Re: Foundling IIe left on curb, now what?

[mshaslam@gmail.com]

Michael J. Mahon wrote:
> 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.

It looks like it's something a little more serious.  The text became
basically unreadable, with serious color 'bloom'.  Reseating the
display ROM cured the problem mostly.  However it will go from clean
clear text to near unreadable every so often, which requires a restart.
 It doesn't seem to be a connection or solder issue, at least I've
never been able to cause it to fail by messing with the mainboard
itself.  I haven't been able to reliably replicate the problem.

> > 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.

Thanks for the offer.  Another contributor, Robert, was kind enough to
send a copy (thanks Robert!).  You guys are great.

> > 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.

Yep that was it.  It looks like it was someone's old office machine.
It was left on the curb in the warehouse area near Fremont.

MSH