Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. I got two apple II Europlus. I believe the only difference to the plus is pal output. There is a lot that doesn't work. I would have never been able to fix this without your help. Let's keep our fingers crossed that i will make them work. One of them is heavily modified. It has a Papst fan that sounds like an airplane starting. This one is from the TU Darmstadt applied physics institute. Looks like it measured some nuclear data. I rescued it from trash in the early 2000. The other one was bought by my parents in the late 80ies for the incredible amount of 10.000 DM probably from the geo institute in Frankfurt. It got a ton of equipment which is distributed through my basement ;) We never ever used the 80 col card or the z80. But they always where in their slots. My father still uses the same fortran software ported to PC on his p3-800 using ms-dos 5.0
It's the nostalgia that is my favorite thing. I have plenty of computers I didn't grow up with (Apple II, TI994a, etc) But I recently got a Windows 98 Pentium 200, which is what I grew up with and that computer is just a beautiful thing. It has the "What was it like" but the added nostalgia of what I used to do for fun as a kid. There's something magical about that.
As a kid, taught myself to program on a borrowed TRS80, then the color version (riding my bike through 2 towns to Radio Shack), took more programming classes in high school on the Apple 2, purchased my own complete Apple 2e system with color monitor, spend many hours playing Bards Tale 1 & 2, used the TI99/4A, ending up with the king of them all the Commodore Amiga running all the software from all 3 platforms on the same machine.
Dear Adrian. I think we are aware of the love and passion you got for your activities, and thats why we love watching your videos. Thats the reason that makes them great!!
I have met with Paul Davis who designed the 80-column card and founded Videx. He was the ceo of Videx until his passing a couple of years ago. A cool guy that until the end tinkered with electronics on his free time. He would have loved this video. These days Videx is making electronic lock solutions and is a great company to do work with. Cheers!
A 1 MHz 6502 machine was never state of the art (not even in 1977), just popular. Two different things. (The same could be said about the IBM PC. A pretty boring machine that got popular by help of its brand name and aggressive marketing campains.) Xerox Alto (1972) and Xerox Star (1980) were state of the art in a more real sense. With overlapping windowing, pull down menues, icons, a mouse, wysiwyg, object orientation, laser printing and networking a decade before Gates or Jobs had anything remotely similar.
I still have my plus somewhere. The drive was broken by my sister putting in a floppy backwards back in the day. Im pretty sure this video taught me enough on how to fix it. I would love to do this setup!
My native language has diacritics, I still remember using control H to force a carriage return and make things like: c ^H , = ç or a ^H ‘ for á and so on…
Well .. i never used any apple at all ... my very first computer was in fact already a Amiga 500. ;) But believe me, we can feel the joy these machines bring to you and to see you fixing them with your full heart. ;) It's fun and very joyful to watch you on these videos. ;)
One of the reasons I enjoy old computers like the Apple ][ is that the whole system is comprehensible. Modern processor and system architecture is so multilayered and abstracted that I suspect few people can understand the whole thing down to the physical layer. Or maybe I’m just old.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Apple ][ series of videos, thank you. Around 1980 I bought an Apple ][ with 16K and an RF modulator for $850. Later I bought a single 5 1/4 disk drive for $525. When the //e became available I upgraded. I used the //e for several years before selling it and buying an IBM clone. I actually still have an Apple ][ Plus I acquired two years ago, and watching your videos inspired me to drag it out and play around with it again. Thanks again.
I suspect that the brown coating in the second drive is there from the factory. Anything that got in there afterwards would almost have to also be on the controller board.
@@adriansdigitalbasement That's a protective oxide that is breaking down like Parkerizing or blueing. You see it on old equipment that used alloys of iron or steel to prevent corrosion. Harmless.
Although I agree it's probably a factory coating I'd like to give some info about something similar but on optical drives. That brown stuff looks like the bearing material on dvd /cd drive disc clamps. That's a common look when the clamp bearing goes on panasonic and Sony branded dvd drives. I've seen this a few times on older honda sat nav disc based systems.
Back in the mid 80s I worked for a small computer company here in NJ, a year on the production floor and a year in customer service shipping parts to field offices. We used Shugart 5.25" drives in our units and when software updates would ship out, the old disks would be sent back. They would let me take the old floppies home and I reformatted them for use in my Apple IIc. Not that this is relevant beyond your comments about nostalgia, but I was just starting out in the working world back then and it was a fun place to work, and seeing those drives kicked out some fond memories.
I have a Softcard clone in my IIe that works very well. Though I had kinda figured so prior, using the CPM card opened up this whole new universe that made me realize that the Apple II is an endless machine to explore. I mean, jeez there are even people reading/sending email from this platform. The greatest computer of all time.
Brings back memories of going over to my neighbours and playing on their Apple 2e. Once spent a weekend playing Wizardry. They did get a PAL card but took it back as the colours were terrible. CP/M and Wordstar bring back memories of working on a Little Big Board at the Weather Bureau. It had a pair of 8” drives.
That CPM card changed my life. I was using my Apple ][+ to connect to a old service called PCLink. I was the only Apple on the service in Beta. Got invited to interview ai Quantum Computer Service the company providing QLink, Applelink, and PCLink. Great days.
@@paulchew7675 i was a user of PCLink as the software was bundled with my Tandy 1000hx and then when it became aol i installed the software and was ported right over to that... and surfing on a 2400 baud modem!
Just wanted to thank you for your videos . I'm not even a Commodore or Apple person either. I like them, just weren't the things I used much. I really like the Amiga series. I started with a TI99/4a and went straight to PC. However I see your videos as a zen thing. Something about them is very relaxing, while being educational, lol. It doesn't matter what the content is, I look forward to watching it. Loved your TI videos of course, as I still have mine. Although it's upgraded to VGA now. Keep on keeping on brother.
Wahhhh! Thankyou so much for this video! I was plugging my untested Apple II's 80 columns card directly into my monitor because I didn't realise I had to manually switch to it, that will be why I was getting no video output! (hopefully!!)
These days, doing anything requires layers upon layers of software (written by other people) : run-time engines, operating systems, device drivers, ... There was something very satisfying about entering a few machine language instructions and seeing the contents of physical RAM or the voltage of external wires change exactly as predicted.
Interdasting! The mechanism in that floppy drive is very different from my IBM branded Tandon unit. I haven't taken the controller board off (obviously it's very different and much more complex than Apple's, which was one of their great innovations), but it's got a stepper motor mounted transversly rather than the flat mounted motor of that unit. It has a date stamp of 3-9-84 (presumably the US America date format, so March 84), which I'm guessing is later than those drives. Took the opportunity to give the door guide a grease like you did in the video, and now it's a lot smoother and the release is almost a hair trigger! But the weirdest thing is that the action of the door triggered a memory of playing with the floppy drive on the Apple II in my primary school library. I had completely forgotten they had one there, but the feeling and the noise of opening it reminded me of how I used to flick it up and stop it before it smacked the top so I didn't annoy the librarian. Anyway, great video as always. Love the technical details sprinkled throughout, and it's always great to see these old machines getting fixed or upgraded.
@ Adrian's Digital Basement Videx did briefly make a card, that would handle switching and mixing of the onboard video and the 80-columns card. I forget what it was called, but it used the internal computer video circuit and the Videx card video outputs, then outputted the mixed video through a British style RF connector and a composite connector. It used a form of Genlock to sync up the video signals and would auto-switch when the 80-column card was detected to be taking over but could be manually switched by pressing Alt+Ctrl+V.
I remember using Wordstar in 80-column mode on an Apple IIe, great times. On the PC side a client had a XENIX system supporting Wyze terminals in 132-column mode, which let us display reports already formatted for their 132-column printers.
For the automatic video switching, I assume you get some TTL level signal from the 80 col card header when it's active. Just use a TTL-level signal relay with it. They come in DIP8 packages and such and are very easy to use.
Yup it's called an 80 column auto softswitch. If you look for it on the web someone on applefritter has posted a DIY solution with a 4011 NAND gate and two transistors that looks just like the one I have. That one even has two pots for adjusting the level.
Light pen I called them..any pcb they work on..machine controls and the main pc that booted like a pacman game before loading the proprietary software. Pen helped our service department diagnose any logic board. Boeing was so cool
I liked the way the Apple 80-column cards worked with the Apple //e. Just type "PR#3" at the BASIC prompt and hit . The display output would be automatically switched to the correct video processor without having to flip any switches or move any plugs.
Thank you Adrian for all of your repair adventures. I was an adult before the 70s so my memories are much different than yours. I watch your channel because of the joy you get out of repairing these old machines. I also enjoy watching your approach to diagnosing and repair as you fix the mystery of "What's wrong with this machine?". ( Same reason I enjoy a good mystery movie ). I still work and teach in embedded hardware/software and recommend new e-techs watch your approach and lack of ego and joy in success! ( Please keep the mystery adventures happening as I can't find movies/ebooks where the techies are the heroes )
1980's for me. First computer I used was a Digital PDP 11/20. In the early 80's I had been debating between an Apple IIe or Macintosh. Then the IIgs came out and had I been able to get Apple financing I would have bought one. But instead got a used Tandy 1000a.
Loved the video i spent many days in grade school playing the apple 2e with two games a math one called number munchers and oregon trail hopefully someday i can find one to add to my collection cause this is the only true way to me to get the full effect of oregon trail 😎
The Videx card also had a softswitch available that piggybacks on the 9334 chip for control. I have that and it's far nicer i think to just press "in#n". Great video.
Take a cotton swab and get some of that brow dust looking stuff on it and sent it off to be analysed :D sounds a little silly but it would be fascinating to find out what it is :)
Hi Adrian, I found that the "Iron remover" liquid can help to remove the rust without scratching too much metal off the screw, just put the rust screw in and let it soak for 30 minutes, it really good.
You asked about the beep and whether it's generated by the text display routines. Well yes, it is. Most Apple II software prints text to the screen by calling a routine called COUT (at $FDED) which takes the character in the accumulator and writes it out to the screen. Except COUT doesn't actually do any of that itself; it just calls the routine stored in the character output vector (CSW) at $36/$37 on the direct page. When you boot the machine the startup routine initializes this vector to point at $FDF0 (COUT1) which is the ROM routine that writes characters to the 40-column text screen. COUT1 checks for several different control characters (carriage return, left and right arrows, etc.) and if it sees ASCII BEL (control-G) it calls the BELL1 routine ($FBD9) instead of writing to the screen. But when you run PR#3 it changes the character output vector at $0036.0037 to point at the slot 3 output routine ($C307) in the firmware on the 80-column card. (Note that if you're running DOS or ProDOS the I/O vectors will actually point at routines inside the OS because they need to hook into the I/O.) And yes, PR#6 works to boot a disk because the disk ][ controller card has a "boot from disk" routine at its main firmware entry point. When you type PR#6 it runs the slot 6 I/O setup routine at $C600 (which would normally initialize the character input/output vectors on an 80-column card or serial/parallel card) and thus boots the disk. Anyway, I guess the Videx output routine must not call the $FBD9 BELL1 routine. Why they chose to implement their own beep I have no idea. Maybe someone at Videx just didn't like the pitch of Apple's beep. 🤷🏻♂️
As I watch you do all the wierd stuff you have to do on the ][+ (that was pretty natural on the //e), it just makes me wonder who would have bought this very late production plus and not waited for the //e that came out in 1983 🤣 my Junior High computer lab had mostly //e's, with one ][+ that no one wanted to get stuck with. One of the //e's had a Rancor floppy drive, which I experimented with to get the extra tracks working (IIRC, Rancor supported 45 tracks, Apple officially supported 35, and 40 would work on the DuoDisk or //c drive mechanism). I remember that some people said that you could get 40 tracks working on the Disk ][, you had to adjust a slider on the head mechanism. But of course you ended up with floppies that not every Apple ][ could read...
Heh yeah the IIe was certainly nice with the improvements -- but it was 6 years after the original ][ came out -- and Apple just adopted many of the tricks people had come up with on the ][ and implemented it in hardware. Like the IIe still emulates the language card the same exact way it was done in the ][ plus -- and I think even the way shift works mirrors the "shift mod" that everyone did on the ][ plus (by toggling an input on the joystick port.)
The Videx UltraTerm was a crazy awesome 80/96/128/132/160 column card! I had one in my computer back in the day... Those VideoTerm was a great card, but there were sure a lot of clones!! Great video! I love the Apple II content!
I remember having the dual video mode and using it with an assembler or programmer tool on an appl ][e clone I had. I don't remember what or how I used it, but I remember feeling all smug with both the monochrome monitor and the TV hooked up.
Had the CPM card in my ][+ and would connect to PCLink when it was in beta. I would drive the Lobby crazy when everyone was saying Tandy, and I would say Apple ][+.
If you ever feel like it, I'd be interested in a comparison of the Apple Disk II drives and the IBM full height drives, mechanism wise, parts exchangability, and if it's possible to strip a FH IBM drive down to be a Disk II, since a Disk II is basically a stripped drive.
I believe the Apple II+ keyboard sends ASCII back to the motherboard. Hence why the shift mod that uses one of the game buttons. Apple II has some characters that use shift and a letter such as shift + P for @ and shift + M for ].
I was expecting the speed of those drives to be checked too. Also it is recommended to put a tad of silicon grease in the groove of that wheel - it makes it quieter. The head motor should be a stepper motor BTW - it says that on the motor itself.
I was going to ask the same thing, why he didn’t check the speeds? It was common for the speed to drift on those drives. It’s just 4 screws to take the bottom cover loose from the chassis, and It’s easy to check speed if you have fluorescent lighting because of the strobe disc on the fly wheel. You can just adjust the pot until the pattern stops turning. Also it does use a stepper motor to turn the positioning cam disc, but they didn’t have a track zero sensor switch. So they would just run the head all the way back and bump against the stop enough times to make sure that it had to end up at track zero. Lastly it was very common for people to plug the ribbon cable onto the interface card incorrectly, and it usually fried the 74LS125 chip on the analog board. Depending on how it was misconnected and how long it was left turned on, sometimes the ULN2003 Darlington driver chip for the stepper motor would also burn up.
@@adriansdigitalbasement - then following your own logic, Adrian, why did you bother lubricating the rails and cleaning the heads since the drives were working I believe? Not the answer I was expecting to be honest.
@@macfixer01 it's not even that for the speed check. I believe Locksmith or other diagnostic software are quite accurate in showing the speed so there is no extra disassembling required.
FYI - Videx is pronounced VY-dex, not VID-ex. I was the lead engineer for the company in the late '80s thru the early 2000's, and we always winced when a customer mispronounced the name! :)
I have a cable that comes from the 80 column card to the mainboard, so i can use 40 and 80 columns with the onboard Video out. But i have still the vertical lines in the 40 column mode.
I learned to program in BASIC on the Apple II for a semester class during my senior year in high school, so it was forty years ago. I feel a bit nostalgic about it, too, but it seems I've lost too many brain cells for me to remember very much. What I'd like to see is a test of its usefulness. For example, how useful and/or user-friendly is VisiCalc compared to a modern spreadsheet. Can we imagine any scenario in which this hardware/software becomes a necessity again?
The werid brown color is from the metal itself. Some of these drives had metals that were.. not the best. As long as it doesn't come off you will be good
the weird brown coating did these come from a place where they roasted and ground coffee I have a computer that came from a coffee shop that did their own roasting and it lived in the roast room it is defiantly coated with brown dust inside and out.
I like these series, allthought not a fan of Apple😅 Would you please show some games, maybe in the last video of this series. Highly interested😳😉 For the rest, I cant seem to get enough of ADB👍🏻
My first thought was VGA text is nine pixels high, then I was like "wait a minute..." After thinking for a minute, I remember VGA text mode is nine pixels *wide*.
I don't know how to think about this era. I was born in 85 and for nostalgia - my computer life began in 386, and in reality, i love to remember that time, but use - no thank you. Let alone 8-bit computers. But it is so vastly different from everything i worked with, so it is really fascinating, each quirk of this machines is monument to human cleverness. And actually, comprehensible - if you could somehow get inside modern i5, you will get some interesting, but really mind blowing stuff going inside.
yeah, the software does create that beep by flipping the speaker line up and down. My Apple ][ Plus presents "APPLE ][ PLUS" with a beep, and hilariously, the bell character is part of the print string, and "PLUS" pops up only after the beep duration, so it's really prints "APPLE ][" + x07 + " PLUS" and so it waits a beat (for dramatic effect maybe) between saying "APPLE ][" and saying, ...plus! (ovbiously my ROM is different than yours)
The pitch of the beep in the 40 and 80 column modes seem to be an octave difference which would correspond to a doubling of frequency for the higher pitched beep. Seems like a coincidence with the doubling.halving of the number of columns. I wonder if the beeper frequency is somehow related to the column draw timings?
The regular, 40 column beep is produced by the machine code routine starting at address $FBE2 in the ROM. This routine toggles the speaker 192 times with an interval of 546 clock cycles between each toggle. Given the Apple ][ had a processor speed of just over 1.02 MHz, this produces a tone of 934.49 Hz for 102 ms. I suspect that the 80 column beep is produced from a different routine stored on the PROM on the 80 column card.
I have 5 disk][ drives, and 4 of them have the ALPS clone mechanism of the SA390. These have different motors in them, and you'll know it when the recalibration noise happens (i.e., the noise you heard when your game switched to slot 6 with no disk). On the one SA390 I have, the recal sounds fine. On the other ALPS disk][s, they sound erratic and random. The later ALPS drives found in the IIc and in the Apple 5.25 drive sound like the SA390 due to a different stepper motor and head drive mechanism. I find it bizarre that my ALPS disk][s are all red label, and the SA390 is the later brown label. This later SA390 was even "MADE IN USA"!
Hi Adrian, we played POOYAN at school on old Apple IIe's. Do you have a copy? Your videos are incredible. I remember the feel of closing the 5 1/4" drives with my 12 year old fingers. Such great and detailed work you do! Always watching :)
That Font editor is very cool! ... Even if you can't edit on the fly. But man, the encoding for Katakana is the most random selection of code points I've seen! Can't make sense of it from either a code point ordering, nor a keyboard layout POV
What you are now missing is the Videx Enhancer ][, which is a replacement keyboard encoder card that gives you upper AND lower case chracters on the Apple ][ and ][+. When I worked at the Apple Educational Demo Lab in Ottawa, Ontario, all of our Apples ][+ had the Videx Enchancer ][.
![Fixes for the Apple ][ plus Language Card and Keyboard](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/wVUWaodwNNI/mqdefault.jpg)
A rolling screen is still usable, you just have to nod really fast. ;-)
LOL!!!
Can't lie, this made chuckle 😂😂😂
Just blink at the right Time
Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. I got two apple II Europlus. I believe the only difference to the plus is pal output.
There is a lot that doesn't work. I would have never been able to fix this without your help. Let's keep our fingers crossed that i will make them work.
One of them is heavily modified. It has a Papst fan that sounds like an airplane starting. This one is from the TU Darmstadt applied physics institute. Looks like it measured some nuclear data. I rescued it from trash in the early 2000.
The other one was bought by my parents in the late 80ies for the incredible amount of 10.000 DM probably from the geo institute in Frankfurt.
It got a ton of equipment which is distributed through my basement ;)
We never ever used the 80 col card or the z80. But they always where in their slots.
My father still uses the same fortran software ported to PC on his p3-800 using ms-dos 5.0
It's the nostalgia that is my favorite thing. I have plenty of computers I didn't grow up with (Apple II, TI994a, etc)
But I recently got a Windows 98 Pentium 200, which is what I grew up with and that computer is just a beautiful thing. It has the "What was it like" but the added nostalgia of what I used to do for fun as a kid. There's something magical about that.
You seem to be my favorite UA-camr, even in a busy week where YT notifications pile up, your videos are must see no matter what.
As a kid, taught myself to program on a borrowed TRS80, then the color version (riding my bike through 2 towns to Radio Shack), took more programming classes in high school on the Apple 2, purchased my own complete Apple 2e system with color monitor, spend many hours playing Bards Tale 1 & 2, used the TI99/4A, ending up with the king of them all the Commodore Amiga running all the software from all 3 platforms on the same machine.
Dear Adrian.
I think we are aware of the love and passion you got for your activities, and thats why we love watching your videos. Thats the reason that makes them great!!
Thank you! 😃
I have met with Paul Davis who designed the 80-column card and founded Videx.
He was the ceo of Videx until his passing a couple of years ago. A cool guy that until the
end tinkered with electronics on his free time. He would have loved this video.
These days Videx is making electronic lock solutions and is a great company to do work with.
Cheers!
This has been a GREAT series! I now have 2 ][ pluses (one a Bell & Howell) and I’ve learned a lot about them from you.
Thank you Adrian!!
Man. Time goes by so fast. I remember when the Apple II + was soooo desirable and state of the art.
Loved the apple2 computers they were my favorite 😊
Right there with you! I'm suddenly feeling a little old..
I have an Apple II+ (actually, two of them!) and I love it!
A 1 MHz 6502 machine was never state of the art (not even in 1977), just popular. Two different things. (The same could be said about the IBM PC. A pretty boring machine that got popular by help of its brand name and aggressive marketing campains.) Xerox Alto (1972) and Xerox Star (1980) were state of the art in a more real sense. With overlapping windowing, pull down menues, icons, a mouse, wysiwyg, object orientation, laser printing and networking a decade before Gates or Jobs had anything remotely similar.
Brings me endless joy too Adrian, something about seeing all these old machines fixed, working and cleaned up just warms my heart. Keep 'em coming!
You and CuriousMarc are among some of my favorite nerds when it comes to repair.
That calm presenter charm and explanations are always superb.
The Ghosts in the clock boards have been hilarious over on CuriousMarc haha
This might be my favourite series (along with the C64 repair-a-thons). And I'm not even a Mac guy.
I still have my plus somewhere. The drive was broken by my sister putting in a floppy backwards back in the day. Im pretty sure this video taught me enough on how to fix it. I would love to do this setup!
Wordstar! Used it for years. Great to see it again.
My native language has diacritics, I still remember using control H to force a carriage return and make things like: c ^H , = ç or a ^H ‘ for á and so on…
you're like a child in front of it, but like a master when it needs to be repaired and its so fantastic to follow your steps in this adventure !
Well .. i never used any apple at all ... my very first computer was in fact already a Amiga 500. ;)
But believe me, we can feel the joy these machines bring to you and to see you fixing them with your full heart. ;)
It's fun and very joyful to watch you on these videos. ;)
One of the reasons I enjoy old computers like the Apple ][ is that the whole system is comprehensible. Modern processor and system architecture is so multilayered and abstracted that I suspect few people can understand the whole thing down to the physical layer. Or maybe I’m just old.
Amen, brother!
Nice to see some coverage of the 80 column and z80 cards! Sure brought back memories!
You: "Oh man, it's dialing a phone number...". "VIDEX OFFLINE COMPUTER. PLEASE LOG ON". So cool..., so Retro. Just like the War Games movie.
Watched over again just a week ago!! 😅😅😅
I thoroughly enjoyed the Apple ][ series of videos, thank you. Around 1980 I bought an Apple ][ with 16K and an RF modulator for $850. Later I bought a single 5 1/4 disk drive for $525. When the //e became available I upgraded. I used the //e for several years before selling it and buying an IBM clone. I actually still have an Apple ][ Plus I acquired two years ago, and watching your videos inspired me to drag it out and play around with it again. Thanks again.
19:42 the PC was but a wet dream when Woz used those Shugart SA390 mechanisms in the Apple II in 1977.
I was wondering what he was saying. UA-cam's closed captioning kept showing "sugar mechanism"! 😆
I suspect that the brown coating in the second drive is there from the factory. Anything that got in there afterwards would almost have to also be on the controller board.
True -- I just have never seen anything like it before.
@@adriansdigitalbasement That's a protective oxide that is breaking down like Parkerizing or blueing. You see it on old equipment that used alloys of iron or steel to prevent corrosion. Harmless.
Although I agree it's probably a factory coating I'd like to give some info about something similar but on optical drives.
That brown stuff looks like the bearing material on dvd /cd drive disc clamps.
That's a common look when the clamp bearing goes on panasonic and Sony branded dvd drives.
I've seen this a few times on older honda sat nav disc based systems.
I loved that the line order invoice was filled by Benny Hill.
Back in the mid 80s I worked for a small computer company here in NJ, a year on the production floor and a year in customer service shipping parts to field offices. We used Shugart 5.25" drives in our units and when software updates would ship out, the old disks would be sent back. They would let me take the old floppies home and I reformatted them for use in my Apple IIc. Not that this is relevant beyond your comments about nostalgia, but I was just starting out in the working world back then and it was a fun place to work, and seeing those drives kicked out some fond memories.
I have a Softcard clone in my IIe that works very well. Though I had kinda figured so prior, using the CPM card opened up this whole new universe that made me realize that the Apple II is an endless machine to explore. I mean, jeez there are even people reading/sending email from this platform. The greatest computer of all time.
One of the best things about the Apple II is that they're such tough old goats. Well cared for they'll probably run for another fifty years.
Brings back memories of going over to my neighbours and playing on their Apple 2e. Once spent a weekend playing Wizardry. They did get a PAL card but took it back as the colours were terrible. CP/M and Wordstar bring back memories of working on a Little Big Board at the Weather Bureau. It had a pair of 8” drives.
Hello I love your channel! Greetings from Argentina, I learn a lot watching you. Thanks for being so cool and showing your work!
That CPM card changed my life. I was using my Apple ][+ to connect to a old service called PCLink. I was the only Apple on the service in Beta. Got invited to interview ai Quantum Computer Service the company providing QLink, Applelink, and PCLink. Great days.
And if I remember correctly all that became.......AOL!
@@jonnycando yes except QLink.
@@paulchew7675 i was a user of PCLink as the software was bundled with my Tandy 1000hx and then when it became aol i installed the software and was ported right over to that... and surfing on a 2400 baud modem!
@@jonnycando I remember when we went to 9600..... that was fun.
@@paulchew7675 i eventually made it up to 56k or what ever it was, but my tin can and string phone service would barely give me 30 or so....
Just wanted to thank you for your videos . I'm not even a Commodore or Apple person either. I like them, just weren't the things I used much. I really like the Amiga series. I started with a TI99/4a and went straight to PC. However I see your videos as a zen thing. Something about them is very relaxing, while being educational, lol. It doesn't matter what the content is, I look forward to watching it. Loved your TI videos of course, as I still have mine. Although it's upgraded to VGA now. Keep on keeping on brother.
Wahhhh! Thankyou so much for this video!
I was plugging my untested Apple II's 80 columns card directly into my monitor because I didn't realise I had to manually switch to it, that will be why I was getting no video output! (hopefully!!)
Maybe I'm just getting old and jaded, but computing in the 8 bit era seemed way more exciting than it does today.
These days, doing anything requires layers upon layers of software (written by other people) : run-time engines, operating systems, device drivers, ... There was something very satisfying about entering a few machine language instructions and seeing the contents of physical RAM or the voltage of external wires change exactly as predicted.
Looking forward to the ROM-hacking video to fix that issue with the RetroTINK!
Interdasting! The mechanism in that floppy drive is very different from my IBM branded Tandon unit. I haven't taken the controller board off (obviously it's very different and much more complex than Apple's, which was one of their great innovations), but it's got a stepper motor mounted transversly rather than the flat mounted motor of that unit. It has a date stamp of 3-9-84 (presumably the US America date format, so March 84), which I'm guessing is later than those drives.
Took the opportunity to give the door guide a grease like you did in the video, and now it's a lot smoother and the release is almost a hair trigger! But the weirdest thing is that the action of the door triggered a memory of playing with the floppy drive on the Apple II in my primary school library. I had completely forgotten they had one there, but the feeling and the noise of opening it reminded me of how I used to flick it up and stop it before it smacked the top so I didn't annoy the librarian.
Anyway, great video as always. Love the technical details sprinkled throughout, and it's always great to see these old machines getting fixed or upgraded.
"Filled by Benny Hill" ... they do have a weird humor on that demo disk??
Oh man I'd love to have one of those Microsoft Softcards for my //gs.
@
Adrian's Digital Basement Videx did briefly make a card, that would handle switching and mixing of the onboard video and the 80-columns card. I forget what it was called, but it used the internal computer video circuit and the Videx card video outputs, then outputted the mixed video through a British style RF connector and a composite connector. It used a form of Genlock to sync up the video signals and would auto-switch when the 80-column card was detected to be taking over but could be manually switched by pressing Alt+Ctrl+V.
Great video. Back in time to my beginnings as a programmer. Fond memories.
Videx was literally just across the street from the Hewlett Packard facility in Corvallis Oregon back in the day. 758 is a Corvallis prefix.
I remember using Wordstar in 80-column mode on an Apple IIe, great times.
On the PC side a client had a XENIX system supporting Wyze terminals in 132-column mode, which let us display reports already formatted for their 132-column printers.
For the automatic video switching, I assume you get some TTL level signal from the 80 col card header when it's active. Just use a TTL-level signal relay with it. They come in DIP8 packages and such and are very easy to use.
Looks like the original circuit from Videx used a 4066 CMOS switch and a TTL driver to literally switch between two sources.
Yup it's called an 80 column auto softswitch. If you look for it on the web someone on applefritter has posted a DIY solution with a 4011 NAND gate and two transistors that looks just like the one I have. That one even has two pots for adjusting the level.
Light pen I called them..any pcb they work on..machine controls and the main pc that booted like a pacman game before loading the proprietary software. Pen helped our service department diagnose any logic board. Boeing was so cool
I liked the way the Apple 80-column cards worked with the Apple //e. Just type "PR#3" at the BASIC prompt and hit . The display output would be automatically switched to the correct video processor without having to flip any switches or move any plugs.
Thank you Adrian for all of your repair adventures. I was an adult before the 70s so my memories are much different than yours. I watch your channel because of the joy you get out of repairing these old machines. I also enjoy watching your approach to diagnosing and repair as you fix the mystery of "What's wrong with this machine?". ( Same reason I enjoy a good mystery movie ). I still work and teach in embedded hardware/software and recommend new e-techs watch your approach and lack of ego and joy in success! ( Please keep the mystery adventures happening as I can't find movies/ebooks where the techies are the heroes )
1980's for me. First computer I used was a Digital PDP 11/20. In the early 80's I had been debating between an Apple IIe or Macintosh. Then the IIgs came out and had I been able to get Apple financing I would have bought one. But instead got a used Tandy 1000a.
THAT was an amazing series. Really took me back. And holy crap: LOCKSMITH! Man, that fired some long-dormant neurons. Thanks a million, man!
I really do like the case design of the Apple II series.
Loved the video i spent many days in grade school playing the apple 2e with two games a math one called number munchers and oregon trail hopefully someday i can find one to add to my collection cause this is the only true way to me to get the full effect of oregon trail 😎
Brilliant as always Adrian !
Working on the head flapper thingy.
i like the looks of those older apple disk drives, i have the ones that came out after that. (connected to 1986 iie enhanced)
Wow! Apple II font editor looks great 13:06
The Videx card also had a softswitch available that piggybacks on the 9334 chip for control. I have that and it's far nicer i think to just press "in#n". Great video.
also CTRL+A shifts between caps and lowercase but yes the shift mod is good to stay in lowercase and merely capitalize with shift.
I've seen browning like that in factories where a ton of robotic welders are going. It might be gaseous flux reside. Try Windex.
Take a cotton swab and get some of that brow dust looking stuff on it and sent it off to be analysed :D sounds a little silly but it would be fascinating to find out what it is :)
Great video.. I miss the 80s... Great time for computer s.
Hi Adrian, I found that the "Iron remover" liquid can help to remove the rust without scratching too much metal off the screw, just put the rust screw in and let it soak for 30 minutes, it really good.
You asked about the beep and whether it's generated by the text display routines. Well yes, it is. Most Apple II software prints text to the screen by calling a routine called COUT (at $FDED) which takes the character in the accumulator and writes it out to the screen. Except COUT doesn't actually do any of that itself; it just calls the routine stored in the character output vector (CSW) at $36/$37 on the direct page. When you boot the machine the startup routine initializes this vector to point at $FDF0 (COUT1) which is the ROM routine that writes characters to the 40-column text screen. COUT1 checks for several different control characters (carriage return, left and right arrows, etc.) and if it sees ASCII BEL (control-G) it calls the BELL1 routine ($FBD9) instead of writing to the screen. But when you run PR#3 it changes the character output vector at $0036.0037 to point at the slot 3 output routine ($C307) in the firmware on the 80-column card. (Note that if you're running DOS or ProDOS the I/O vectors will actually point at routines inside the OS because they need to hook into the I/O.)
And yes, PR#6 works to boot a disk because the disk ][ controller card has a "boot from disk" routine at its main firmware entry point. When you type PR#6 it runs the slot 6 I/O setup routine at $C600 (which would normally initialize the character input/output vectors on an 80-column card or serial/parallel card) and thus boots the disk.
Anyway, I guess the Videx output routine must not call the $FBD9 BELL1 routine. Why they chose to implement their own beep I have no idea. Maybe someone at Videx just didn't like the pitch of Apple's beep. 🤷🏻♂️
your shirt is reminder of Azadi (Shahyad) Square in Tehran to me.they are very similar.
The 2nd one has just came from Mars
Videx is still around. Nowadays they make very high-end security products.
As I watch you do all the wierd stuff you have to do on the ][+ (that was pretty natural on the //e), it just makes me wonder who would have bought this very late production plus and not waited for the //e that came out in 1983 🤣 my Junior High computer lab had mostly //e's, with one ][+ that no one wanted to get stuck with. One of the //e's had a Rancor floppy drive, which I experimented with to get the extra tracks working (IIRC, Rancor supported 45 tracks, Apple officially supported 35, and 40 would work on the DuoDisk or //c drive mechanism). I remember that some people said that you could get 40 tracks working on the Disk ][, you had to adjust a slider on the head mechanism. But of course you ended up with floppies that not every Apple ][ could read...
Heh yeah the IIe was certainly nice with the improvements -- but it was 6 years after the original ][ came out -- and Apple just adopted many of the tricks people had come up with on the ][ and implemented it in hardware. Like the IIe still emulates the language card the same exact way it was done in the ][ plus -- and I think even the way shift works mirrors the "shift mod" that everyone did on the ][ plus (by toggling an input on the joystick port.)
The Videx UltraTerm was a crazy awesome 80/96/128/132/160 column card! I had one in my computer back in the day... Those VideoTerm was a great card, but there were sure a lot of clones!! Great video! I love the Apple II content!
I remember having the dual video mode and using it with an assembler or programmer tool on an appl ][e clone I had. I don't remember what or how I used it, but I remember feeling all smug with both the monochrome monitor and the TV hooked up.
Had the CPM card in my ][+ and would connect to PCLink when it was in beta. I would drive the Lobby crazy when everyone was saying Tandy, and I would say Apple ][+.
If you ever feel like it, I'd be interested in a comparison of the Apple Disk II drives and the IBM full height drives, mechanism wise, parts exchangability, and if it's possible to strip a FH IBM drive down to be a Disk II, since a Disk II is basically a stripped drive.
Have the t-shirt on that you received last week
I believe the Apple II+ keyboard sends ASCII back to the motherboard. Hence why the shift mod that uses one of the game buttons. Apple II has some characters that use shift and a letter such as shift + P for @ and shift + M for ].
I was expecting the speed of those drives to be checked too. Also it is recommended to put a tad of silicon grease in the groove of that wheel - it makes it quieter.
The head motor should be a stepper motor BTW - it says that on the motor itself.
I don't bother to check the speed when the drive is operating correctly
I was going to ask the same thing, why he didn’t check the speeds? It was common for the speed to drift on those drives. It’s just 4 screws to take the bottom cover loose from the chassis, and It’s easy to check speed if you have fluorescent lighting because of the strobe disc on the fly wheel. You can just adjust the pot until the pattern stops turning. Also it does use a stepper motor to turn the positioning cam disc, but they didn’t have a track zero sensor switch. So they would just run the head all the way back and bump against the stop enough times to make sure that it had to end up at track zero. Lastly it was very common for people to plug the ribbon cable onto the interface card incorrectly, and it usually fried the 74LS125 chip on the analog board. Depending on how it was misconnected and how long it was left turned on, sometimes the ULN2003 Darlington driver chip for the stepper motor would also burn up.
@@adriansdigitalbasement - then following your own logic, Adrian, why did you bother lubricating the rails and cleaning the heads since the drives were working I believe? Not the answer I was expecting to be honest.
@@macfixer01 it's not even that for the speed check. I believe Locksmith or other diagnostic software are quite accurate in showing the speed so there is no extra disassembling required.
@@tony359 Checking the speed would be meaningless if you do not know what the speed should be.
Adrian, love the videos, the more I watch, the more I want a Apple II or a Commendore myself. Keep up the good work!
does anyone else get the feeling, that when Adrian says, "Let's get right to it", he's dying to do his 'finger wave' thingy that he used to do ? lol
Haha -- I've evolved :-)
FYI - Videx is pronounced VY-dex, not VID-ex. I was the lead engineer for the company in the late '80s thru the early 2000's, and we always winced when a customer mispronounced the name! :)
I have a cable that comes from the 80 column card to the mainboard, so i can use 40 and 80 columns with the onboard Video out. But i have still the vertical lines in the 40 column mode.
The sound difference is a minor 3rd. Because 80 column mode is much more serious :)
16:28 DIUR changes to DIR, must be CP/M built-in command spell checker
I learned to program in BASIC on the Apple II for a semester class during my senior year in high school, so it was forty years ago. I feel a bit nostalgic about it, too, but it seems I've lost too many brain cells for me to remember very much. What I'd like to see is a test of its usefulness. For example, how useful and/or user-friendly is VisiCalc compared to a modern spreadsheet. Can we imagine any scenario in which this hardware/software becomes a necessity again?
Now I need an 80 column card for the Apple ii+ I found :)
The werid brown color is from the metal itself. Some of these drives had metals that were.. not the best. As long as it doesn't come off you will be good
Happy New Year Adrien
I really enjoyed it, thanks!
Hm, might be from varnish residue. That would be my guess, and might explain why it only stuck to certain parts.
the weird brown coating did these come from a place where they roasted and ground coffee I have a computer that came from a coffee shop that did their own roasting and it lived in the roast room it is defiantly coated with brown dust inside and out.
I like these series, allthought not a fan of Apple😅 Would you please show some games, maybe in the last video of this series. Highly interested😳😉 For the rest, I cant seem to get enough of ADB👍🏻
I would love to have a z80 card in my iie. I can't seem to find one, though and I don't know anything about pcb design. Love this series!
How did I miss this part of the series?
I've never seen a text mode with nine-pixel-high characters before. Especially in the days before monitors that could auto-adjust their resolution.
My first thought was VGA text is nine pixels high, then I was like "wait a minute..."
After thinking for a minute, I remember VGA text mode is nine pixels *wide*.
I don't know how to think about this era. I was born in 85 and for nostalgia - my computer life began in 386, and in reality, i love to remember that time, but use - no thank you. Let alone 8-bit computers. But it is so vastly different from everything i worked with, so it is really fascinating, each quirk of this machines is monument to human cleverness. And actually, comprehensible - if you could somehow get inside modern i5, you will get some interesting, but really mind blowing stuff going inside.
Great video adrian!
Have you done any videos about the Apple IIGS computer?
15:58 - There is an ON mark on the silkscreen below the DIP-switch block...
yeah, the software does create that beep by flipping the speaker line up and down. My Apple ][ Plus presents "APPLE ][ PLUS" with a beep, and hilariously, the bell character is part of the print string, and "PLUS" pops up only after the beep duration, so it's really prints "APPLE ][" + x07 + " PLUS" and so it waits a beat (for dramatic effect maybe) between saying "APPLE ][" and saying, ...plus! (ovbiously my ROM is different than yours)
I know this is getting up there in age now, but I'm wondering if the coating in the second drive is some sort of paint over spray?
The pitch of the beep in the 40 and 80 column modes seem to be an octave difference which would correspond to a doubling of frequency for the higher pitched beep. Seems like a coincidence with the doubling.halving of the number of columns. I wonder if the beeper frequency is somehow related to the column draw timings?
The regular, 40 column beep is produced by the machine code routine starting at address $FBE2 in the ROM. This routine toggles the speaker 192 times with an interval of 546 clock cycles between each toggle. Given the Apple ][ had a processor speed of just over 1.02 MHz, this produces a tone of 934.49 Hz for 102 ms. I suspect that the 80 column beep is produced from a different routine stored on the PROM on the 80 column card.
10:48. I find it funny that Videx used Benny Hill to be the order filler for their fake invoice demo.
23:50 Man, please, for your health and our mental health, stop trying to sniff suspicious unknown brown substances.
He is from Oregon... ;-)
LGR would do it, especially if it was a keyboard.
I have 5 disk][ drives, and 4 of them have the ALPS clone mechanism of the SA390. These have different motors in them, and you'll know it when the recalibration noise happens (i.e., the noise you heard when your game switched to slot 6 with no disk).
On the one SA390 I have, the recal sounds fine. On the other ALPS disk][s, they sound erratic and random. The later ALPS drives found in the IIc and in the Apple 5.25 drive sound like the SA390 due to a different stepper motor and head drive mechanism.
I find it bizarre that my ALPS disk][s are all red label, and the SA390 is the later brown label. This later SA390 was even "MADE IN USA"!
First thing I do first each time? Smash the like button...
Hi Adrian, we played POOYAN at school on old Apple IIe's. Do you have a copy? Your videos are incredible. I remember the feel of closing the 5 1/4" drives with my 12 year old fingers. Such great and detailed work you do! Always watching :)
Saturday highlight!
That Font editor is very cool! ... Even if you can't edit on the fly. But man, the encoding for Katakana is the most random selection of code points I've seen! Can't make sense of it from either a code point ordering, nor a keyboard layout POV
What you are now missing is the Videx Enhancer ][, which is a replacement keyboard encoder card that gives you upper AND lower case chracters on the Apple ][ and ][+. When I worked at the Apple Educational Demo Lab in Ottawa, Ontario, all of our Apples ][+ had the Videx Enchancer ][.
Did that include a sticker with additional key support you attached to the lid?
@@adriansdigitalbasement I never saw one, they just attached to the bottom of the keyboard.