The IIe I bought as a kind of self-care in the aftermath of the election debacle arrived yesterday. It held some surprises.
For the most part, I've been exceptionally lucky in my recent purchases from the auction site.
The only bad luck has been the damage in shipment to a IIc, which was a bargain since the listing was only for the external IIc disk drive. I'm still looking for a replacement space bar, though at some point I'll just have to figure out a way to attach the stabilizer wire to the space bar it does have. The bottoms of the two plastic clips that secure the stabilizer wire broke off, and you need that wire to be able to use your right thumb to hit the space bar.
Well, that and a replacement internal IIc drive that was supposed to arrive this week and I received a t-shirt! Got a refund, but wow. (The internal drive of the "bonus" IIc has a broken latch. Still works, but it's not very attractive.)
The first IIe I bought was a very early model, a REV A motherboard. But it came with a working Monitor III, the Apple monitor III stand for the Apple II, a Kensington System Saver, a Hayes (or CH) Mach 3 joystick, two 5.25" drives, and everything survived an otherwise unsatisfactory packaging effort. It was a bargain for the amount I paid for it, especially since the seller wasn't even certain if it worked.
Likewise, this IIe is also an early model, which means it's in a painted case. Neither of my IIe computers has yellowed due to exposure to UV light. They were dirty, but they cleaned right up. Very few blemishes, and the product badges on both machines are near-perfect.
This IIe is a REV B, so it has the motherboard modifications that permit double high-resolution graphics. (140x192, 15 colors - 16 if you count two grays). It also already has the 65c02 processor and "enhanced" ROMs.
But what came as a surprise were some items that weren't in the pictures or the description. The most significant one is a 1MB Applied Engineering RamFactor card. This was a clone of an Apple RAM disk designed to go in any slot of any Apple II. An enhanced IIe could even boot from it, once an operating system had been copied to it. The Applied Engineering clone added a unique feature. A power connection on the card that delivered 8vdc to the card to keep the RAM contents even when power was off to the cpu. So you could boot from the RAM disk at any time.
Power was provided by another Applied Engineering product, the RamCharger. It was a power supply and 8vdc battery, which maintained the contents of the card for several hours in the event of a power loss.
Well, in a small box inside this well-packaged purchase, was a RamCharger, complete with power cables! I'd never seen one back in the day, apart from ads of course. It appears to be in good shape, no swollen or leaking capacitors. The battery is likely useless, but a quick search revealed they're still being made and sold.
Now, there are modern replacements for the "Slinky" (Apple's code-name for the device.) RAM cards. Much smaller, and one even offered battery backup from a coin-cell battery. But they're not currently in stock. (The non-battery backed ones are.) Ideally, I'd like to have one of those. But it might be kind of fun getting this up and running, if I can.
The listing said it included a 5.25" disk drive. Well, again, apparently this was a naive seller. There was an original 3.5" 400K Mac disk drive (single-sided) included in the package. That puzzled me until I found out what an unidentified card in the computer was. I asked on Applefritter and quickly learned it was a Universal Disk Controller (UDC). The previous owner likely used it with the 3.5" Mac drive.
I have a modern replacement, the Yellowstone card from BMOW (Big Mess O'Wires). More about that in a minute. But nice to have one for each computer.
There were some other cards, a 300 baud Hayes Micromodem, a printer buffer, and a Sider HD interface card. None of those are especially interesting to me, but there was also an Apple 64K RGB video interface card that plugs into the Aux Slot. RGB monitors are a bit hard to find and pricey, and there's no guarantee they'll survive shipping, but the card intrigues me. Not a priority, but I expect there's an RGB monitor in my future at some point. It also has the updated Disk II interface card (the "IO Card") which will be useful with the //c external disk drive, though I could also use the UDC, if that's still functional.
I pulled all the cards out and turned the computer on and it beeped. I connected a monitor and ran the internal self-test and got a satisfactory response. I'll run a full suite of diagnostics at some point, but we're getting ready to head up to New York on Friday and I have some stuff I have to do for that trip.
I spent some time the past few days with the first IIe, plugging in some new cards I bought. I learned that at least one feature of one of the cards won't work in a REV A IIe. That's the A2FPGA, and the SuperSprite board won't work in a REV A. I wasn't able to get the Mockingboard feature to work either, so I don't know if that's a REV A incompatibility or something else. There's no audio connector on the card that I could find, so audio must come via the HDMI connection, so it may be the monitor. In any case, I was unable to test the Mockingboard function.
I also bought an old Echo II speech synthesizer and tested that. I learned that the Yellowstone Smartport emulator doesn't like it when the Echo card is installed, just like with the SpeedDemon accelerator. And I can't seem to boot the computer from a hard drive image on the Floppy Emu attached to the Yellowstone card. (If all that makes no sense, don't worry about it.)
What I can do, is boot from a 5.25" floppy into ProDOS, and then the computer can see the HD image on the Floppy Emu from ProDOS. So the good news is that I do have access to 32MB virtual HD images, which saves a lot of disk swapping.
In any event, the Echo II works fine. I enjoy the sound of those old TI speech synthesis chips.
I am experiencing something akin to happiness or a small amount of joy from playing with new (old) toys. I'm also causing more challenges for myself, in that I have no real space to set these things up. If I sell this 27" iMac and get rid of this desk, I may be able to reconfigure the office to accommodate at least one of the IIe computers.
I'm not sure how long we'll be here, so I'm reluctant to undertake anything very permanent.
But it's stuff that can distract me from the catastrophe unfolding around us.
Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:20 Wednesday, 13 November 2024