The Apple II SprintDisk RAM Card 

September 7, 1999
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The SprintDisk card is a 1 MB regular slot RAM card,  made by AST Research Inc.
and it's compatible with Apple's memory card. It's a unique and fairly rare
Apple II RAM card that's fixed some of the problems that the Apple card has.

The SprintDisk card also has a connector for adding a piggy-back card to expand
the memory to 2 MB.

It's auto recognized and can be used by such applications as AppleWorks v1.3 and
up. The SprintDisk card is also auto recognized as a RAM disk. It will also auto
format itself for ProDOS or Pascal v1.3 when you boot into one of those
operating systems.  Under DOS 3.3 you must set up the SprintDisk card manually
It permits up to two 400k DOS 3.3 volumes, dependent on how much memory is
installed on the SprintDisk card.

A unique feature of the SprintDisk card allows a program such as AppleWorks to
access the SprintDisk card memory and uses it to expand the desktop size it has
available and you can still use the SprintDisk card as a RAM disk also. However,
the desktop size will decrease as you add files to the RAM disk.

If you don't need the extra memory or a RAM disk, you can also use the memory as
a disk cache under ProDOS.  It can automatically cache up to 14 drives of any
size so that subsequent reads will be read from RAM instead of from disk.  This
speeds up disk reads.  Writes are sent directly to the disk.

The software included with the SprintDisk card will also allow you to have more
than one of these cards installed so you can use one for disk cacheing and the
other for RAM expansion and RAM disk needs.

Having the pinout of the piggy back connector so the cards user could expand the
card would be nice. If anybody has such info, please forward it on to me, for
inclusion with this information for the SprintDisk RAM card. Although long out
of commercial production, if somebody could be motivated to develop this card
for commercial production again, it would be a great RAM card to have for use
with the Apple II models. Also, a GS/OS cache driver written for it would be a
nice thing to have.

That's All Folk's !

MacProber
GS WorldView Editor