Subject: Re: Help needed for Frankiln 2200 From: Rubywand Date: Fri, Dec 4, 1998 22Ç8 Message-id: <3668BFC6.B288C670@swbell.net> Dave Warren writes ... > > I was given a Franklin 2200 computer today but no manuals and have > a few questions. Any help would be appreciated. > > What are the settings for the option switches on back? > What is the 9 pin connector at number 6 for? > Does anyone have a manual or photocopy for this machine for sale? The Franklin Ace 2200 looks like a pretty spiffy machine. (There's a picture on Doug Coward's 'museum' page at ... http://www.best.com/~dcoward/museum/mfrankli.htm#face2200 ) Below are some snips from Csa2 posts about the computer. I've included email addresses because these posters seem to be pretty knowledgeable about the '2200. One may even know where you can get a manual. >> From: CreatSltn (creatsltn@aol.com) Sir, The Franklin 2000 series were Franklin's 1985-86 clones of the enhanced Apple IIe. The 2000 had no drives installed, the 2100 had one 5.25 half-height drive installed, and the 2200 had 2 installed. They had 128K RAM, 2 expansions slots, built-in parallel printer port, external IBM style keyboard, heavy duty power supply, and cooling fan. They were about 95% compatible and were quite attractive machines. Franklin also made a Franklin 500 about the same time that looks like a spiffy black IIc. Franklin no longer has anything to do with computers since they are now into the handheld spell checkers/translators/etc. As far as I know, we are the only ones on the planet that still provide any support for them. Thanks, Gene For Your Info: I am a certified Apple Technician in Beavercreek, Ohio, who has been serving the Apple Community worldwide since 1986. Our company, Creative Solutions, handles new and used hardware, software, and repairs for Macintosh, Apple II, Laser, and Franklin computers. We have a one year warranty on all our hardware and our repairs. References are available upon request. Please email me at CreatSltn@aol.com or phone (937) 429-5759 M-F 9-5 Eastern or FAX (937) 429-2123. Please drop by our Web site at http://members.aol.com/CreatSltn for a visit. ----- From: Steve Craft (scraft@bigpapa.nothinbut.net) The Ace 2200 is somewhere between a IIe and a IIc and a PC. Franklin always gave a little bit "more" for the dollar. :) There are read and write lights on the floppy drive. You'd be amazed at what games were actually writing data to the hard drive (what we'd call a pagefile/Vm these days?) when you thought it was supposed to be loading something... The double-hires light flipped on whenever aux memory was "locked on", so sometimes in Wings of Fury the ligth would be on although the game itself was hires only. The CPU light was cool, we need more of those, I think only the BeBox has one now. OK, on to something useful. The base 2200 (I read about 2000s and 2100s but never saw one) has 128k of RAM. You have to get some kind of special RAM chip (I never figured out what the chip spec was) to increase the memory to 640k, I think it emulated all "slot0" memory so you could use it in AppleWorks or ProTERM, but not as a RAM disk like RAM5- type memory expander cards. There are DIP switches inside for what you want to set in terms of the internal slots. One was 2/7 and the other was 4/5 or something like that. So it's like a IIe or Laser 128 series in that respect, but the ports on the back are identical to the "standards of the day", ie Superserial and Epson APL. The CPU was a 65sC02a, not quite the rock-hard 65c02(a?) you'd get in a IIe or IIc, and this made some games incompatible. I mean things like crash unpn bootup, so you'd know immediately what worked and what did not. :) Then again, it might have been the other parts that were looking for "II trueness" that was crashing. Cracked programs with the Tom-e-Hawk Boot never worked on the 2200. The speaker sounded better than the IIe/c, and the text chars looked better. But games like Star Fleet I were weird in text mode, since instead of torpedoes being represented by apples, they were represented by "F"s, whch *really* didn't look like torpedoes. :) That reminds me of something else. There is a switch in the back for MouseText or standard characters. In this day and age, keep it on MouseText, it affect something elsebesides text, and you want it on always. ---------- From: Richard Pirong (rpirong@aztec.asu.edu) It's a very nice //e and/or //c compatible. has features of both. Some slots and some ports. one of the slots is fixed as slot 2. the other can be either slot 4 or slot 7, depending on the position a jumper. On the right side of the case, is access to slot 5 which was intended for an expansion box that was never put on the market. I used slot 7 for the hard drive and slot 2 for a 3.5" drive card. Tell me if there is/are any daughterboards plugged onto the MB. A small one (by the power supply) would be memory expansion. A slightly larger one (right side) would be the RGB color board which drives either the Apple monitor or a CGA monitor. Loved the keyboard. Although those function keys weren't very useful. Nobody ever wrote software to access them. The ALT key wasn't too useful either. Version 5 of Franklins own DOS is DOS3.3 compatible and can program the function keys. I never needed it because Dos 3.3 and ProDOS (all versions) work just fine. Software compatibility is excellent especially if it has the last ROM version. (level 6) .... I'd like to add a few details of the ACE2000 series. After many years of good service, my 2200 was just retired in favor of a //gs. It is an excellent //e - //c workalike. It has some ports like a //c and some slots like a //e. came with RGB color and 512k ram on the motherboard. In spite of rumors to the contrary, it is VERY software compatible. It does run all versions of ProDOS. (ver 1.0.1 thru to P8 v2.0.3). Some early rom versions had application compatibility problems but not the last ones (level 6). If things had worked out a little differently, they could have created one hell of a //gs clone. Instead of duplicating Apples, they had begun improving them. << Rubywand