The Emu behaves exactly like a real disk drive, requiring no special software or drivers, but is totally silent. It uses a micro-SD memory card and custom hardware to mimic an Apple floppy disk and drive. Floppy Emu is a floppy and hard disk emulator for classic Apple II, Macintosh, and Lisa computers. To address the disk drive problem I purchased a “Floppy Emu” from Big Mess o’ Wires. Listen to my Apple IIe disk booting: youtu.be/… I have included a link in the show notes to demonstrate that awful sound. They had a death rattle when they were new and they still sound like they might fail at any moment, given the chance. My main concern was the old Apple II Disk Drive which always sounded terrible when booting the computer. I could develop a workflow and test most of the components I had accumulated to determine what was useful and what needed to be rebuilt. Unfortunately non of the 5 included power supplies worked.Įventually I found old colleague who still had an operational Apple IIe and that made all the difference.
I was next offered a few big boxes full of Apple II Europlus mother boards, cases, power supplies, disk drives, peripheral cards and books. The first Apple IIe I found booted but the power supply smoked and failed after 30 seconds. I felt confident that I could develop a workflow solution if I could find a functioning Apple II computer to work at my own pace at home. Unfortunately I consigned my collection of “old” computers to the tip when I moved house in 2001. I had actually migrated data from Apple II disks to PC disks for the Library in 1995, but this project would be a bit different. Thirty years ago I had built a fully loaded Apple IIe computer system and together with my early Macintosh computer could migrate data from the Apple IIe to a Mac or IBM personal computer.
I have included a link to this article and others in the show notes: /…Īfter helping them with software donations, the NLA Digital Preservation Unit asked if I could provide advice on how to create disk images on Apple II computers and transfer them to a modern computer. As secretary of the ACT Apple User Group I contacted them to see if our members could assist in this and other projects. The NLA Digital Preservation Unit published an article in June 2015 called Trash to treasure: Retro computer, software collection helps National Library access digital pieces. Collections of papers and disks are sometimes donated to the National Library of Australia (NLA) and it is the responsibility of the NLA Digital Preservation Unit to try to make the data on the disks accessible to others. The problem to be solved is how to transfer that historical data from those disks so that it can to be accessed now and in the future. The data saved to those big, old 5.25” floppy disks now languish in desk draws or storage boxes along with research papers and manuscripts. Usually listener contributions are about the latest software or hardware, however my experience is in part a journey back in time and addresses an archivists’ ongoing dilemma.īack in the 1980s and 1990s Apple II computers were in widespread use in schools, homes and by professionals around Australia. In the previous version the application crashed.Hello Allison and NosillaCastaways, Trevor from Canberra with something a little different.
Making a screen movie in macOS 10.11 and 10.12 now works as it should the application no longer crashes.