Mike's Hobby Blog

Cameron Cooper, who has been a great asset in finding parts, is putting together a new web site called apple-1.org. We are planning some scheduled chat sessions that will be hosted from his site. The first one will be held the evening after I receive the A1 boards. Topic’s are open to Apple 1 related stuff, but I hope to post a URL to images of the PCBs boards- so this will be the first public viewing, so to speak. I’ll post the time and date for this chat session as soon as UPS gives me the date that the PCB’s will arrive. Meanwhile hop on over to Cameron’s site and get registered.

According to the status on the Advance Circuits web page, the boards are built and in the shipping department, due to ship Monday. I’m far more excited about these boards than I think I was with the rev0 boards. Could be a couple of factors at play here. First of all, this board seems to me to have been far more difficult to reverse engineer that the A2 rev 0 was. I though I would have an easier time on the A1 because of the experience of the A2rev 0, but the A1 effort turned out to be even larger. I believe that the A1 was original designed with the idea that a silk screen and possibly solder mask were expensive options, so a lot of legend information was added to the top copper layer. Also the power supply section was pretty tricky. There is more interest in this project than there was on A2 rev 0, so I think that that is adding to the excitement, as well.

While I’m waiting for the PCB and last parts to be delivered, I’ll be working on two things.

1) The A1 assembly manual.
2) The PS/2 to keyboard adaptor. I’ve decided to make a batch of these. They will default to an A2 configuration, but will easily be altered to a A1 configuration, and I’ll provide instructions. Here is what the top artwork currently looks like.

Cameron and I are also investigating a possible vendor of new parallel ASCII keyboards. This same vendor was advertising in the Hobbyist magazines the 70’s and still lists ASCII keyboards with parallel interfaces in their catalog. In fact the current keyboard appears to have the same key layout as can be seen in those 1970’s era adds. Hopefully they still stock them and the price is reasonable. Original ASCII keyboards are very, very difficult to find. The only reliable source I know of, is from the Apple II+ systems that are frequently sold on ebay.

Finally, if you are interested in a A2 rev 0. kit, remember that the price is going up on Feburary 1st.

Base motherboard kit price to go up to $400.00 from $350 on Feb 1, 2010.

I receive an occasional query regarding Apple ][ repair services. I have considered offering repair services, but feel that frequently, problems are traced back to intermittent connections between sockets and chips on these old boards. Apple didn’t use the best sockets in it’s products and once you start having intermittent problems with sockets, they probably aren’t going to stay away for long. Because of this, I feel that it would be very hard to provide a repair service that would consistently return boards that are reliable over the long haul.

Creative Solutions does offer repair services, though I am not sure if they still are in business. You can try contacting Creative Solutions at creatsltn@aol.com or phone (937) 429-5759 M-F 9-5 Eastern.

I really feel that your best bet is to find a fellow vintage computer hobbyist in your area that would be willing to work with you in troubleshooting your board. Half the fun of these old machines is learning how to fix them up and get them back into working order.

An anonymous contributer sent me some pretty good notes on servicing Apple II computers. I have put them into PDF format and put a link from my repair page to them.

My repair page.
http://www.willegal.net/appleii/appleii-repair.htm