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Re: Foundling IIe left on curb, now what?

mshaslam@gmail.com wrote:


It's been 20+ years since I booted an Apple II, but when I found one
sitting on the side of the road, well I guess I'm a sucker for hard
luck stories.  I was hoping I could get some pointers on getting it
into functioning condition.

The case is in fairly good condition.  It's dirty and the cap for the
keyboard light is missing, but all the keys are there and seem to
function, and it has two 5.25 drives.  However it has no disks.

Internally it has three cards in the expansion slots, the floppy
controller, an Epson parallel port controller, and the last one, which
is a only labled as 'Microsoft Consumer Products'.  My wild guess says
it's a CP/M card.  It also has  an '80col/64k' card in the 'aux
connection' slot.

It boots into ROM just fine and I managed to dust off my BASIC enough
to make it say 'hello world'.  The only problem so far is that the
colors bleed quite a bit on the screen unless I get the cable just
right.


Great--it sounds like everything is working fine, for your setup.


My questions are:

Are there known issues and solutions to the color bleed problem?  More
wild guesses on my part say either a solder problem or corrosion, but
I'm not yet ready to take the thing apart until I'm a little more sure.


It is not unusual for text to show some color fringing on a color
monitor, though it should not be extreme, since the text screen is
displayed as a monochrome signal.

For non-graphics uses, an old NTSC monochrome monitor is a much
more satisfying experience.  For graphics--like games--a color
monitor such as you are using is usually preferred.  You can have
the best of both worlds by using the AppleColor //e Monitor, which
supported both composite color and 80-column monochrome text.  An
ordinary color monitor will not work well beyond 40 column text.

There is a design problem in all Apple II models related to the RCA
video connector:  it is a poor choice in which the metal at the
junction between the central lead to the main board and the main
board can be easily cracked, making the connection intermittent.

The problem is that twisting the male connector, as is common practice
to seat it and get a good connection, repeatedly bends a very small,
stressed area of the female connector.  This can be easily fixed by
flowing a bit of solder over the lead at the main board, but it
remains vulnerable to future cracking by the same mechanism.

They should have chosen a connector which firmly secured the central
sleeve against rotation to prevent this problem.  Fortunately, it is
easily "fixed" with a soldering iron.


What OS does an IIe run and how would I get a copy?   I remember from
the long ago days that the apple drives are totally incompatible with
IBM drives, so bootstrapping seems to require getting a hold of actual
boot disks.  I currently have no access to a functioning Apple II, but
I do live in the Seattle area.


So do I--Bellevue, actually.

Though there are ways to bootstrap an Apple II withoug a boot disk, I'd
be happy to make you a DOS boot disk with ADT, so you can transfer Apple
disk images from your PC.


What the heck is that Microsoft card, and/or how would I find out?


It is almost certainly a Microsoft SoftCard, a Z80 card intended to
support running CP/M programs on an Apple II.  It is of no use to you
unless you intend to run CP/M, an entirely different environment than
the Apple II environment.

-michael

New Applesoft BASIC interface for NadaNet networking!
Hoe page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/