Fixing my Apple :)

More about Fixing my Apple :)

For the past two weeks (approx) I've been fixing my Apple :) First of all, I drilled a few holes in Lola's old "Cooler Master" case, to match the mounting holes on the Apple //e mobo (Lola was the PC I mentioned quite a while ago on here, which seems to have come from a local prison, and whose IDE port damaged a couple of my HDD's). I put the Lola mobo (along with its ATX PSU) in Cathy's old case (I mentioned Cathy ages ago on here, it was an AMD K6 which came from where I used to work and was used as a MS-Windows test machine). Anyway, I put an AT PSU in the Apple case, as the Apple power supply only gave 1.25 volts on the -12V rail, which could damage the old 4116 memory chips (they use -12V as well as +5 and +12V). Powering up the A//e mobo, I just got a text-mode screen of ASCII characters, rather than the Apple ][ boot caption. So there was probably an iffy bus transceiver (74LS245 or similar) between the VDU and Processor sections. So I took the A//e mobo out, and put my original A ][ Europlus mobo in (which I bought and used in the early 1980's). Last time I used it, it made weird squeaky noises om bootup, so I looked around with the logic probe. On touching the 14MHz crystal wiring, the CPU sprang back into life. So I thought "wobbly oscillator". After some more probing round, I took all the chips out, cleaned their pins ("Deoxit that socket", lol) and put it all back together again. It worked (yay!). So I put my Mountain Computer Music System in (good test for mobo timing), dug out my old floppies, cleaned the heads on the Apple 5+1/4 drives, and played all the wavetable tracks (turning the floppy disk over for each one, as the player is on one side and the playfiles are on the other side). So far so good. Then I went through most of my 5+1/4 DOS 3.3.floppies to check they were still readable, luckily only 2 or 3 failed (the Echo ][ speech system and my UCSD disk dump). I'm now checking the ProDOS ones, so far 5 have I/O errors on them, probably recoverable with CIA or Bag Of Tricks. Still to do : put a new 74LS10 in my 68000 card, so I can play with that :)