Hardware!
My birthday present arrived Friday. It’s an Apple ][+, specifically a Bell & Howell Apple ][+. That was a pleasant surprise. I was expecting a //e, hoping for an enhanced //e, since the //e was the longest lived of the Apple IIs. This is much better. I might end up replacing the motherboard, and I'll have to find some way of getting a Platinum IIe keyboard hooked up. (I'm thinking I'll house the keyboard in an Apple Keyboard case and run a cable to the Apple II. That will give me a nice keyboard without modifying the II's case. Assuming that the Keybaord interface can handle the extra cable, I might end up with a couple of PCBs with bus drivers on them.)
There is no way I'm giving up this case, I mean, it's black. And I have a matching Disk ][. Granted it's marked as Drive 2, and my sanity will be much easier to maintain if I have a 3.5" drive, but.. it's a Bell & Howell ][+ with an original drive!
Now, to condition:
- There are a couple screws missing from the bottom plate, nothing worrying there.
- The label on the Power light is mostly worn off, nothing to worry about, but if I can replace it with a better-condition cover I will.
- There's a 'SaskCOMP' badge on the lid. This has to go. Yes, it's retro and very period, but it's, well, ugly by any objective standard and, more importantly, it keeps the lid from sitting properly.
- As I said, Drive 1 is missing. Frankly, I'm amazed I got Drive 2.
- It's a little dusty, but that's to be expected.
Internals:
- Slot 6: There's (unsuprisingly) a Disk ][ Interface Card with the Disk ][ plugged into the Drive 1 pins. The card, by the way, is Copyright 1978 -- two years before I was born.
- Slot 3: A Video Associates Lab, Inc VB-43 July 1983. Since this model of Bell & Howell ][+ didn't have the A/V pack, this is probably an after market addition. It has a whole bunch of logic and a Rockwell 6522 VIA on it. It's got ribbon cables going to a few of the sockets for logic on the motherboard and another big ribbon cable going to a massive board sitting on top of the Power Supply.
- Slot 0: An Orange Computers, Inc. Orange 16K Card. It has some logic, some RAM and a ribbon cable going off to a RAM socket on the motherboard.
- On top of the Power Supply: The aforementioned big board, it's got some ribbon cables of its own that snake off to less visible parts of the machine, and a pair of chunky wires that go to BNC connectors mounted on a sturdy block on the back of the machine.
- Miscellaneous: There's a DB-9 socket wired up to the Game I/O socket. Nice idea, really, brings the ][+ on par with the IIe in this area (actually, it's better since we can unplug this DB-9).
The Saga:
- Flip the power switch: nothing. Damn. All right, now to diagnose the problem. If I wiggle the switch a bit I can get a bit of noise form the speaker and the activity light on the drive turns on, so the power supply is probably mostly OK, but maybe the switch is faulty.
- Remove the power supply, drill out some rivets and open it up, revealing a bunch of analog parts in good condition, no leaking or visible cracking and the caps aren't bulging. Cut the leads from the switch, short them together and plug it in: the voltages all come close, a little twiddling with the adjustment pot and presto: fairly good voltages. Reconnect the Power Supply to the mother board and... nothing. Damn. Time to reconnect the switch and close the Power Supply.
- Next, remove extraneous cards, well, that is pretty much just the Disk ][ Controller since everything else has ribbon cables going to the mother board. Result: no change.
- The A/V board has most of the chips that it's usurped the positions of. So, I remove the board and start pulling chips off of it and putting them back on the motherboard. There's some writing on the Power Supply indicating what school this was originally installed in, so the A/V board is definitely after market. I feel better about pulling it out now.
- Problem, of the 12 sockets the A/V board connects to, only 11 of the chips are available on the board. The motherboard calls for a 9334 8-bit addressable latch and there isn't one available.
- A Digi-Key order will fix that, but I'll have to wait a while before I get the chip installed. Still, worth a shot, so powering up the machine I hear a beep (it POSTed!) and the screen displays gibberish. Okay, Normal boot (or maybe just video modes) is interrupted. Everything else seems to be working. Now, for that latch.
- Digi-Key doesn't stock it, damn. How about an equivalent? Hmm, the 74259 looks promising, check the data sheets... and, for my purposes, it's the same chip. A simple precaution; check the board for a '259... and there it is.
- Pop the 259 on the motherboard, flip the power switch and PRESTO! It boots and presents an AppleSoft BASIC prompt. Sweet.
The Disk ][ seems to be working, but I don't have any 5.25" floppies to test it with. I can load and store programs through the cassette interface using my PowerBook as a rather expensive tape recorder. Apple II makes me happy.
