Creating a CompactFlash card for use with an Apple II

There are some third-party expansion cards which are made to install into
Apple II computers and which are capable of reading CompactFlash cards,
allowing you to effectively create a single large disk for use with an Apple
II computer. One good card for this purpose is the CFFA, which has a homepage
at http://dreher.net/CFforAppleII/. Another is the MicroDrive IDE Controller,
available from www.reactivemicro.com.

In order to be able to use a CompactFlash card with an Apple II, you must
first copy files to it and format it as an Apple II-compatible disk volume. A
good freeware, open-source utility for working with Apple II disk images in
Windows is CiderPress 3.0.0, which can be downloaded from www.faddensoft.com.

Once CiderPress is running, and you have a disk image (such as a .PO or .2MG
file) which you want to copy to the CompactFlash card, you can perform the
following steps to prepare the card:

1. Insert your CompactFlash card into your PC. Make sure it's accessible as a
drive letter in Windows.

2. Run CiderPress.

3. From the Tools menu, choose "Volume copier (open volume)".

4. Click on the drive letter of the CompactFlash card, and un-check "Open as
read-only". Click OK.

5. Click on the volume name, and click "Load from file".

6. Find and choose the image file you wish to load onto the CompactFlash
card.

Once this has been done and the image has been copied, the card is ready. You
can unplug it from your PC, plug it into the Apple II card, and boot the
Apple II.

Note that if you are using an Apple IIgs, you may get a $0201 error. This
error signifies that the computer is out of memory. If you are getting this
error while booting a standard Apple IIgs floppy disk, you probably have an
original Apple IIgs with only 256KB of RAM. You will need to get the memory
expansion card for the Apple IIgs--which allows you to add up to 1MB of
additional RAM--to be able to boot most typical Apple IIgs disk images, which
are 800KB. This memory expansion card appears to have two different Apple
part numbers, which are printed in different places on each card: 820-0166-B
is one, and 670-0025-A is the other. There are also notable third-party RAM
expansions for the IIgs, including a 4MB expansion card which uses regular
SIMMs which is made by Briel Computers, who have a homepage at
www.brielcomputers.com. For the ultimate in IIgs RAM, there is an 8MB
expansion card (which is the highest amount of RAM the IIgs hardware will
support) made by Sirius, which can be purchased at the shop at
www.16sector.com.

To determine how much RAM is installed in your Apple IIgs, go to the built-in
control panel by pressing Control-OpenApple-Esc, choose "Control Panel", and
choose "RAM Disk". Once there, you should see an entry called "Largest
Selectable", which is the largest size of a RAM disk you can currently
configure. Add 256K to that figure, and the result is how much RAM you have
installed. (The reason you need to add 256K is because the IIgs reserves that
much for non-RAMdisk usage.) If the "Largest Selectable" entry currently
reads 0K, then you have an original Apple IIgs with only 256K of RAM.