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Jealous as all hell of that IIfx. About two months ago I decided that I needed an 8 bit computer in my life and bought an Apple IIe from ebay that looked like it had been stored in a shed for the last 20 years. I'm just going to assume that yall want to hear about how the restoration went and I have a strong desire to  .The one I picked was a lot cheaper than the others that, well, were actually clean, but I assume that's because most people don't want a computer that looks like this one did and the photos didn't really show much. When I got the computer the case was filthy and the connectors and screws were severely corroded (even the AC jack, its prongs were green!). The seller had no interior shots so I had no idea if it was even going to come with a disk controller, let alone anything actually interesting in terms of expansion cards, but more on that at the end. But the keyboard was fully intact unlike a lot of them out there and it had the older "brown" keys that I just think look cooler than Apple's later all gray all the time aesthetic that came a few years later. This particular one turned out to be a non-enhanced IIe built in the 42nd week of 1983.  Yep, that's disgusting   Somehow I don't think I want to use these Before I did anything I wanted to remove all the screw-shaped rust. Most of them came out without issue, but two case screws were so seized I had to use a drill with a phillips bit rather than just a screwdriver and a third was so seized even that didn't work and just stripped it so I hacksawed a slot into it and then the drill plus a slot bit worked. I'm still trying to figure out what to replace the weird clip nuts that the case uses to attach its halves together with, but the rest at least I had random screws lying around for if not always as many as it started with. Then I took the various parts outside and blew them out with a datavac to get the absurd dust balls and various dead bugs out. I also briefly wiped the case down after I took it apart and while it looked like nothing changed the microfiber cloths I used basically came up black. The good news was the internals generally looked in good shape. Some ICs had crusty legs and basically every screw was junk (except the ones attaching the keyboard which I guess are a different metal), but the board itself was in great shape and the inside of the power supply was pristine, minus the presence of a rifa. First up was dealing with the power supply. Thankfully panel mount AC jacks seem to all use the same spacing even today so I could easily order a new one of those. Once it arrived I snipped the wires to the original jack and soldered them to the new one and it mostly went without issue, except that my brilliant self forgot that when soldering a wire the wire gets hot, and my heat shrink became heat shrunk before I got a chance to put it over the actual contacts. Whoops. I stuck some electrical tape over them instead, figuring it's better than nothing and nobody but me is ever likely to see the inside of that again. If someone else does in the future, well, they're free to try to fix that. While I was at it I swapped the one rifa with a new non-paper X2 cap, and thankfully my wild-rear end guess of the lead spacing was correct. That also went just fine. I was led to believe these power supplies had two rifas but mine only had one so I guess that's a different revision (or maybe the 220V version?). Testing the power supply was a little more interesting since I couldn't get a straight answer on if Apple II power supplies work without a load, I wasn't going to plug it in to the computer until I had at least seen it be vaguely in spec, and I didn't have anything immediately useful as a dummy load. So I figured the hell with it and just powered it on with no load anyway, assuming I'd only have it on for a few seconds at a time and I'd just buy a new build replacement if I had to. I did this outside, using a power strip to power it on "remotely" and with my loving fiance standing ready with a fire extinguisher just in case, but everything went just fine. This testing got 5.1V/12.4V which was thankfully well within spec for no load. In hindsight I/we probably should have had safety glasses on but whatever moving on. Then I pulled all the chips off the board and, lacking any better idea for cleaning the decades of dust off, just sprayed it with my utility sink faucet and then blow-dried it with the datavac again. It doesn't look new but it at least just looks used instead of left for dead. Onto the rear connectors. Desoldering them was a pain in the rear end, between the 40 year old solder and the rust and the fact that they just all have a ton of metal to sink heat. I cut the various pins and did everything as individually as I could to minimize the heat sinking issue, but that wasn't possible for the cassette jacks so those were a pain. That plus using a larger soldering iron tip to transfer heat more easily eventually got everything out, leaving behind some rust stains where everything was and the two posts the game port was mounted to, which appear to be riveted to the board. Rude. The rust stains were easily cleaned up with some IPA and an old toothbrush. I found what looked like an exact match for the video and cassette jacks, other than the RCA jack I got is a black inner ring rather than the red it was when I got it, but the game port I mis-measured slightly and I'm not taking a drill to this thing to get the posts out to install it properly regardless so I just kinda bent it into place and called it good enough. Also left some flux stains behind I can't get out due to having to run the iron super hot but oh well, that's a lot better than the connectors being unusable.  Ew. Next I took some fiberglass pens that I bought just for this purpose and scrubbed the legs on the ICs. Some of them were just fine as they were and some definitely weren't, but they all looked good enough when I was done. The fiberglass pens all now have black ends, which I have no idea what to do about because how the hell do you clean that, but they worked great. The ICs thankfully all went back in their sockets without protest; I was expecting at least one to make horrible crunching sounds and make me have to buy replacement sockets, but somehow I got lucky there that all the corrosion was external.  That cleaned up way better than I expected Nothing left to do at that point but actually try to power it on, so I plugged in the power supply to the logic board and threw the switch and... nothing obvious happened aside from the internal power LED turning on, so at least I didn't blow it up, but I was expecting a beep. Connected a monitor to the video out, got a test pattern, reconnected the keyboard because it turns out on an Apple IIe without the keyboard it goes into a diagnostic mode, and got a prompt! The thing was still fully functional. Blew my mind, I was fully expecting to have to diagnose bad RAM or something. Then I tried typing "Hello World" and got as far as "HELL" before I ran out of working keys. The keyboard was in good mechanical shape but terrible electrically, with shift, O, W, R, D and many others not working. Also the power indicator lamp was burned out, and the speaker definitely didn't seem to be working which was really no surprise given how corroded it was. Easy option first, I gently applied deoxit to the switches. That restored some of them, killed some others though I suspect they were marginal to start with, and still left me with a bunch that worked only sometimes or not at all. For the intermittent ones I just pressed them a ton of times which managed to reactivate a couple more but nowhere near all of them. Which left desoldering the switches to try to fix them the hard way. As far as I can tell all the advice on repairing these Alps SKCC switches is "just buy replacements" but I am too stubborn for that, so I desoldered one of them and took it apart. Which is by the way incredibly tedious, these things are fragile as hell when they're half-opened and you have to be super careful to not snap these tiny plastic clip arms off. Thankfully I had some ifixit spudgers which worked great, and I somehow didn't break a single one. With the switch fully apart I was able to verify that it had no continuity when closed, and just sort of started poking and prodding at it figuring that worst case it was already dead so I couldn't really make it worse. Eventually by dumb luck I hit on "scrubbing" the metal sheets in the switchplate with a pair of tweezers I had with sort of plier-like serrated grips, and somehow that fixed it. I assume there was corrosion between them and this was cleaning it off. But whatever it was, after that it worked perfectly! Then I just had to do the others that were dead. All 19 more of them. There's only 63 keys on this keyboard to start with. That took so goddamned long. In desoldering the keys a couple tried to tear pads on their way out because their leads were bent so I couldn't cleanly desolder them but thankfully they didn't tear at the trace, so resoldering them back in fixed it aside from the solder joint looks weird since there's no metal in part of the pad now. In entirely unrelated news my christmas list now includes a desoldering pump that isn't the cheapest crap ever to exist. I also cleaned the keycaps while they were out because they were filthy. I did wind up short one keyswitch, because its casing was damaged in such a way that I nearly couldn't get it out of the metal plate and I do not want to do that again, though it does actually work electrically fine now. So for that one I ordered a replacement. Oh well. But I can live without right shift until the replacement gets here so while I'm sad I had to buy one after all it's not like it's impacting the usability of the computer. At least I somehow didn't lose any of the tiny springs or metal spring arm things despite dropping a couple before I figured out how to open the switches safely. With the keyboard fully functional (right shift aside) next up was the speaker, and for that I found a speaker from an ancient early ATX case I had that was also rusty (no I don't know why I still have this) but the speaker was in perfect shape, and it turned out to be an exact match in both size and specs. I just repinned the header down to only 2x1 and it worked immediately. The cable was shorter but thankfully still long enough and the old clips fit it perfectly. Then came the keyboard power lamp but for that I just ordered a new one and swapped it which isn't a very fun story, but the new one at least is comically bright to the degree I feel like the original wasn't likely this powerful but what do I know, I otherwise haven't used an Apple II since like 1999, maybe they were like this new. Also in hindsight it's kind of amusing that that's the one thing that was actually broken prior to it going into storage as it was very clearly burned out, not rusted or mechanically damaged. A couple more futile passes at cleaning the case later, it's pretty much "done" and ready to play Oregon Trail again like it's still 1983.  Very satisfying, other than that shift key, and I really need to find replacement clip nuts so I can keep the case from sliding over the Reset key like that. I did fix it after taking that photo. Don't ask why I didn't then take another one. What cards did it come with, you might be wondering? It had: A Disk II controller, which probably works just fine but I bought a DuoDisk because they were weirdly cheap and seemed cooler than a Disk II, and it turns out those need a different controller card. D'oh. Maybe that's why they were cheap. Without a regular Disk II I can't test the controller but I'm sure it's fine given how well everything else held up. On the plus side the DuoDisk has basically an identical degree of yellowing so aside from being much cleaner it actually looks like a match. The standard 80 column extended card, which worked flawlessly once I hit the aux slot with deoxit as the slots had some moderate corrosion too. A printer card with an extremely rusty ROM which isn't a model of IC that seems very common. I'll see if I can dump this at some point anyway. A "Titan" accelerator card, which I haven't tested yet, but these seem to be relatively valuable so I'm pretty pleased with that. This is apparently a 65C02 running at 3.58MHz vs the standard 1.02MHz, and I think its RAM is supposed to be faster somehow too. A "Burple". No, really, that's what it's called. I can find next to no evidence that this even existed, except for a friend of mine dug up a newspaper ad saying it cost $500 new and was for connecting to Burroughs mainframes. I want to dump the ROM on this thing too at some point so I can try to figure out what the hell it does, probably some kind of serial adapter, though I am admittedly short on Burroughs mainframes to use it with and have no plans (or space) to change this. I also bought a new build VGA card which works great and doesn't tie to me to the one tiny LCD I have that actually has a composite input. Plus the different floppy controller the DuoDisk needed which also worked flawlessly. All in all that was actually a lot of fun and I'm only disappointed that I'll probably never have as great of a story using the thing as I did getting it working. I'd guess it took me somewhere around 30-40 hours in total to fix it, more than half of that being the keyswitch repairs. I probably spent as much in the end as I would have on a "good" one factoring in replacement parts and a few new tools, but I've at least got a hell of a story and this particular IIe is now undoubtedly mine. For what it's worth I have no plans to do retrobrighting or anything. Beyond the fact that I just don't really want to deal with that, it's not really that yellowed, and I think that just gives it the aged look it deserves for what it's been through. I do want to try to clean up the various blemishes remaining but if I can't, same thing, it's part of this computer's history. The only one I want to "fix" is the badge which just looks horrible but I have no idea what to actually do there.
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Dec 4, 2023 20:14
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 05:32 |
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longview posted:In case you feel like redoing all that work, it sounds like you came up with a basic burnishing technique, there are specialised tools for this: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/jonard-tools/OB-1-3/5956091 I figured I wasn't treading any real new ground, but good to know there's a better tool in case I somehow ever have to do that again. I'm still surprised it worked at all, really, let alone that reliably.
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Dec 4, 2023 21:10
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Data Graham posted:Also pretty sure that's a G4, the G3 was light blue. Yeah that's a G4, the G3 in that formfactor was from the like one year window where Apple made computers that were neither beige nor gray.  colorful iMacs, thought of graphite and died.Also from experience it wasn't uncommon in that era to have games ship with both the mac and PC versions on one CD (at least if you bought the mac version), so you might get lucky and somebody had one of those instead of a pure PC version rather than having to buy a dedicated mac copy. On the other hand if you (or your parents) could afford a mac you could probably afford to buy your own copy of Quake3 and UT99 anyway.
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Apr 11, 2024 21:31
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Beve Stuscemi posted:Well, I'm really not sure whats going on with the Sun right now. At first it was throwing that memory error, which I fixed by reseating the RAM. Then it started throwing ecache errors, which came up pretty late in the POST process, and now its throwing a ROM mapping error pretty early in the process. So I don't know poo poo about sparcs but for a regular retro x86 PC my next steps would be something along the lines of make sure it actually detects a boot device and then either dump/verify or replace the ROM, assuming the latter is even possible here. That's from the serial output, right? Are you sure it isn't secretly switching to regular video?
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May 19, 2024 15:18
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