Re: My first ever Apple II!

[Roger Johnstone <rojaws@orcon.net.nz>]

In <%KZ%d.188$it1.8@newsfe2-gui.ntli.net> Alex Taylor  wrote:
> I thought I'd share with everyone my experiences of my first ever 
> Apple  II, and I have a few questions along the way.
>
> I've had collections of just about everything else, including very 
> large  quantities of Macs, Acorns (8 and 32 bit), Sinclairs, and odd 
> stuff like  Dragons and Aquarius. My favourite 8-bit computer is 
> probably the 8-bit  Acorn range (Electron/BBC/Master), since that's 
> what I'd grown up with  at school.

When I started at high school we had a few Apple IIes which I learned to 
program on. A year later the school got a room full of networked BBC 
model Bs, but your first computer is always special :o)

<snip>

> came across a IIe with with Disk II drives, which I  took away for the 
> sum of 5 UKP!
> 
> Some more questions: I've got it hooked up to a Philips CM8833-II 
> monitor using the composite input. How do I get colour on the screen? 
> I  can only seem to get monochrome.

Have a look at the motherboard. It will have printed on it either PAL or 
NTSC. Early models of the IIe were available in a PAL video version, but 
later on Apple only sold NTSC video versions. If it is NTSC it'll only 
show in monochrome on a PAL monitor. You could connect to the monitor 
using the RGB card though.

> And what is the small rocker 
> switch on  the front lower part of the case?

That switches between the USA keyboard layout and character set and a 
local layout and characters. If you've got the UK version there's only 
one difference: the # key becomes the pound symbol. Type # on the screen 
and change the switch and see what happens. On other localised versions 
several of the ASCII punctuation characters are swapped for accented 
characters.

-- 
Roger Johnstone, Invercargill, New Zealand
http://vintageware.orcon.net.nz/
________________________________________________________________________
  No Silicon Heaven? Preposterous! Where would all the calculators go?

              Kryten, from the Red Dwarf episode "The Last Day"