[1] Applied Engineering was the last company to offer a slot-based Apple II accelerator card, the TransWarp.
A user could hold down the Esc key upon bootup, to disable the card for speed sensitive applications.
The TransWarp ran at the same 3.58, 1.79 and 1.02 (commonly listed as "1") MHz speeds as other accelerators of its time, however, it included a whopping 256 KB of onboard RAM.
When you power-up your Apple with TransWarp installed, all of the ROM from $D000 through $FFFF is copied into one of the high-speed RAM banks.
[2] The same issue of the publication determined that the TransWarp was faster than either the McT SpeedDemon or Titan Accelerator //e when running the same applications, even though all three cards ran at the same 3.58 MHz native speed.
Applied Engineering offered a unique $89 upgrade to the 16-bit 65802 microprocessor, for people who were able to use its advanced features.
The company scrapped the onboard RAM design of the original TransWarp in favor of a licensed cache based implementation like Zip Technology used.
Some believe that images in advertisements announcing the TransWarp III in Apple II related magazines were complete mock-ups and that the product never existed.
They took a 65C02 core and combined it with control logic and 8 KB of cache ram into a very compact 40-pin DIP package, not much bigger than the original 65C02 CPU it replaced.
By creating this ultra compact, slotless accelerator, the entire untapped market of tens of thousands of Apple IIc computers became available.
The accelerator was a cache type, based on Zip Technology's US patent #4,794,523 and was capable of 10 different speed settings.
The less expensive model 1500 would have omitted DMA support and was supposed to run at 8 MHz with 8 KB of cache.
The slot-based model 1600 ("Zip GSX") was made available at several different clock speeds and with varying amounts of cache.
These problems were perhaps due to Bits and Pieces pushing the physical limit of their 65C02 cores to squeeze out the extra speed in a game of one-upmanship with Zip Technologies.
Zip Technologies ended up with the upper hand when they successfully sued Bits and Pieces for patent infringement and in turn forced the company out of business.