Orange Micro's Grappler+
Imagine It...Capture It
Orange Micro Inc was founded in the 1980s. They made hardware add-ons for Apple devices. One of their biggest product lines were what they called “DOS compatibility cards”. These cards would let Mac users run Windows or DOS programs at native speeds. (I won’t talk too much about them here because I may be covering them in the future.) Orange Micro shut down without warning in 2005.
(When I first saw the name Orange Micro, I immediately thought of the OrangePi, a RaspberryPI clone.)
The Product
The Grappler+ allowed the Apple II to print graphics on a dot matrix printer. Here is a quote from the Grappler+ owner’s manual:
The GRAPPLER + TM Interface is a Centronics compatible parallel interface for the Apple® II, II+ , and IIe Computer. The GRAPPLER + is also Apple® III compatible when the GRAPPLER + /Apple III Driver is implemented. In addition to advanced text features, it offers high resolution dot graphics (HIRES) dump routines located in firmware. These features are easily invoked by using simple control commands.
Three different versions of the GRAPPLER + are available, The Standard GRAPPLER + offers a wide array of graphics and text features. The second version, the BUFFERED GRAPPLER + , offers all the features of the standard GRAPPLER + , and adds buffering'. The BUFFERED GRAPPLER + is equipped with a 16K RAM buffer, which can be upgraded to 32K or 64K. For special information and instruc-tions regarding the BUFFERED GRAPPLER + , see Appendix B. All other features and instructions for the GRAPPLER + and the BUFFERED GRAPPLER + referred to in this manual are identical.
The third version of the GRAPPLER + is for IDS Printers. The IDS GRAPPLER + is compatible with the IDS 460/ 560, Microprism 480, and the Prism 80 and 132. The IDS GRAPPLER + has special color graphics capabilities when used with Prism 80 and 132 printers with color graphics options. The BUFFERBOARD and BUFFERED GRAPPLER + do NOT support IDS Printers. See Appendix D for additional commands and information for the IDS GRAPPLER + .
I couldn’t find any review of it from the time, but I did find this video below that demonstrates the Grappler+ card.
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