Well well well...Darn logic board was shagged!! I’ll de darned. I originally thought I had a good deal buying my Apple IIGS from the UK. Apparently not.



After buying a secondhand logic board from eBay, I had to return it in the end. No questions asked, but it was faulty as we have seen in the last post. I’ve now got my Apple IIGS cooking with gas. I just need to get some more peripherals.

A while back I purchased an Apple IIGS from the UK. Things started to fail soon after. First the serial port started spitting out strange code and then the 1MB RAM expansion card was not detected. I located a reconditioned logic board from ebay. Replaced mine and fired it up. All tests from the Apple IIGS Diagnostics disk seems to pass but when I booted up System 6.01 it froze while loading. Sometimes with an error. Read More...

I guess if all my Apple II stuff worked then it would be quiet boring. Half the fun is working out what is wrong and how to fix it. hmmmm.. I had a simple task ahead of me. Create a floppy copy of Ultima V so a friend could test out the graphics on his Apple IIe NTSC version to see if the graphics are displayed like my PAL version. My endless video problems seem to have no solution. The fact is I don’t even know if anything is wrong. Maybe all PAL Apple IIe’s graphics look like mine? As I have no reference I need to go about this the hard way.



So I located a new box of 10 double Density 5 1/4” floppy disks and fired up ADT-PRO. Errors…..more errors.. And this was on my Apple IIGS which worked a few months ago. arrrggh. I then tried my Apple IIe and the Super Serial card. Strange things are a foot at the Circle K. Looks like I have screwy Super Serial Card too. Darn. I’m sourcing one now. Fingers crossed it works.

*****Update: The problem in the end was with mac Mac Pro. The driver I was using was not installed correctly. I removed it and used the standard Aten one.

To try and resolve my on going video problems with my Apple II PAL editions I located this store in Japan. Hand crafted made to order boards that seemed amazing. Only one catch. Seems they are NTSC only as I’m getting some really strange results. The webpage for the cards is: http://tulip-house.ddo.jp/DIGITAL/english.html Read More...

My original Apple IIe that I purchased off eBay came broken. The video rom was burnt out and displayed garbled graphics. In the end I could not source a replacement chip so I purchased a second Apple IIe to use as spare parts. Last week I found someone of eBay selling the Apple IIe Enhancement kit. Unfortunately it arrived with the US video rom chip which is a lot smaller than my Germany PAL version. You can see the size difference here: Read More...

My Apple IIe (PAL) has a switch which lets me select between colour and monochrome but the strange thing is when flipped to monochrome I notice the refresh rate seems to be much higher. The screen seems to flicker less. This could be due to my TFT monitor I’m using. I pick up some tamagochi band euro connector PAL TFT monitor real cheap. Still not sure though if the interference is due to the monitor’s quality or from my Apple IIe? I’ve tried the same monitor on another Apple IIe and I get the same results. Here is a photo of the switch.



Read More...

I stumbled apon this magazine a while back and instantly subscribed. These days there are very few printed magazines about the Apple II left in circulation. I’m all for saving tree’s but I just can’t bring myself to purchase a pdf or electronic copy. Its just not the same as thumbing through the pages. Don’t get my wrong I poses an iPad and use it everyday.

Memories float back of the old days and Phrack magazine, underground press. This months issue even includes a 5 1/4” floppy disk with demo music from David Kruszyna. The same stuff as from the assembly parties back in the early 90’s.
Read More...

Talk about Murphy’s Law. I just blew one of the bus controller chips in my Apple IIe. Arrggh. I should have noticed the midi interface card did look at little too homebrew and should be inserted with extreme caution or in my case not to be inserted at all!

Read More...

Darn video rom was faulty. I assumed that these could not be easily located so I found a cheap auction on eBay for another Apple IIe PAL. Lucky, as last night I was testing the new Apple IIe with a midi interface card and suddenly a pop, then a strong smell of burnt electronics. Arrggghh. I could have died. The darn mini interface card shorted something out. I then tried to boot and I have this screen. Arrgghhh!!!
Read More...