included.  There is the DRI assembler and editor and DDT (and PIP and
stat, and so on) but no 'higher level' languages.  I recommend buying
Turbo Pascal.

> The ad says the 64K ram on the card can be used as
> RAM/Disk for DOS3.3.  Has anyone used the Applicard in
> this way?

Yes, see above.

> 
> Thanks,
> 
> 	David Lazar
> 	ihuxk!dcl55611


Rick Thomas
{ihnp4,akgua,sdcsvax,just about anywhere}!attunix!rbt
(201)-522-6062
