Sorry about the audio sync issues. This was a UA-cam processing problem and they didn't want to help replace the video. (Since the source file I uploaded had no audio issues.)
I worked for an Apple dealership from 1979 to 1989. The biggest problem with the Apple /// was that they used sub-par IC sockets. During shipping, IC chips would start working their way out of the sockets. The remedy was to re-seat the IC chips, much as you have done. After that, it was a fine machine. I still use the phrase, "I'm okay, machine status normal."
Somewhere I learned that the Apple /// RAM would also start to crawl out of the sockets as the machine heated up. Rumor has it the fix for this would be to power off, lift the front of the machine a bit and drop it.
The socket issue was caused by contact fretting due to dissimilar metals between the chip leads and the socket material. Chips didn't just 'get loose'. Apple could've solved the issue by getting rid of the sockets entirely (the cheapest way) or using gold plated sockets - not Apple's stye. Whoever was in Apple Engineering at the time desperately needed re-boot. Also, overheating with these computers is a myth. Remember folks, these were 6502 computers. This one slightly over-clocked.
I seem to remember there was actual technical support advice from Apple to lift the computer off the desk and drop it. This was suppose to help reseat the chips after they worked their way out of the sockets. Also I believe it was the heating issues that flexed the components that caused them to come loose.
The heat issue is due exclusively to Steve Jobs who ordered the engineering department that no fans could be used, period. Engineers aren't dumb, they knew this machine needed active cooling. But Jobs refused, even fired people who questioned him on this. Wozniak, who had nothing to do with this project, stated the failure of the machine was entirely due to the misdirection of Jobs.
For those who own machines with 12V RAM chips, there is a way to get them going with 5V RAM chips: 1. Firstly, grab your new memory chip, a TO-92 7805 voltage regulator, a 100nF 50V ceramic cap and, more importantly, a cup of coffee; 2. *Lift the chip's VCC pin* and solder it to the *pin 3 of the voltage regulator* and to *one of the pins of the capacitor;* 3. Solder a piece of wire *from the GND pin of the chip* (without lifting it), to *pin 2 of the voltage regulator* and to *the other pin of the cap;* 4. Bend *pin 1 of the voltage regulator,* in a way as to make it fit into *the original VCC pin of the socket;* 5. Glue both the cap and the regulator onto the chip's back, with epoxy resin (not really critical); 6. IT'S DONE! P.S.: Prevously, I said you would need a 7806 regulator. Sorry! You'll need a *7805.* Actually, if you were to install a 7806, you'd cause an SCR Latchup in the chip, and this would release it's magic smoke pretty quickly. P.S. 2: Please check your new chip's pinout, to ensure both the old and the new chip are pin-by-pin compatible.
Reminds me of some memory upgrade hacks from the 1980s where they would solder piggyback more memory chips, but bend one leg out for additional addressing.
The reason you'd use a linear regulator over a buck regulator is because of noise. Linear regulators create a very clean output which requires minimal filtering. Buck regulators on the other than are RF blasters and produce very noisy output, which requires complex filtering that usually isn't present on readymade buck modules. The interference a buck regulator creates can cause erratic behavior in circuits, especially older low-frequency circuits. It's the reason why audio gear still uses linear supplies, even though it makes them large and heavy.
I worked in a computer store in San DIego that specialized in Apple computers. I remember when the Apple III was released. We were excited about it until we actually set up the demo unit and started experiencing glitches from the moment we powered it on. Things got really bad after it began heating up. It seems that many of the problems were caused by overheating and poorlly seated chips, and after opening the unit and pressing down on the chips, we could get it to work. But after experiencing these initial problems, I never had to heart to recommend it to any customers. I left the shortly after - but not because of the Apple. I was offered a better job. What a shame.
If I was to get one of these, the first thing I would do is rig up some cooling fans. Remember the infamous advice from Apple themselves: if your Apple 3 stops working, pick it up and drop it on the desk. Having said that, I still think that the best Apple for collectors is the IIGS.
That advice was because the /// used a tin socket between the motherboard and RAM board, which would start corroding basically the second the machine was assembled. Banging on the machine would move it enough to restore contact, but Apple eventually recalled the machines and replaced it with a gold connector which was reliable. Heat was never the problem.
I worked for an Apple dealer in the Detroit area back in the late 70s through about 1985. I was also a member of a local Apple computer user group and back around 1980 or so Apple had a special get together in Chicago as an outreach to the user groups. A couple of friends and I went to the meeting and saw Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak there. Can’t remember for sure now but I think the other speaker from Apple was Mark Markkula? In any case he was talking about the problems they were currently having with the Apple /// and he said the problem was “Workers who didn't know the difference between this socket and that one, and you can’t explain it because they don’t speak English!”. Got a lot of laughs from the audience, but obviously was a different time then.
Great video! :-). The Apple /// was my first computer. I learned so much on the Apple /// I ended up writing an assembler for the 65802 process which was compatible with the 6502 in the Apple ///. The 65802 added 16 bit support.
I had an Apple III because I needed to run spreadsheets that required more memory than an Apple II could handle. We had 2 problems. Compatibility between the 2 and 3 was limited. The Apple dealer in our area was very happy to sell but offered no maintenance or repair support. We began switching to IBM. Eventually I purchased over 2,000 PCs every year. All of them were IBM type unless the user had a very specific need for an Apple.
I remember the III from my first job working for an Apple dealer. It's biggest problem wasn't the poor reliability as much as the almost complete lack of software, and a really poor "emulation mode" that has compatibility issues. Ultimately the IIe put the final nail in its coffin.
More specifically, 80 column text mode in the //e. The lack of software definitely hurt the ///, as did the high price. But for pascal-based accounting software like Great Pains you really couldn't beat how well a /// with a Profile handled it.
Steve Jobs insisted that this needed to use the case as a giant heat sink and wouldn't let the engineers install any case fans. The thing overheated like crazy and the chips would pop out of their sockets as boards got hot and warped. But Jobs was a genius! LOL
6:39 RIFA (Radioindustrins Fabrik Aktiebolag) was a Swedish electronics manufacturer which was established in 1942 and originally manufactured resistors and capacitors.
In 1982 I went to work for a New York City bank. The new Controller had heard about microcomputers and purchased an Apple III. It sat on a table waiting for someone to approach it. I did and shortly thereafter VisiCalc and I were generating spreadsheets at an unbelievable pace that shocked the accounting department and the Controller. Would have been even faster but the dot matrix printer was sooo slow. I still have the computer today! Have not booted it since the 90's. Thanks for taking me on this walk down memory lane.
No. These need to be X2 rated caps, designed to withstand 2.5 kV peak and approved by UL / ENEC / etc.. Traditionally they are special metallized paper caps, but metallized propropylene seems to be working well, too. You generally get what you pay for with these, and comparing dimensions you'll generally find that parts from a reputable brand (WIMA etc.) are bigger than some others, implying thicker dielectric and thus better peak voltage handling and slower aging. Incidentally, Yamaha also recalled some of their early-'80s HiFi amps just a few years ago due to the very same Rifa caps (though really, if I had something like an A-960 II I'd much rather swap out the cap and keep it, those are nice amps). They're also pop-ular replacement candidates in Dual turntables.
They were used in a lot of electronic devices, including hifi gear. All of them eventually fail, and for this reason, Yamaha for instance still has a service program to replace them for free in your amp from the late 70s-to this day!
Josh Rice the first Macintoshes have a Rifa cap directly connected to mains and it can blow even when the computer is turned off. I leared that the hard way.
Apple had problems with the original RAM sockets being too tight, and bending the pins when they inserted the RAM chips. They replaced them with lower insertion pressure sockets, but the chips tended to work part way out of the sockets during transportation. The official solution was to place the computer on a flat, hard surface, unpowered, lift it six inches, and drop it to seat the chips. It actually worked in many cases.
A lot of engineering at the time went into early computers especially Apple and IBM and it's no wonder they were expensive. Obviously with low voltages this systems can develop dry connections. Great time piece.
One of the freaky things about the Apple /// was that it had custom circuitry external to the 6502 that added additional addressing modes (using unused bit patterns for instructions) so that the processor could actually access 24 bits worth of address space directly, without needing to bank switch like most other Apple IIs. (The 65816 used in the IIGS actually could address 24 bits of address space directly, by multiplexing the upper 8 bits onto the data bus lines.)
Daniel Watson lol I saw your comment on another Apple /// video in which you said it was a shitbox Edit: nevermind, it was someone with a very similar profile pic. I’m sorry about that.
Awesome episode! I really enjoyed this. It’s important to preserve these models for historical purposes. I find the green monochrome color to be extremely cool. It really takes me back to quite a number of years ago. Thanks for the upload.
Ahoy, Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I used an Apple /// from the mid-80s into the 90s. Mine was a later one and was decked out complete with 2 DD and the Profile HD. On a whim I bought an RGB 25" studio monitor for a song, found a cable mailorder and got it working on the ///. Later I found a card at a swap meet for $5.00. It was called the "///+//e" and was a complete 128k extended Apple //e on a card. With it you could boot onto the card and have a real Apple //e running. So I got to run all my games in glorious RGB 25" color. IMHO the Apple /// Business BASIC was about the most complete BASIC I ever used. Try to get a copy of it if you can. Later in the 90s I lost my complete collection of vintage systems in a house fire. My 2 biggest losses were the Apple /// and a working Gimix Ghost MC6800 SS50 system I bought for $10.00 at a boot sale. Keep up the great work, daveyb
Greetings from Bulgaria! I really like this computer, please make more thorough review with software running on the machine some day when you have the time 😀
Apple may not have sold a whole lot of III computers, but they certainly sold a mess of those monitors. They are instantly recognizable to anyone who went to a public school in the 80s & 90s. They have a gorgeous deep green long persistence phosphor which I think really sets them apart from any other vintage monitor.
Originally the Apple III had a detached keyboard with a coiled cable between the keyboard and the chassis. I liked that feature because on the Apple II it was more difficult to find good ergonomics for the keyboard. Unfortunately, Apple recalled these early machines due to radio interference. The machines came back with the fixed keyboard as you have.
Fantastic machine! The Apple /// seems rare enough that I haven't seen any other videos on it before, so this was a treat! I was hoping the RAM was OK and just needed reseating, since the /// was mostly legendary for the whole "overheats to the point where the chips unseat themselves so you need to lift it and drop it three inches onto a table to reseat the chips" thing. It was funny to see there may be something to that myth...
The joystick ports ARE NOT COMPATIBLE with the apple ][ joysticks. If you plug an apple II joystick in a 3 the joystick buttons will send power where it shouldn't go. The Apple /// freaks out and reboots. Use Apple /// joysticks only.
Ah, the notorious Rifa reefer! They always pop, but they never actually cause a fire. They are still being produced (but now under the kemet name), and they are still prone to failure after 20 years or so. AFAIK they don't lose capacity like modern plastic dielectrum caps do, but they sure do smell when they fail.
Had one of those blow it's top in a oscilloscope I was in the middle of repairing. (Phillips branded scope from the 70's) Man what a huge stinker!!! RifaPopTop! that's the nickname we gave them.
Rifa was a Swedish manufacturer of electronic components. The capacitors were really good, but as with anything that’s old they tend to go up in smokes. The funny thing is that you don’t generally find Rifa brand capacitors in old Swedish made electronics. One of the few Swedish products that used Rifa capacitors was in L. M. Ericsson’s telephones.
My mother bought one of these for her real estate business in Knoxville. She even had a phone in her car at the time, so she was keen on using technology for success. Unfortunately, the Apple /// didn't really work well, so she ended up giving it to me. Of course, I don't have it any more, but this video was nostalgic :D
Wow that is a relic of the past, but very impressive for the time. Back in middle school, I had a friend whose dad was a professor. And they had an Apple III computer. I remember I was impressed by how powerful it was, and that it could emulate the Apple II (which we used to play games!)
Wow! All these years I thought the keyboard was separate from the unit. Quite an illusion from just front profile pictures over the years. The insides are reminiscent of the Atari 800 style rf shielding. Amazing how sensitive analog electronics were back then. Not much in the way of shielding these days and I wonder how much our bodies are exposed to with modern devices if analog interference is no longer a concern.
The cycle of repeated heating up and cooling down that is the main cause of chips walking out of sockets, not excessive heat. RAM in DIP or SIP form factor especially has this issue on many types of older computers. There are several different general style of DIP sockets used. Some manufacturers of cheaper sockets were known for loose chip issues.
in a way the heatsink on that old computer is huge even for todays standards but not as efficient as modern heat sinks for dissipating heat to improve cooling point a box fan at it lol
Reseating the board may have worked because the chips were known to pop out of their sockets due to high temps. One solution Apple proposed at the time was to raise the computer off the desk a couple inches and literally drop the computer back onto the desk (hahahaha) and then the chips would drop back into the sockets. This was according to the book “Apple Confidential”. I HIGHLY recommend that book if you can find it. It’s tough to put down.
Dear Adrian, I am far from understanding everything you say, but I will get there with great help of your and Ben Eater´s videos. RESPECT for your knowledge guys. Thanks :)
I have a complete set as well including software and handbooks and termic printer. All from my first job from 1982-1989. I worked with it a lot and even the management came down looking. Not sure what t do with it now. I am early retirered now as is that machine.
When i was in elementary school in the early 90s (the south west of winston salem in north carolina) the computer lab was filled with apple iic and apple iii's they were the first ones i learned on. Im surprised to hear how few of the 3s were sold... i guess i was lucky. Even tho i remember very little about them, other than the green and purple colors i recall from various programs they had us run.
Newer Apple products still suffer from heating problems. Apple wants the MacBook to be quiet. The result is the fan doesn't kick in as soon as it should causing it to run hotter the CPU starts to thermal throttle. The remedy is a third party app such as Macs Fan Control.
Gary Cameron when I opened one of the latest MacBooks I was like what? who designed this? when I saw a small fan far from a small heatsink. Normally a fan is close to the ribs and either blows the air on them or sucks it out through them. But in the case of that MacBook it's like a pretty much useless fan that can't even get enough hot air out of the case at max rpm. And let's not forget a "heat gun" MacBook where again heatsink wasn't enough so the fan was blowing out really hot air but it was actually going to display bezel which was glued with some glue which wasn't too resistant to heat. It looked like purposefully designed bezel self-destruct mechanism.
@@ischmidt and jobs literally told us to drop the iii when it fails (pretty logical solution tbh). Apple iii have so many funny stuff when it was released
Thanks for sharing. This machine is quite elegantly looking. If only they had cleaned it up and stuck a GUI on it... the Apple IISG kind of proved there was a way foreward even if it was some years later. Steves ego created division in the company. Don't get me wrong, I love the Mac :)
12 volt RAM is not weird or rare. It is just an earlier design of DRAM that was very common, and in fact the only type of DRAM design in wide production till newer designs were developed that did not need the +12 and -5 volt supplies in addition to the logic +5 volt supply. The 4116 was used in commodore, radio shack, atari, Sinclair, and just about every other computer till the 4164 became available. The 4116 was also in arcade video game consoles and pinball machines.
2:47 i immediately think of the Gamecube Shoulder Buttons, where you slide down and then click. You can also do what’s called the dual tact mod which makes the buttons act like the arrow keys you described here.
A Monitor /// screen is not easy to clean. It has a textured surface to improve the contrast. This texture would capture dust after it was wet and it could make viewing MUCH worse. I would use a soft brush to help get the dust out of the grooves but it was still a real chore to clean.
2:04 Sorry to be pedantic, but I'm pretty sure it's an RS-232 DB25 connector. So basically a serial port. Common for connecting modems and other peripherals which used streaming data in this era.
Another reason for the aluminum block design. FCC regs. They were softened up somewhat after a fiasco with Texas Instruments which had their computer delayed much to the chagrin of the Texas House rep who complained to the FCC that their shielding standards were too high. Both the Apple III and the first Atari 8-bits used huge aluminum covers to contain RF signals in 1980 and 79 respectively.
Those Rifa safety caps are notorious for doing that. The explanation I was told is when they sit for a long time, they suck in moisture and when voltage is applied again they blow their guts everywhere. Often their cases are cracked or compromised if you are to look at them prior to poweron.
I've opened so many electronics from the 80s with those crappy X2s inside them. You've actually just reminded me that I need to double check the inside of my mid 80s Casio synth because the chorus unit is making one hell of a noise...
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.... I cut my teeth on an Apple II shared between about 15 people in the early 1980s. My principal use was with spreadsheets (Visicalc?) as a young product manager, preparing sales and GP reports and forecasts, hooked up to a dot-matrix sprocket paper feed printer.
I heard that Apple support used to tell people having this RAM issue to lift the computer and drop it on the table. This was supposedly to help chips reseat themselves into the sockets.
i like your videos, i like that you dont put music and that you show the computers all the time, i dont like to see faces of people when they talk about computers
The 12 volt ram chips in the smaller sizes were pin compatible with the 5v only ones. The extra +12 and -5 power pins were NC on the 5 volt parts. IIRC only the 4k and 16k parts were made in the 3 voltage type. the 16K parts 86'ed the CS pin, and used it as A6 (the lack of RAS or CAS was used as a CS). On the 64K and 256K parts, the unused +12 and -5 pins became A7 and A8. SO... I think that the 5v only 4K and 16K parts will work in a board designed for 12v chips, BUT it might be safer to not insert the NC pins into the sockets, just in case....
Those rifa capacitors are also a problem in BBC Micro power supplies. They're all getting too old and need replacing. I make a point of it in a prophylactic capacity.
The Apple /// also had an interlace kit you could buy, that double the lines on screen which removed the gap between the horizontal lines. The interlace kit didn't work with every monitor as some Apple /// monitors could handle the refresh rate without flicker. I recall checking multiple monitors at the local computer dealer until I found one that worked perfectly well with the Apple /// interlace hardware upgrade. :-) Also, a number of people didn't know that you could turn off the video hardware to increase the CPU clock speed a little.
"Also, a number of people didn't know that you could turn off the video hardware to increase the CPU clock speed a little." That was a pretty common trick on hardware of the day. For example, I know the Commodore 64 could do it, as well as the ZX80/81/TS1000.
That is a paper metalized film capacitor Rafi made a ton of them and they area plauge on everything from the 1980s through the 1990s. A lot of test equipment from Tektronix and HP in that era used them.
Apple II emulation was limited by the Apple III designers so it could only emulate a 48K machine because of their marketing decisions. They didn't want the two machines competing against each other. One of the joystick ports used extra pins to control their thermal printer called the silent type printer. It's another reason not to try just any type of joystick or game controller that wasn't made for the Apple III.
It's not a software limitation, Apple actually built-in hardware circuity to block RAM access above 48K in Apple II mode. No amount of programming can get around this, you literally must modify the motherboard (to the best of my knowledge, no one ever has). This "crippling" was done purposely to discourage further development and usage of the Apple II. Interestingly Titan released hardware plug-in boards that emulated a full 64K Apple II Plus and (later) a 128K Apple IIe on the Apple III.
It's probably more difficult than you imagine. It has to emulate the 16 K language card mappings of memory, i.e. 2 4Kbyte block at address $D000-$DFFF and 1 6Kbyte block of RAM at $E000-$F7FF and a 2 Kbyte block at $F800-$FFFF of ROM or RAM, all controlled with soft switch at address $C080-$C08F
My dad had the revised Apple /// that didn't overheat and lose chips. Bought it new. It cost about $7000 back in 1981-ish. I remember the Apple ][ emulation 48k limitation causing some of the newer games that required 64k to not work. A game that used the joystick would not work as the axis would be completely wrong. My dad was a bit of an electronics tinkerer(built a Heathkit TV once) and was able to correct the joystick problem by building an adapter that switched some pins around to make it work. He bought the Apple Pascal compiler and spent most of his time writing programs on it.
There used to be a video card that supported actual greyscale on the apple //e called the Screen Enhancer by Video 7.. it sometimes caused issues due to the hack color esp in hgr mode.. used to have a rca switch box I made to switch the native video and the video 7 video to the apple green mono display
Would be cool to see what actual applications were available on the Apple ///. I.e. what spreadsheet, word processor, and other software would a “business” user actually run on it? I’m thinking native Apple /// software (not Apple II software running in emulation)
looks like the same cap that go bad in other apples. most of the apple ii power supplies look like that, mine has a dyna corp power supply, the caps are in the power cord socket which i am glad, i would rather solder the wires to the socket than have to solder on the board.
Cool - I always had a low-grade curiosity about these since we had a ][e at home and one of my dad's friends had a ///. I'd see it when we were at his house and it looked alien (in a good way). He was very dismissive of it and I couldn't understand why at the time - it was probably 1984, though, so it was clearly an abject failure by that time.
I owned and used an Apple /// from around 1981 to the late 1980s (when I bought an Amiga). I used Apple /// mode for business type programs and Apple ][ mode for games. The Apple /// hardware was designed to limit Apple ][ mode to 48K so the Apple /// wouldn’t compete with Apple’s cash cow, the Apple ][. I really loved using the Apple /// after I got the Profile /// hard disk so I didn’t have to keep swapping floppies constantly. I just wish it was made to boot directly from the Profile ///.
The apple III doesn't run without the filter capacitor? All apple II's can run fine without the part. On our apple II's, I just removed the part and cleaned the goo off and put it back together and they all run fine. It's very common for apple II's to pop the filter capacitor after 30+ years.
Augh. You know, even though I don't _produce_ any video, I know people who work on every aspect of the chain, and... man, it's 2018, why can't we figure out A/V sync? =( (And yes, I have an appreciation of the challenges involved, but c'mon, we've known about and understood this problem for decades, so why isn't it fixed yet?? =3 )
This many years on from their introduction-coming up on 40 years!-I would recommend that if you're serious about keeping your Apple /// working, you buy up every reasonably-priced spare part you can find... >.>
Almost 100% sure a mistake @2:05 and caught by others, but after looking back through a couple years of comments didn't see so asking for myself... Apple didn't have some rare RS-323 protocol they used standard RS-232 correct? Well done videos, I let them auto play in the background while doing other things. I've done much of the same work and my internal video has no sync problem with your audio!
6:43 Ye olde Rifa PME ... those are infamous for getting cracks, attract moisture and then blew up. Fortunately they are still "safe" in most cases, so they usually only produce a lot of ugly smoke but no fire (there is no guarantee at all for that, of course). Often you can technically use the device normally while the smoke is pouring out, but of course no one does this and I really don't recommend it. They were designed to fail in this "relatively benign" way (there is usually no collateral damage) if they ever fail. Nevertheless, if you encounter those .. change them. Don't bother if they are okay now. They WILL fail sooner or later.
Sorry about the audio sync issues. This was a UA-cam processing problem and they didn't want to help replace the video. (Since the source file I uploaded had no audio issues.)
can you send me a link of the capasitors that you bought?
Other sites, like Vimeo, allow you to re-upload a video. Why is it UA-cam does not?
That's fine! :D
🙃💀question can you use a ide card for a apple 3
I worked for an Apple dealership from 1979 to 1989. The biggest problem with the Apple /// was that they used sub-par IC sockets. During shipping, IC chips would start working their way out of the sockets. The remedy was to re-seat the IC chips, much as you have done. After that, it was a fine machine. I still use the phrase, "I'm okay, machine status normal."
Somewhere I learned that the Apple /// RAM would also start to crawl out of the sockets as the machine heated up. Rumor has it the fix for this would be to power off, lift the front of the machine a bit and drop it.
The socket issue was caused by contact fretting due to dissimilar metals between the chip leads and the socket material. Chips didn't just 'get loose'. Apple could've solved the issue by getting rid of the sockets entirely (the cheapest way) or using gold plated sockets - not Apple's stye. Whoever was in Apple Engineering at the time desperately needed re-boot. Also, overheating with these computers is a myth. Remember folks, these were 6502 computers. This one slightly over-clocked.
WIsh I had seen this before I left my message. Yup, that is exactly what we found with our units.
Desolder sockets, solder chips in. Problem fixed.
I seem to remember there was actual technical support advice from Apple to lift the computer off the desk and drop it. This was suppose to help reseat the chips after they worked their way out of the sockets. Also I believe it was the heating issues that flexed the components that caused them to come loose.
The heat issue is due exclusively to Steve Jobs who ordered the engineering department that no fans could be used, period. Engineers aren't dumb, they knew this machine needed active cooling. But Jobs refused, even fired people who questioned him on this. Wozniak, who had nothing to do with this project, stated the failure of the machine was entirely due to the misdirection of Jobs.
For those who own machines with 12V RAM chips, there is a way to get them going with 5V RAM chips:
1. Firstly, grab your new memory chip, a TO-92 7805 voltage regulator, a 100nF 50V ceramic cap and, more importantly, a cup of coffee;
2. *Lift the chip's VCC pin* and solder it to the *pin 3 of the voltage regulator* and to *one of the pins of the capacitor;*
3. Solder a piece of wire *from the GND pin of the chip* (without lifting it), to *pin 2 of the voltage regulator* and to *the other pin of the cap;*
4. Bend *pin 1 of the voltage regulator,* in a way as to make it fit into *the original VCC pin of the socket;*
5. Glue both the cap and the regulator onto the chip's back, with epoxy resin (not really critical);
6. IT'S DONE!
P.S.: Prevously, I said you would need a 7806 regulator. Sorry! You'll need a *7805.* Actually, if you were to install a 7806, you'd cause an SCR Latchup in the chip, and this would release it's magic smoke pretty quickly.
P.S. 2: Please check your new chip's pinout, to ensure both the old and the new chip are pin-by-pin compatible.
+simontay1984 Come on! It's not even bodgy enough for the 1980's. Hahahah
Wouldn't it be more easy to use a generic 9+V DC to 5V DC bucks? Adding a 7805 only adds more heat, and these days the buck converters are very small.
Reminds me of some memory upgrade hacks from the 1980s where they would solder piggyback more memory chips, but bend one leg out for additional addressing.
or pay the measly 8 bucks lol
The reason you'd use a linear regulator over a buck regulator is because of noise. Linear regulators create a very clean output which requires minimal filtering. Buck regulators on the other than are RF blasters and produce very noisy output, which requires complex filtering that usually isn't present on readymade buck modules.
The interference a buck regulator creates can cause erratic behavior in circuits, especially older low-frequency circuits. It's the reason why audio gear still uses linear supplies, even though it makes them large and heavy.
I worked in a computer store in San DIego that specialized in Apple computers. I remember when the Apple III was released. We were excited about it until we actually set up the demo unit and started experiencing glitches from the moment we powered it on. Things got really bad after it began heating up.
It seems that many of the problems were caused by overheating and poorlly seated chips, and after opening the unit and pressing down on the chips, we could get it to work. But after experiencing these initial problems, I never had to heart to recommend it to any customers. I left the shortly after - but not because of the Apple. I was offered a better job.
What a shame.
If I was to get one of these, the first thing I would do is rig up some cooling fans. Remember the infamous advice from Apple themselves: if your Apple 3 stops working, pick it up and drop it on the desk. Having said that, I still think that the best Apple for collectors is the IIGS.
That advice was because the /// used a tin socket between the motherboard and RAM board, which would start corroding basically the second the machine was assembled. Banging on the machine would move it enough to restore contact, but Apple eventually recalled the machines and replaced it with a gold connector which was reliable. Heat was never the problem.
I worked for an Apple dealer in the Detroit area back in the late 70s through about 1985. I was also a member of a local Apple computer user group and back around 1980 or so Apple had a special get together in Chicago as an outreach to the user groups. A couple of friends and I went to the meeting and saw Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak there. Can’t remember for sure now but I think the other speaker from Apple was Mark Markkula? In any case he was talking about the problems they were currently having with the Apple /// and he said the problem was “Workers who didn't know the difference between this socket and that one, and you can’t explain it because they don’t speak English!”. Got a lot of laughs from the audience, but obviously was a different time then.
Great video! :-). The Apple /// was my first computer. I learned so much on the Apple /// I ended up writing an assembler for the 65802 process which was compatible with the 6502 in the Apple ///. The 65802 added 16 bit support.
That "I'm okay, machine status normal." was an absolute joy to behold. If someone could upload a high quality sample off it that would be amazing.
before we even got there, and i know this is an old video, but i called it when you said a cap blew up, "I bet it was a Rifa!"
Same here! Apple is predictable
It's always the rifa cap. Same with IBM systems.
I had an Apple III because I needed to run spreadsheets that required more memory than an Apple II could handle. We had 2 problems. Compatibility between the 2 and 3 was limited. The Apple dealer in our area was very happy to sell but offered no maintenance or repair support. We began switching to IBM. Eventually I purchased over 2,000 PCs every year. All of them were IBM type unless the user had a very specific need for an Apple.
I remember the III from my first job working for an Apple dealer. It's biggest problem wasn't the poor reliability as much as the almost complete lack of software, and a really poor "emulation mode" that has compatibility issues. Ultimately the IIe put the final nail in its coffin.
More specifically, 80 column text mode in the //e.
The lack of software definitely hurt the ///, as did the high price. But for pascal-based accounting software like Great Pains you really couldn't beat how well a /// with a Profile handled it.
Steve Jobs insisted that this needed to use the case as a giant heat sink and wouldn't let the engineers install any case fans. The thing overheated like crazy and the chips would pop out of their sockets as boards got hot and warped. But Jobs was a genius! LOL
6:39 RIFA (Radioindustrins Fabrik Aktiebolag) was a Swedish electronics manufacturer which was established in 1942 and originally manufactured resistors and capacitors.
In 1982 I went to work for a New York City bank. The new Controller had heard about microcomputers and purchased an Apple III. It sat on a table waiting for someone to approach it. I did and shortly thereafter VisiCalc and I were generating spreadsheets at an unbelievable pace that shocked the accounting department and the Controller. Would have been even faster but the dot matrix printer was sooo slow. I still have the computer today! Have not booted it since the 90's. Thanks for taking me on this walk down memory lane.
Those RIFA capacitors love to spill their guts. BBC Micro's have the same capacitors, and the same problems
would any old film cap of any size work? These seem extremely large - I guess thats for a reason?
No. These need to be X2 rated caps, designed to withstand 2.5 kV peak and approved by UL / ENEC / etc.. Traditionally they are special metallized paper caps, but metallized propropylene seems to be working well, too. You generally get what you pay for with these, and comparing dimensions you'll generally find that parts from a reputable brand (WIMA etc.) are bigger than some others, implying thicker dielectric and thus better peak voltage handling and slower aging.
Incidentally, Yamaha also recalled some of their early-'80s HiFi amps just a few years ago due to the very same Rifa caps (though really, if I had something like an A-960 II I'd much rather swap out the cap and keep it, those are nice amps). They're also pop-ular replacement candidates in Dual turntables.
They were used in a lot of electronic devices, including hifi gear. All of them eventually fail, and for this reason, Yamaha for instance still has a service program to replace them for free in your amp from the late 70s-to this day!
Think Rifa was a Swedish brand
Josh Rice the first Macintoshes have a Rifa cap directly connected to mains and it can blow even when the computer is turned off. I leared that the hard way.
Apple had problems with the original RAM sockets being too tight, and bending the pins when they inserted the RAM chips. They replaced them with lower insertion pressure sockets, but the chips tended to work part way out of the sockets during transportation. The official solution was to place the computer on a flat, hard surface, unpowered, lift it six inches, and drop it to seat the chips. It actually worked in many cases.
A lot of engineering at the time went into early computers especially Apple and IBM and it's no wonder they were expensive. Obviously with low voltages this systems can develop dry connections. Great time piece.
Yes but IBM had good engineering and Apple had shit engineering.
One of the freaky things about the Apple /// was that it had custom circuitry external to the 6502 that added additional addressing modes (using unused bit patterns for instructions) so that the processor could actually access 24 bits worth of address space directly, without needing to bank switch like most other Apple IIs. (The 65816 used in the IIGS actually could address 24 bits of address space directly, by multiplexing the upper 8 bits onto the data bus lines.)
What a beautiful thing, I had never even heard of the Apple 3! Great presentation, and nice to see this great piece of computing history!
Daniel Watson lol I saw your comment on another Apple /// video in which you said it was a shitbox
Edit: nevermind, it was someone with a very similar profile pic. I’m sorry about that.
I remember our school's Honeywell mini computer in the '70s. Colour was the dream, but green's what we got!
Awesome episode! I really enjoyed this. It’s important to preserve these models for historical purposes. I find the green monochrome color to be extremely cool. It really takes me back to quite a number of years ago. Thanks for the upload.
I used a few of these in my school's Apple II lab. They stood out from the rest a little.
Ahoy, Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I used an Apple /// from the mid-80s into the 90s. Mine was a later one and was decked out complete with 2 DD and the Profile HD. On a whim I bought an RGB 25" studio monitor for a song, found a cable mailorder and got it working on the ///. Later I found a card at a swap meet for $5.00. It was called the "///+//e" and was a complete 128k extended Apple //e on a card. With it you could boot onto the card and have a real Apple //e running. So I got to run all my games in glorious RGB 25" color. IMHO the Apple /// Business BASIC was about the most complete BASIC I ever used. Try to get a copy of it if you can. Later in the 90s I lost my complete collection of vintage systems in a house fire. My 2 biggest losses were the Apple /// and a working Gimix Ghost MC6800 SS50 system I bought for $10.00 at a boot sale. Keep up the great work, daveyb
Greetings from Bulgaria!
I really like this computer, please make more thorough review with software running on the machine some day when you have the time 😀
Apple may not have sold a whole lot of III computers, but they certainly sold a mess of those monitors. They are instantly recognizable to anyone who went to a public school in the 80s & 90s. They have a gorgeous deep green long persistence phosphor which I think really sets them apart from any other vintage monitor.
Originally the Apple III had a detached keyboard with a coiled cable between the keyboard and the chassis. I liked that feature because on the Apple II it was more difficult to find good ergonomics for the keyboard. Unfortunately, Apple recalled these early machines due to radio interference. The machines came back with the fixed keyboard as you have.
The 0.22UF capacitors are also present on power supplies for BBC Micros. After 30 years they've all blown too!
Fantastic machine! The Apple /// seems rare enough that I haven't seen any other videos on it before, so this was a treat!
I was hoping the RAM was OK and just needed reseating, since the /// was mostly legendary for the whole "overheats to the point where the chips unseat themselves so you need to lift it and drop it three inches onto a table to reseat the chips" thing. It was funny to see there may be something to that myth...
Even more rare is the Apple ///+
The joystick ports ARE NOT COMPATIBLE with the apple ][ joysticks. If you plug an apple II joystick in a 3 the joystick buttons will send power where it shouldn't go. The Apple /// freaks out and reboots. Use Apple /// joysticks only.
Very good to know. I have an Apple ///+ in my collection along with various Apple ][ series equipment.
Ouch.
Ah, the notorious Rifa reefer! They always pop, but they never actually cause a fire.
They are still being produced (but now under the kemet name), and they are still prone to failure after 20 years or so.
AFAIK they don't lose capacity like modern plastic dielectrum caps do, but they sure do smell when they fail.
Had one of those blow it's top in a oscilloscope I was in the middle of repairing. (Phillips branded scope from the 70's)
Man what a huge stinker!!! RifaPopTop! that's the nickname we gave them.
Such a beautiful machine.
Rifa was a Swedish manufacturer of electronic components. The capacitors were really good, but as with anything that’s old they tend to go up in smokes.
The funny thing is that you don’t generally find Rifa brand capacitors in old Swedish made electronics. One of the few Swedish products that used Rifa capacitors was in L. M. Ericsson’s telephones.
My mother bought one of these for her real estate business in Knoxville. She even had a phone in her car at the time, so she was keen on using technology for success. Unfortunately, the Apple /// didn't really work well, so she ended up giving it to me. Of course, I don't have it any more, but this video was nostalgic :D
Wow that is a relic of the past, but very impressive for the time. Back in middle school, I had a friend whose dad was a professor. And they had an Apple III computer. I remember I was impressed by how powerful it was, and that it could emulate the Apple II (which we used to play games!)
Funny as your voice sounds so much different after just 6 years I follow your channel.
I died (of dysentery) when you busted out with "The Oregon Trail" at the end.
Wow! All these years I thought the keyboard was separate from the unit. Quite an illusion from just front profile pictures over the years. The insides are reminiscent of the Atari 800 style rf shielding. Amazing how sensitive analog electronics were back then. Not much in the way of shielding these days and I wonder how much our bodies are exposed to with modern devices if analog interference is no longer a concern.
The cycle of repeated heating up and cooling down that is the main cause of chips walking out of sockets, not excessive heat.
RAM in DIP or SIP form factor especially has this issue on many types of older computers.
There are several different general style of DIP sockets used. Some manufacturers of cheaper sockets were known for loose chip issues.
Wow, i've never seen the inside of one of those. Cool.
in a way the heatsink on that old computer is huge even for todays standards but not as efficient as modern heat sinks for dissipating heat to improve cooling point a box fan at it lol
Reseating the board may have worked because the chips were known to pop out of their sockets due to high temps. One solution Apple proposed at the time was to raise the computer off the desk a couple inches and literally drop the computer back onto the desk (hahahaha) and then the chips would drop back into the sockets. This was according to the book “Apple Confidential”. I HIGHLY recommend that book if you can find it. It’s tough to put down.
Dear Adrian, I am far from understanding everything you say, but I will get there with great help of your and Ben Eater´s videos. RESPECT for your knowledge guys. Thanks :)
I have a complete set as well including software and handbooks and termic printer. All from my first job from 1982-1989. I worked with it a lot and even the management came down looking. Not sure what t do with it now. I am early retirered now as is that machine.
Ahhh the days of CGA almost makes me want to dig out my old 286 Digital Vaxmate i used at college in the 80's to get my degree in computing science!
When i was in elementary school in the early 90s (the south west of winston salem in north carolina) the computer lab was filled with apple iic and apple iii's they were the first ones i learned on. Im surprised to hear how few of the 3s were sold... i guess i was lucky. Even tho i remember very little about them, other than the green and purple colors i recall from various programs they had us run.
Really enjoyable tour thanks
6:15 Those are the same ones I see blow in old IBM PC's and Macintosh computers, too. They should probably all be replaced at this point.
Just looking at the outside (forgetting about the actual electronics for a sec.) The Apple /// is definitely a step on the road to The Lisa.
Thank you for the video - its a computer that (at age 5) always fascinated me for its appearance. Good to learn more about it, much appreciated.
Apple should have concentrated on the Apple series for home consumers. Can you imagine having an 'Apple VII' today? I would totally buy one!
1:41 “innovative” aka “suffering from chronic heating problems”
Newer Apple products still suffer from heating problems. Apple wants the MacBook to be quiet. The result is the fan doesn't kick in as soon as it should causing it to run hotter the CPU starts to thermal throttle. The remedy is a third party app such as Macs Fan Control.
Gary Cameron when I opened one of the latest MacBooks I was like what? who designed this? when I saw a small fan far from a small heatsink. Normally a fan is close to the ribs and either blows the air on them or sucks it out through them. But in the case of that MacBook it's like a pretty much useless fan that can't even get enough hot air out of the case at max rpm. And let's not forget a "heat gun" MacBook where again heatsink wasn't enough so the fan was blowing out really hot air but it was actually going to display bezel which was glued with some glue which wasn't too resistant to heat. It looked like purposefully designed bezel self-destruct mechanism.
Urban legend. The /// didn't have heating problems, it had cheap board-to-board socket problems. The hardware engineers have all confirmed it.
Sometimes innovation has no fans! 🤣
@@ischmidt and jobs literally told us to drop the iii when it fails (pretty logical solution tbh). Apple iii have so many funny stuff when it was released
Thanks for sharing. This machine is quite elegantly looking. If only they had cleaned it up and stuck a GUI on it... the Apple IISG kind of proved there was a way foreward even if it was some years later. Steves ego created division in the company. Don't get me wrong, I love the Mac :)
Good to see some like are keeping these alive. Hard to believe but at least a part of Back to Future movie was very true!
12 volt RAM is not weird or rare. It is just an earlier design of DRAM that was very common, and in fact the only type of DRAM design in wide production till newer designs were developed that did not need the +12 and -5 volt supplies in addition to the logic +5 volt supply.
The 4116 was used in commodore, radio shack, atari, Sinclair, and just about every other computer till the 4164 became available. The 4116 was also in arcade video game consoles and pinball machines.
I used to play Oregon Trail on the Apple II at my elementary school in the 90s
Wow; I used to own one of these. I used the Apple II emulator disk and don't remember ever having an issue with it.
That computer is awsome and well worth hanging on to as it's worth a lot of money.
2:47 i immediately think of the Gamecube Shoulder Buttons, where you slide down and then click. You can also do what’s called the dual tact mod which makes the buttons act like the arrow keys you described here.
10 PRINT "Windex";
20 GOTO 10
SYNTAX ERROR IN LINE 10
The Original Gamer Not anymore 😉
@@oturgator Windex
Windex
Windex
Windex
Windex
Windex
Windex
Windex
Windex
Windex
The Original Gamer Scroll? (as a ZX Sinclair Spectrum would say)
A Monitor /// screen is not easy to clean. It has a textured surface to improve the contrast. This texture would capture dust after it was wet and it could make viewing MUCH worse. I would use a soft brush to help get the dust out of the grooves but it was still a real chore to clean.
2:04 Sorry to be pedantic, but I'm pretty sure it's an RS-232 DB25 connector. So basically a serial port. Common for connecting modems and other peripherals which used streaming data in this era.
Another reason for the aluminum block design. FCC regs. They were softened up somewhat after a fiasco with Texas Instruments which had their computer delayed much to the chagrin of the Texas House rep who complained to the FCC that their shielding standards were too high. Both the Apple III and the first Atari 8-bits used huge aluminum covers to contain RF signals in 1980 and 79 respectively.
mgabrysSF also the first Atari 2600 with 3 switches on each side used a big hunk of aluminium as a shield and could double as a boat anchor.
Those Rifa safety caps are notorious for doing that. The explanation I was told is when they sit for a long time, they suck in moisture and when voltage is applied again they blow their guts everywhere. Often their cases are cracked or compromised if you are to look at them prior to poweron.
And thus Adrian begins his long adversarial relationship with Rifa caps.
I've opened so many electronics from the 80s with those crappy X2s inside them. You've actually just reminded me that I need to double check the inside of my mid 80s Casio synth because the chorus unit is making one hell of a noise...
New too your channel , so happy to see an apple III video.
Thanks - I have fond memories of using an Apple IIe in high school and was very curious about the Apple III :-) - Grey
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be....
I cut my teeth on an Apple II shared between about 15 people in the early 1980s. My principal use was with spreadsheets (Visicalc?) as a young product manager, preparing sales and GP reports and forecasts, hooked up to a dot-matrix sprocket paper feed printer.
I heard that Apple support used to tell people having this RAM issue to lift the computer and drop it on the table. This was supposedly to help chips reseat themselves into the sockets.
i like your videos, i like that you dont put music and that you show the computers all the time, i dont like to see faces of people when they talk about computers
The 12 volt ram chips in the smaller sizes were pin compatible with the 5v only ones. The extra +12 and -5 power pins were NC on the 5 volt parts. IIRC only the 4k and 16k parts were made in the 3 voltage type. the 16K parts 86'ed the CS pin, and used it as A6 (the lack of RAS or CAS was used as a CS). On the 64K and 256K parts, the unused +12 and -5 pins became A7 and A8. SO... I think that the 5v only 4K and 16K parts will work in a board designed for 12v chips, BUT it might be safer to not insert the NC pins into the sockets, just in case....
Those rifa capacitors are also a problem in BBC Micro power supplies. They're all getting too old and need replacing. I make a point of it in a prophylactic capacity.
The Apple /// also had an interlace kit you could buy, that double the lines on screen which removed the gap between the horizontal lines. The interlace kit didn't work with every monitor as some Apple /// monitors could handle the refresh rate without flicker. I recall checking multiple monitors at the local computer dealer until I found one that worked perfectly well with the Apple /// interlace hardware upgrade. :-) Also, a number of people didn't know that you could turn off the video hardware to increase the CPU clock speed a little.
"Also, a number of people didn't know that you could turn off the video hardware to increase the CPU clock speed a little." That was a pretty common trick on hardware of the day. For example, I know the Commodore 64 could do it, as well as the ZX80/81/TS1000.
That is a paper metalized film capacitor Rafi made a ton of them and they area plauge on everything from the 1980s through the 1990s. A lot of test equipment from Tektronix and HP in that era used them.
Apple II emulation was limited by the Apple III designers so it could only emulate a 48K machine because of their marketing decisions. They didn't want the two machines competing against each other. One of the joystick ports used extra pins to control their thermal printer called the silent type printer. It's another reason not to try just any type of joystick or game controller that wasn't made for the Apple III.
It's not a software limitation, Apple actually built-in hardware circuity to block RAM access above 48K in Apple II mode. No amount of programming can get around this, you literally must modify the motherboard (to the best of my knowledge, no one ever has). This "crippling" was done purposely to discourage further development and usage of the Apple II. Interestingly Titan released hardware plug-in boards that emulated a full 64K Apple II Plus and (later) a 128K Apple IIe on the Apple III.
It's probably more difficult than you imagine. It has to emulate the 16 K language card mappings of memory, i.e. 2 4Kbyte block at address $D000-$DFFF and 1 6Kbyte block of RAM at $E000-$F7FF and a 2 Kbyte block at $F800-$FFFF of ROM or RAM, all controlled with soft switch at address $C080-$C08F
My dad had the revised Apple /// that didn't overheat and lose chips. Bought it new. It cost about $7000 back in 1981-ish.
I remember the Apple ][ emulation 48k limitation causing some of the newer games that required 64k to not work.
A game that used the joystick would not work as the axis would be completely wrong. My dad was a bit of an electronics tinkerer(built a Heathkit TV once) and was able to correct the joystick problem by building an adapter that switched some pins around to make it work.
He bought the Apple Pascal compiler and spent most of his time writing programs on it.
Remember using a apple 2 in the 1st grade I was 7 in 1991 got a good memory 😎
Adrian in 2017: Some fancy caps, German or Swiss brand.
Adrian in 2021: Sh*tty Rifas. xD
That model external floppy is really rare.
Rifa is actually Swedish
Nice to see one of these. pretty much non-obtainum in the UK. IBM 5150s are pretty rear over here to.
There used to be a video card that supported actual greyscale on the apple //e called the Screen Enhancer by Video 7.. it sometimes caused issues due to the hack color esp in hgr mode.. used to have a rca switch box I made to switch the native video and the video 7 video to the apple green mono display
Would be cool to see what actual applications were available on the Apple ///. I.e. what spreadsheet, word processor, and other software would a “business” user actually run on it? I’m thinking native Apple /// software (not Apple II software running in emulation)
enjoyed that - I only have an Mac and a BBC B from that era.
fun to watch this in 2022 and see you not recognizing RIFA caps 😆
What you did was called excelsior the board, common on all socketed chips it was even worst in TI sockets!
Once the IBM PC came out, all 8-bit machines and there architecture were obsolete. It was just a matter of time.
Poorly seated ram chips were my first suspect when you had a failed ram test.
Robert Jordan used it to write his the Wheel of Time series.
The power supply bay is a cookie chamber. Throw in some cookie dough and half hour later you have tantalizing cookies. Tantalum cap chips and all.
Good to know Apple was using cheap-ass caps back then too.
So accepting cookies was a thing back then too, eh?
looks like the same cap that go bad in other apples. most of the apple ii power supplies look like that, mine has a dyna corp power supply, the caps are in the power cord socket which i am glad, i would rather solder the wires to the socket than have to solder on the board.
We had that gloriously sexy green/black monitor. Actually still have it.
When I was a kid, we had an Apple //e with the Monitor ///.
that's nice dear
Cool - I always had a low-grade curiosity about these since we had a ][e at home and one of my dad's friends had a ///. I'd see it when we were at his house and it looked alien (in a good way). He was very dismissive of it and I couldn't understand why at the time - it was probably 1984, though, so it was clearly an abject failure by that time.
I owned and used an Apple /// from around 1981 to the late 1980s (when I bought an Amiga). I used Apple /// mode for business type programs and Apple ][ mode for games. The Apple /// hardware was designed to limit Apple ][ mode to 48K so the Apple /// wouldn’t compete with Apple’s cash cow, the Apple ][. I really loved using the Apple /// after I got the Profile /// hard disk so I didn’t have to keep swapping floppies constantly. I just wish it was made to boot directly from the Profile ///.
The apple III doesn't run without the filter capacitor? All apple II's can run fine without the part. On our apple II's, I just removed the part and cleaned the goo off and put it back together and they all run fine. It's very common for apple II's to pop the filter capacitor after 30+ years.
It’s funny how the Apple /// is rare, but Apple /// monitors are a dime a dozen.
... is the audio/video sync a problem on my end, or yours?
Augh. You know, even though I don't _produce_ any video, I know people who work on every aspect of the chain, and... man, it's 2018, why can't we figure out A/V sync? =(
(And yes, I have an appreciation of the challenges involved, but c'mon, we've known about and understood this problem for decades, so why isn't it fixed yet?? =3 )
This many years on from their introduction-coming up on 40 years!-I would recommend that if you're serious about keeping your Apple /// working, you buy up every reasonably-priced spare part you can find... >.>
Post-recall ///s are as reliable as Apple IIs, but the reputation damage had been done.
I’ve got a monitor I’ve found urban exploring it’s really dope need the keyboard I’ve hooked the monitor up to a cable box and it worked
Almost 100% sure a mistake @2:05 and caught by others, but after looking back through a couple years of comments didn't see so asking for myself... Apple didn't have some rare RS-323 protocol they used standard RS-232 correct?
Well done videos, I let them auto play in the background while doing other things. I've done much of the same work and my internal video has no sync problem with your audio!
3:39 I imagine that was a Jobs-ism.
6:43 Ye olde Rifa PME ... those are infamous for getting cracks, attract moisture and then blew up.
Fortunately they are still "safe" in most cases, so they usually only produce a lot of ugly smoke but no fire (there is no guarantee at all for that, of course).
Often you can technically use the device normally while the smoke is pouring out, but of course no one does this and I really don't recommend it.
They were designed to fail in this "relatively benign" way (there is usually no collateral damage) if they ever fail.
Nevertheless, if you encounter those .. change them. Don't bother if they are okay now. They WILL fail sooner or later.