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found original apple II with possible problems

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fengland

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Joined
Oct 2, 2010
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26
Hi everyone,
I found a great garage sale this weekend with several nice vintage computers including an original apple II (late 70s?). I fired it up and it powers on fine but looks like it has some issues. When I turn it on, the screen is filled with ?s then there's a * monitor prompt near the bottom. Some of the keys type the right letters, but some don't. (the top row does) so I guess something's wrong. Are the original IIs supposed to dump you into the monitor on power up, or is it supposed to go into a basic prompt? I used a IIe a while back but never an original II. Has anyone here seen similar problems before? I have electronics experience so I'm going to try to find a schematic and do some debugging.
 
ok, I found the red book online. It looks like it's working right, the keyboard's probably just dirty or something.
 
You found quite a gem... hit Ctrl-B to get into (Integer) BASIC. Pictures of the serial number on the bottom, and at the left-rear of the motherboard, please...
 
The motherboard serial number is 2486 and the one on the case is 2213.
It does seem to have some bugs in the basic interpreter - immediate instructions seem to work fine but deffered ones don't. LIST prints garbage, and RUN doesn't work.
PRINT "HELLO" - works fine
NEW
100 PRINT "HELLO"
RUN
fills the screen with garbage and has to be reset to do anything.
Maybe it just needs to be cleaned? It's cool that a machine this old works at all though.
 
Nice. What color are the slot connectors? Are they black, dark green, or bright turquoise-ish green?

The typical resurrection spell for these machines is to gently pull up and reseat all the socketed chips.
 
The slots are turquoise. Cool, thanks for the suggestion, I thought I might give something like that a try.

Looking at the next thread, it looks like this is an old one - light green slots, black on white serial number sticker, keycap power light. Cool!

I also have a duodisk and card. I know floppys weren't available when the original apple IIs came out, so I'm assuming there isn't rom support for them. Do I have to load something using the casette interface to be able to use the floppy?
 
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Oh, my. You hit the motherlode. Please don't tell us you paid $1 for it.

As for the floppy disk controller - it has ROM on the interface card (part of the beauty and expandability of the Apple II) so even the earliest machines can use floppies.
 
Yeah, it was the motherload - I was really excited. They were just taking donations for all I wanted to take away - got the apple II, a later apple IIe, a pc/at, atari 520st, and a trs80 model 4 and I gave them $12! couldn't believe my luck. This stuff is worthless to most people, but it is more rare nowdays - most of the old computers like these have probably been recycled =[
 
fengland said:
Great job on ADT Pro by the way - I'm looking forward to trying it.
Click to expand...

It's an excellent utility...if you don't have a serial card, get one -- they're pretty cheap (I probably have an extra if you need it) and it makes the transfers much nicer than trying to use audio (which I attempted when I first got my IIe up and running).
 
The original, DOS-based ADT client requires 48k of memory. The ADTPro client (the newer, ProDOS-based version) requires 64k. Neither requires an Autostart ROM. Both can be served by the ADTPro server.
 
well, reseating, removing and replacing and deoxit didn't solve the basic bugs. I'm thinking about trying to dump the basic roms and make sure they're reading correctly/reliably, as the monitor and miniassembler seem to be working fine. Does anyone have or know where some apple II integer basic rom dumps are for comparison?
 
just a hunch, but try swapping the 74LS139 at F2 with the 74LS139 at E2. If the behavior changes, you probably have a bad 74LS139, which will need to be replaced.

Regards,
Mike Willegal
 
Is it always question marks that fill the screen? If you type more into your statement before running does the character change at all? Sounds like it could be a stuck bit somewhere or just bad memory (piggy backing a chip might help find better results). That's at least my theory for the pre-caffeinated morning ;-) It sounds like running code live works, but when the code is stored in memory something is getting corrupted.
 
Thanks for the suggestions. Maybe it's bad memory. Yeah, running a basic line 'live' works, but storing it then listing it doesn't work right. It isn't always the same. Sometimes it just lists a nonsense line, sometimes it fills the screen with crap and hangs. I saw a memory test assembly program somewhere, I'll try that. Replacing some memory chips wouldn't be a big deal, they're all socketed and I might have some extras on some cards. I'll do some more debugging this weekend.
 
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