Apple IIc Plus - teardown, repair and walkthrough of the rarest and fastest Apple II!

[Music] why it's a family reunion the black sheep of the clan returns to the herd a little worse for wear it's all happening right now on a very special episode stay tuned I'm here today to show you my Apple 2c plus now I've made videos already about my original to see which I've owned since 1985 this is a different animal entirely let's dive in if someone asked you what the rarest Apple 2 machine was assuming you'd have any idea at all I'm guessing you'd probably say the original Apple 2 without the Plus without the e without the sea or the GS just because an original model is so expensive on eBay or maybe you'd say the 2 GS which was intentionally crippled to preserve Macintosh sales and had a hard time competing against the Amiga and Atari ST but you'd almost certainly be wrong the rarest Apple 2 is also the fastest Apple 2 ever made the 4 megahertz to C plus and that rarity is because it was a massive failure now Apple in those days didn't break down sales of individual models so we've really only got secondhand sources and best estimates to work with but we know from various sources that the original to C sold either 400,000 units in its first year or over its four-year run I was one of those original to C owners so I kept up on this stuff at the time and I'm inclined to believe it was 400,000 units in total keep in mind the computers just sold in smaller numbers in those days 400,000 units in a single year would have been huge for any manufacturer and the to C was well known as something of a disappointment to Apple whose cash cow continued to be the TUI well into the late 80s the - C plus was released in 1988 to replace the to see an 8-bit closed architecture computer that came long after the 16-bit expandable to GS hit the market and at a time when the 32-bit Macintosh was finally making inroads it's competition included not just computers from its own parent company but also the Atari ST Amiga and a little-known family of computers from what by then was a bunch of different manufacturers known collectively as the PC in fact the 32-bit Intel 386 chip had been introduced three years earlier and VGA graphics a year earlier how could an 8-bit machine that didn't even have dedicated graphics or sound Hardware hope to compete in this world this is entirely unscientific but I just took a look at the number of original 2 C's both currently for sale and recently sold on eBay versus the same for the 2 C plus I found a hundred and nine original two c's and only nine to C pluses if we assume sales of 400,000 to CS over its lifespan that equates to about 33,000 to C pluses that's pretty bad and also totally believable all this means that you're lucky if you own one of these machines today it's a forgotten little piece of Apple history the two C+ probably didn't sell much better than the notorious Apple Lisa and it sold a lot less than the oft lamented Newton yet it's a machine that some retro computer fans don't even know exists all this raises the question of why the two C+ exists to begin with well the story goes that Apple's engineers wanted to replace the 2 C with a portable 2 GS complete with a 65 C 816 processor this would allow Apple to have both a desktop and portable option for the new 16-bit Apple twos similar to the 2e and to see in the 8-bit only lineup but the bean counters at Apple quickly nixed this idea as impractical so those same engineers tried to do the next best thing and come up with a faster and somewhat more modern 8-bit successor to the to see but with the three and a half inch floppy drive that Apple was trying to standardize across all lines they ended up licensing accelerator technology from zip but producing their own chips based on that technology increasing speed from 1 megahertz to 4 with a software switch to drop back down if you needed to so here's my Apple 2 C+ and I've had this for about a year a little more than a year it came to me broken which is fine because it was free so can't look a gift horse in the mouth but it just doesn't work and I've been putting off diagnosing it trying to figure out what's wrong but here I'm gonna try to do that today this video could go one of two ways now I'll show you what's wrong I did get this helpful note along with it at the time that I bought it not bought at time I received it telling me exactly what's wrong and sure enough it does exactly what it says on this note and that is this just print a bunch of flashing Elle's no matter what you do I'll show you what happens when I do the self diagnostic and this will hopefully help us out today so let's check that out now it's gonna take a while to get through this so I'll kind of fast forward a little bit and get back to you in a second now most of this is actually normal all the garbage on the screen but you see in the middle here it just says ROM that's where it tells you what the actual problem is now I've asked around often Apple to cease of any kind have their RAM go bad but it would usually tell you if it's the RAM in this case it's telling me it's the ROM so I got myself a new ROM chip from reactive micro and I'm gonna just try installing that today Hey I mean if it's that simple all the better if I end up having to diagnose RAM chips and stuff like that I'll do that okay so here I am ready to disassemble the machine these are dead simple to take apart and let me just see if I remember how to do it but yeah it's just these outer screws and they're just standard screws whoops this screwdriver is a little too big I'll be right back [Music] and the ROM chip is if you can see this guy right here and I'm just going to be pulling that out sticking in the new one and hoping that it works [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] hopefully that's it since I know somebody's gonna ask I did take a picture of the system taken fully apart so you can see the full motherboard and how everything fits together the power supply is really particularly elegant for the time it just snaps into the motherboard via tabs no screws required here's the CPU which was actually made by VLSI and incorporates a zip accelerator technology on board and here's a closer look at that new rom chip note the Microsoft copyright on the motherboard which is because the ROM chip contains a licensed version of basic ok so a moment of truth here before I completely lose my light my batteries seem to be dying in my lights but let's just turn it on to see what happens hope for the best and look at that that's actually normal that's normal behavior for the 2c plus the 2c does something a little different but that looks good let's just do a self-test and again after I start this I'll just kind of cut ahead till we see the results so again the garbage all over the screen is normal but right here in the middle we've got a system okay so we've got a working Apple to see it was just the ROM and now I can go ahead keep going with the video talking about the Apple 2 C+ let's take a quick look at the 2 C+ compared to the original to see from the top down you can see immediately that the color is different that's not just yellowing although it is a little bit but the two C+ was an example of Apple's platinum look that it's shared with the two GS and final version of the 2e this is a light gray the original 2c was Apple's first computer to use the snow-white design language and the only one they ever made to use the correct color for that design language the keyboard itself is different to the original to see had clicky micro switches that eventually got super firm as the rubber mat underneath aged mine is almost unusable at this point you can hear in this clip that the keyboard clicks at the midpoint of the actuation like the IBM model M that Apple was trying to make a mini version of the to c+ has a tactile keyboard very similar to the two GS and while it wasn't as pleasant initially as the clicky original 2c keyboard these do age a lot better and feel about the same now as when new it may sound similar on video but if you listen closely you can hear that the click is actually the keys bottoming out it's not happening at the actuation point like on the to see it's just the sound of the key hitting the keyboard backplate in the back the port selection looks pretty similar like the original to see the 2 C plus is meant to have all the most common expansion options from the 2 e built-in incidentally the 2 GS had all this too but it also still had a bunch of slots so from left to right we've got a joystick port a serial port that was commonly used for a modem a video expansion port and note this is not an RGB output port but could be converted to one with an adaptor then we've got a composite output the disk controller port and this is now a smart board another serial port for connecting a printer or other serial item and the power port only the power port has really changed since now you're just plugging in a standard power cord rather than a separate power supply interestingly you see this little extra notch cut out of the back of the case that's a slot for a physical lock your laptop probably still has one of these mine does this is probably the earliest computer I know of to use this type of lock slot although there could be others I don't know of one minor change to the front of the case is the removal of the 40 / 80 column button or 80/40 column button this was kind of a useless button to begin with since software pretty much did what it wanted anyway you see also that the volume slider has been moved to that spot on the case and the two c''s headphone jack has been completely removed yep apple's been removing headphone jacks from products for more than 30 years here's one other very welcome change they fixed the feat this is one of those tiny things that you never realize could be so annoying but the original to see had round feet made of a kind of rubber that turns the consistency of use chewing gum overtime minor still somehow all original but they're at the point where they stick to a desk or table better than they stick to the computer so I'm constantly having to collect them from whatever surface my to see was on and reglue them the to see plus has larger feet made of much harder rubber that doesn't degrade like this huzzah I did discover another small problem as I was exploring this machine well the floppy drive itself works fine the electronic eject mechanism is dead as a doornail this was an extremely common problem on these drives back in the day and it's not hard to fix if you can properly diagnose it and have the right replacement parts now my drive looks basically brand new and I tested for all the most common issues including broken gears cracked solder joints and dead switches but I've narrowed it down to the motor itself these motors cost about five bucks if you can find one but that's not easy these days outside of just buying a whole Drive and hoping it doesn't have the same issue I'll get this repaired at some point but for now this is a manual emergency eject drive only and that makes it incredibly annoying given all that I'll be loading most of the software you see in this video via my floppy EMU this is an Apple 2 floppy drive emulator and it works well with the 2c plus since this machine can boot from either an external five and a quarter inch or three and a half inch drive it's more problematic with most 2c revisions but it's great with the 2c plus now I thought the first thing I would do is just kind of run through some of the features that this new rom chip has that the original does not so let me see if I can remember how to get into this this is the new menu that goes with the new rom chip and it has some new features this is not a menu that would have been included with the original ROM so just to quickly go through this monitor just drops you out to the Apple monitor which is basically talking to the machine in machine language if you want to do that that's kind of the original interface for the Apple 2 when it first came out reboot just reboots we've got these RAM card settings here now we talked a lot these days about loading software from SSDs as if that's a new thing well RAM cards and Apple twos basically acted as an SSD you wonder why people would even bother upgrading a to C+ or another Apple two to one Meg or however much well it's because you could make a ram disk out of that additional RAM you could actually store programs on that so this is kind of an option that you can zero the RAM card if it becomes corrupt or something like that you can just basically erase it system dye eggs we've already gone through that RAM card is kind of the same thing if your RAM card is going bad or you suspect it then you can boot from the smart port from five and a quarter inch drive and then we've got these accelerator options here which are kind of interesting here you see the accelerator is off it's normally on by default in Apple to see pluses but you can kind of change that in here so I've just turned it on and now you can see it's listed as on at four megahertz but you can actually step through that and this comes in handy because a lot of Apple 2 software does not run well at 4 megahertz and this will stay persistent whatever you set this at with this ROM it'll stay persistent through your next reboot whereas with the old ROM it would reset to 4 megahertz every time you reset the system which was pretty annoying but anyway let's just move on to some software okay so I've got flight simulator 2 from sublogic loaded up here and I'm I'm at 1 megahertz right now so I've got the accelerator turned off just to see what this normally would have looked like on any other Apple 2 and it's kind of a horror show but I'm doing demo mode so I'm just gonna let it kind of play itself it takes a little while to load here so just bear with it this is what we all had to deal with back in the day I played the hell out of this game even as crappy as it was I would fly from New York to Chicago all the time in real time but here you go it's running right now this is it and we got looks like about one frame per second I would say have one megahertz and you know this is flight simulator yeah okay this is what we this is what we played if you can imagine that it did get slightly better than this if you would get out of an urban area I guess this the John Hancock tower over there is kind of screwing up the frame rate but if you keep watching this if I just let this run it's gonna eventually crash the plane which I always thought was hilarious in the demo mode of flight simulator too but it's just gonna keep banking there until it crashes I'm gonna throw up right now some footage of flight simulator running on the IBM PC that came out the same year as the Apple 2 C+ and you're gonna see in the footage that it's it's a bit stretched and that's really an artifact of the cheap VGA monitor that I'm using but just look at how much smoother it runs and again that's on a machine released the same year as this now this is 1 megahertz again so I'm gonna just restart here in 4 megahertz and we'll see how much of a difference that makes okay so here I am back in 4 megahertz and we'll just do the exact same thing it's not going to take much less time to load because the the disk controller itself is running at the same speed so still gonna take a second to get started here but once it does you'll see a little bit of a difference at least and there it is it's still not what you would call smooth but it is definitely better you're seeing maybe I would guess that's two three frames per second just for shits and giggles here's the same scene running on the original Microsoft Flight Simulator on an original IBM PC released in 1981 that's seven years before the Apple to see Plus this was based on sub logics flight simulator 2 for the Apple 2 and other computers now at first glance it may not seem much different from the Apple 2 but look at the shading which there's a lot more of and to my eyes it does look a little more like the four megahertz mode on the Apple than 1 megahertz and that would not be unexpected the PC was a faster machine definitely quicker the gauges are updating a lot faster now one problem is you may see the clock here is running obviously much faster than it normally would and again that's because early Apple twos did not have real-time clocks and there's the crash you would get clocks running much too fast at four megahertz games themselves this one could still benefit from some more speed this needs an important qualification while the frame rate goes up at four megahertz on the Apple 2 the lack of a real-time clock to keep the game running at the same speed means the performance of the plane in the game changes too this is the real problem with not having a system clock the speed of the game itself is dependent on the frame rate most Apple 2 games were developed to run the actual game at whatever framerate the system's spat out at 1 megahertz so no I was kind of wrong when I said this game would benefit from an even faster CPU that's only true if you want even less realism so here's Dig Dug and you're probably all familiar with this takes a second to load again but I've set the computer at 1 megahertz turn the acceleration off and we're just gonna see how it plays at 1 megahertz [Music] so probably pretty much what you'd expect from Dig Dug on the Apple to at least you know Apple to doesn't have the greatest graphics or sound but this isn't a bad port let's try it at for my guards and here's Dig Dug at four megahertz now the the attract mode is a lot faster than even the real gameplay is and I think that's because the sound actually slows it down quite a bit it's not completely unplayable as you'll see but it is still kind of ridiculous so let's just get this party started [Music] so again know if I can pause this there we go so again it's it's actually playable it's not terrible but obviously the music is all screwed up and it's just kind of janky in the way it moves so not ideal let's try one more different game now a lot of people don't realize that the Apple to see actually had a surprisingly good port of MS pac-man in fact it had a lot of pretty good ports of a lot of arcade games they weren't all that popular on the system for some reason but I've kind of been getting more into the arcade ports as I've gotten older I guess and kind of discovered games that I never played on the Apple 2 when I had one back in the day but anyway this is one megahertz again we're gonna see how MS pacman would have really played so here we go [Applause] [Applause] and here we are back at four megahertz and we'll just see how this does now one of the things that kind of holds the Apple two back a lot is the sound the sound takes a lot of computing power now watch anytime there's not sound going on in this game meaning I'm not eating any pellets and nothing else is going on with music or anything bouncing around the screen just no sound and you'll see what happens here we go you basically go into a turbo mode and it gets really hard to control obviously [Applause] [Applause] so when there is sound it's not that bad but it's kind of impossible whenever the sound cuts out so we've kind of established that for megahertz wasn't the greatest for games on the Apple to most games were just developed with one megahertz in mind and the system doesn't have a real-time clock in order to compensate for a faster speed so what was four megahertz good for why did they release a four megahertz machine well mostly for productivity apps like this this is Bank Street writer which is a word processor it's the one that I used back in the day and it was very popular and I'll just show you kind of how scrolling around and things like that looks in one megahertz on this machine and this is about as fast as it gets and you see it even kind of backs up when I take my hands off the keyboard it's still going and it's the same if you were to page down or anything like that that's how quickly or not that it draws the screen let's take a look at this same thing informa guards so here's the same file open at four megahertz and I'll just try and scroll through now and you see it's a lot better it still gets a little backed up but that was scrolling this is page down it's much more pleasant to use this way and the same would have been true for a spreadsheet program like VisiCalc or a database program or anything like that now the problem for Apple was this was 1988 and not many people were still using the Apple two for applications like that I was I used my to see my regular to see up until about 1992 or 93 when I upgraded to a PC and I put up with one megahertz scrolling another crap like that it was tough it was not pleasant but the two C+ at four megahertz was a lot better and the two gs which could do both obviously 16-bit apps and also 8-bit apps at 2.6 gigahertz or gigahertz we're getting a little ahead of ourselves here megahertz two point six megahertz not as fast as the Apple 2 plus but still better and you could at least use a program like this on the 2g s as well a little a little eat more easily than you could have 1 megahertz now let's have some real fun here I've got a disk here that I have loaded on my floppy move via ADT Pro long ago and this is a disk full of programs that I actually wrote back in grade school I had a computer science class we used Apple twos this was back in the probably mid 80s and I've still got him here and one of the programs that I wrote was a very simple coin flip program I actually have several versions of these on here but this one best shows the difference between 1 and 4 megahertz so let's try to run that and I'm just going to time it this is at 1 megahertz right now it's going to take a while to get through so I'll kind of cut after starting it and get back to you at the end so I hit the button at 29 seconds but I saw that it was really about 28 and a half seconds that that took to get through that and it's just kind of calculating random numbers there and 29 seconds at 1 megahertz on this program let's just switch over to 4 and see how much better that does so here we are we'll do the same thing at 4 megahertz and see how much better this does about nine seconds so not four times faster but significantly faster that's about three times faster at running a basic program and obviously basic is not getting directly into the hardware if you write something in machine language it's going to be even faster than that so interestingly I do have a version of this this little program and let me just show you the list here it's it's that simple I have a version of this that does the same thing but actually draws each flip on the screen as as it's happening and that doesn't speed up at all so the act of drawing it on the screen basically completely negates of the computing advantage that four megahertz would have but it does go to show I think we're four megahertz would benefit you a little bit or a lot depending on the kind of program you're running but anything that involves heavy calculations but again apple's problem at that point was just that people weren't buying 8-bit machines anymore to do real work with they were buying pcs there were maybe buying amigas or Atari STS more for creative work in those cases or they were buying Macs so a four megahertz 8-bit machine just was not a very big selling proposition at that time having said all that I should point out that Apple themselves didn't seem to expect much from this machine I couldn't find a single magazine or TV ad for it and only a few reviews in Apple specific publications whereas original to see ads and reviews are everywhere but I did find mentions a 1099 all in price with a color monitor at the system's introduction that makes it kind of a budget computer by Apple standards the original 2c was introduced at $12.99 with a monochrome monitor and a usable 2gs system was about 1,500 bucks in 1988 these prices did seem to drop really quickly Apple seemed to be targeting this machine at schools and maybe those just running home finances or something that didn't require the power or expandability of a 2e or 2 GS but even a budget price couldn't budge the size of that market in 1988 the fact that you basically had to buy a five and a quarter inch drive with the computer in order to use most of the software already out there didn't help and made the true cost of the system for most people just that much higher also one really quick note a lot of you were probably looking at this screen and wondering how the hell we ever dealt with text there was multicolored like this well for one thing a lot of us didn't I had a green monitor I'll try to find some old footage of that and show that to you now and the green monitors from Apple were quite sharp and actually anyone who was working mostly with text or even graphics because graphics worst sharper on them as well but text was much sharper and did not have this NTSC artifacting that's where these colors are coming from also this is quite a low resolution monitor to begin with this is a 40 kala monitor that's trying to display 80 columns right now so you know most of us if we were dealing with a lot of text we weren't looking at it like this so I hope you've enjoyed this look at the Apple 2c plus for me as an original 2c owner in both senses of that word it really is an interesting machine but that's about it for now and I'll see you next time bye bye you

Channel: Modern Classic

Views: 36,904

Rating: 4.9216824 out of 5

Keywords: apple, computers, retro computers, vintage computers, apple ii, apple iic

Id: VqjEDbuc-Cc

Length: 31min 44sec (1904 seconds)

Published: Sat May 23 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ogdonvito]

Rarest?

[u/EmersonLucero]

I have both systems, option cards are definitely more rare for some. Disk card is easy. Workstation Cards not so much.

[u/packetmon]

I did not know it had a licensed zip chip in it. Very interesting.