rendered useless on the Platinum IIe unless the user removed the capacitors from the board. There were no firmware changes present, and functionally the motherboard was otherwise identical to the Enhanced IIe. This final model of the Apple IIe (which was not sold in Europe) was quietly discontinued on November 15, 1993, which (following the discontinuation of the Apple IIGS a year earlier) effectively marked the end of the Apple II family line. Apple IIe Card for Macintosh In March 1991, shortly after the release of the Macintosh LC series, Apple released the PDS slot-based Apple IIe Card for the Macintosh. By plugging this card into a Macintosh LC (and later models incorporating an LC PDS slot), through hardware and (some) software emulation, the Macintosh can run most software written for the 8-bit Apple IIe computer. This miniaturized computer on a card was made possible by a chip called the Gemini, which is heavily based on the Mega II, first used in the Apple IIGS computer to emulate the Apple IIe. The Gemini duplicates most of the functions of a standard Apple IIe, minus RAM, ROM, video generation and CPU. Many of the built-in Macintosh peripherals can be "borrowed" by the card when in Apple II mode (i.e. extra RAM, 3-inch floppy, AppleTalk networking, clock, hard disk). It can run at either standard 1 MHz speed or an accelerated 1.9 MHz. As video is emulated using Macintosh QuickDraw routines, it is sometimes unable to keep up with the speed of a real Apple IIe, especially in the case of slower host machines. With a specialized Y-cable, the card can use an actual Apple 5.25, Apple UniDisk 3.5 and Apple II joystick or paddles. The Apple IIe Card is thought of as an Apple II compatibility solution or emulator rather than as an extension of the Apple II line. International versions Regional differences The Apple IIe keyboard differed depending on what region of the world it was sold in. Sometimes the differences were very minor, such as extra local language characters and symbols printed on certain keycaps (e.g. French accented characters on the Canadian IIe such as "à", "é", "ç", etc., or the British Pound "£" symbol on the UK IIe) while other times the layout and shape of keys greatly differed (e.g. a European IIe). In order to access the local character set and keyboard layout, a user-accessible switch is