Re: Adept: Discwasher calling-four

TomCh wrote:
Hi,

Anyone know what a "Discwasher calling-four" is?
From Adept's option screen, press Ctrl-C and it'll display a message
about what slot you have it installed in.

A Google search turns up this excerpt from the NY Times archives:

================

October 11, 1983
PERSONAL COMPUTERS; SPLITTING THE APPLE, FOUR WAYS
By ERIK SANDBERG-DIMENT

....

Now along comes a game port expander, from Discwasher. It is an add-on board that fits into one of the expansion slots within the Apple, and to it, in turn, you can connect up to four controlling devices; for example, a joy stick, a trackball, a touch tablet and a paddle or, when software becomes available for it, one of those electronic rodents called a mouse.

That is a lot of connecting, but once it is done, it is done forever. There is no more unplugging the computer, popping off the cover, disconnecting one peripheral and connecting another every time you want to switch. Instead, you insert Discwasher's Calling Four card into slot number seven of the Apple's main board, which is no problem at all if your Apple is accompanied by its manual. A connector from the expansion card then plugs into the spot where the joy stick, say, would normally plug into the computer, and the joy stick plug goes into the new card, along with those of any three other controllers you might want to use.

The Calling Four card has a little four-light indicator which, if you slip its cable through the back of the computer, can be fastened just about anywhere on the console or display monitor by means of an attached double- sided tape. The four red lights, labeled zero through three in computer fashion, indicate which controlling device is active.

To switch from one controller to another, all you need to do, or so I thought, is to type in a single command. True, only a single command is involved, but there are preliminaries to be attended to, and here the manual accompanying Calling Four begins to let the novice down. Before you can give the command to switch controllers, you have to load a disk that comes with the Apple and contains both the operating system DOS 3.3 and the computer language Basic. THEN, too, under the heading ''Applications Software,'' the manual tells us that while number seven is the preferred slot for installing the Calling Four card, any slot can be used if necessary. The manual then goes on to list the appropriate command for each slot number. For someone who merely wants to slip a disk into the drive and run a program, however, being told to enter a computerese command like ''POKE -16144,3 CR'' may be confusing. Being greeted - as he will be - with that ubiquitous and annoying response from the computer, ''syntax error,'' is needlessly frustrating.

A ''poke'' statement allows you to put a specific value into one of the Apple's 65,536 memory locations. In the case of the command ''POKE -16144(3) CR,'' you are entering the value three, representing the last of your four controller attachments, into location 16,144. If you do not use the ''poke'' statement, the value in this memory location will remain zero, meaning that the first of your four controllers will be the active one.

....

================

-michael

NadaNet file server for Apple II computers!
Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
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