Category: Apple II

About Apple II

Apple II and compatible/clone machines.

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Apple II Europlus

Posted on by Graham

The Apple II computer is iconic. It was the first computer that i ever touched – one arrived at Unley High in 1981.

I’m sure there are original Apple II machines in Australia but the earliest i could expect to find was a Europlus which uses PAL video without the colour encoding from the factory. This one appears to have been manufactured in 1979 when i was still at school. It was owned by Flinders University.

This one was a gumtree purchase and came with two third party drives. It had a language card and a disk controller card.

The keyboard was missing a key, and the replacement i got was not for this particular keyboard – it’s easy to spot if you look in the pic. Perfection is not my goal.

The power supply looked fine other than the line filter caps, and the machine largely worked – most of the time. Often it would stop working, and then it would need a push or a prod on the motherboard to get it going again.

I don’t pull down stuff just for kicks, but i pulled all the chips, cleaned the board and the ICs – in some cases re-attached some legs that had broken – and put it all back together.

The controller card and drives were all faulty, so i suspect they came from a repair box at the university. The controller card needed one IC replaced. Both of the drives needed replacement Darlington drivers – one was cracked. I eventually replaced the third party drives with Apple units.

I like to fill slots, so i added:

  • Printer (Epson): Slot 1
  • Super serial: Slot 2
  • 80 column card (Videx clone): Slot 3
  • Z80 card (softcard clone): Slot 4
  • Booti: Slot 5
  • Disk Controller (clone): Slot 6
  • RGB card (Taxan): Slot 7

With the Z80 card installed i could boot CP/M but i got some strange behaviour including calculation errors in MBasic. The silkscreen indicated that IC B1 should be a 74S, but it was a 74LS. When i changed to the S part, the calculation issue resolved.

I also found an issue where the 80 columns mode would not work with Wordstar. This seems to have been related to a known problem with the Softcard when a Videx card is installed. The solution was to add a capacitor between pins 10 and 11 on IC15. This resolved the issue.

The booti card does a great job of serving up disk images including Total Replay. Real floppy disks provide a more genuine experience, but there’s no doubt that they take more patience.

Lingo 128

Posted on by Graham

Over the 1984/85 summer, i earnt enough money to buy my first computer.  I was never going to be able to afford one of the big names, but my neighbour was selling some Apple II clones made in Singapore by Limco.  I’m not sure that it was the most well-informed purchase that i’ve ever made, but the computer got me through my final year of uni and taught me a lot of things along the way.

It sat in a cupboard for many years and then in my shed for many more before i boldly applied power in about 2014.  To my surprise, it booted up fine.  I added a super serial card and used ADTPro to back up my floppy disks.

Compatibility is not perfect, but most programs run ok.  The included CP/M included a RAM disk which used the additional 64k of memory.  The keyboard interface is unique, but i have deciphered it so that i can use a PS/2 keyboard if the original fails.

It has two Chinon floppy disk drives in the flip top chassis.  I’ve since added a couple more external drives – 160kB is not a lot to work with.

The monitor is a rebadged Mitsubishi unit similar to the ones that were often used with Microbee computers.

Sadly, i stupidly gave away the printer about 30 years ago.  It was a rebadged Panasonic unit.