Restoring an Apple IIe Left for Scrap!

hey everyone it's colin how's it going i recently stumbled across a model of retro computer i used a lot back in my youth this time let's see what it takes to get this one working again [Music] so i found this apple 2e setup heading out for recycling and i just had to grab it it seemed complete but had a few obvious problems first is that the ribbon cables coming out of the back were simply cut off someone was probably in a hurry to get rid of this second is that the permanently attached power cord on the monitor had been cut off as well i'd have to deal with that before i could even test it cosmetically it's in surprisingly good shape when i found it it was really dusty and i wiped it off before i even brought it home there is a bit of yellowing but for a 35 year old machine that's probably to be expected both the tui and monitor had these security pads stuck to them where a cable could be used to lock them to a desk this suggests that the machine was owned by a business or institution of some sort but we'll deal with those pads later the inside of the tui is in equally good condition with not much dust at all in slot 6 is a disc 2 interface card the 2e doesn't have any floppy drive ports built in so you'd need a card in order to attach one and this was the most common option at the time it supports up to two five and a quarter inch floppy drives which are powered directly by the card in slot 2 is an apple super serial card which allowed the use of something like a modem or a printer and connects to a db25 port attached to the back side of the case and in slot one is an orange micro grappler plus card while the ssc could support serial printers this one allowed connecting a parallel port printer apple's own printers like the imagewriter line were serial based but a majority of pc compatible printers were parallel so a card like the grappler gave owners a better selection of printers to choose from the first thing i wanted to address was the monitor power cable the plastic plug it passed through on the back looked familiar and it gave me an idea i flipped the monitor face down and took out the screws that held the back cover on while this thing probably hadn't been powered on in a long time i was still very careful when working around the crt there wasn't much slack in the wiring so instead of cutting it off before the plastic plug i decided to pry the grommet apart then i could slide the remaining bit of jacket off the wires one option could have been to simply replace the cable with another one but i picked up an iec socket instead this is technically known as a panel mount c14 connector and installing one would let me use a regular pc power cable because permanently attached cables are annoying the back side of the socket has terminals that can accept wires a few different ways and they're labeled for line neutral and ground normally i would have gone with crimping on some insulated spade connectors but the transformer inside the monitor is too close to the back to leave enough room for that setup so instead i strip the insulation off the wires slid on some pieces of heat shrink tubing then loop the wires through the holes in the terminals i fired up my iron and soldered the wires into place i found that these took solder really really well so i easily got clean strong joints then i could simply slide the heat shrink over the connections to insulate them it was still a bit of a tight fit but nothing to worry about so i got the new connector screwed into place if the wiring had been too short i probably could have replaced it at the power inlet board which incidentally reveals that this monitor was actually manufactured by samsung something else i noticed was this label inside the back housing it lists part numbers for replacement crts but there's one that makes reference to an orange phosphor tube the back of the monitor says this one has green phosphorus which is what i've always seen these monitors with i had no idea there was an orange version while there are a few electrolytic capacitors inside the monitor none of them showed any signs of failing so i decided to button it back up to give it a test thankfully it powered on no problem and even better when i cranked up the brightness on the back i got a picture it was clear and bright with no flickering and no signs of image burning i'm really happy with how this repair slash modification turned out it looks factory and to me at least makes the monitor much less annoying to set up and store because i can use detachable cables and considering how perfectly that new connector fit into the back i can't help but wonder if other revisions of this monitor came that way or if it was an option its designers considered so with the monitor working i could turn my attention to the 2e itself the most common failure point in these is the power supply so in the very least i wanted to take it apart and inspect it before powering the computer on if it had failed in certain ways it could damage the tui's motherboard there's just a single six pin cable harness coming out of it which is easy enough to disconnect then there are four screws that hold the psu into the case from the bottom this one was made by aztec and it's interesting to see the pin out and voltages printed right on the side of the case which of course stands in stark contrast to the serious warning label on the top declaring that it should never be opened yes screw that there's five fasteners on each side holding the case on this housing is made from aluminum and it feels really high quality it's also interesting that there's no fan or cooling vents in it probably because it's so low power that they aren't needed this one only outputs 35 watts power supply efficiency has seen dramatic improvements since this one was made in 1985. you can get a modern pc psu that delivers a thousand watts and takes up about the same volume [Music] there was one additional screw that confused me at first it loosened but never came out oh i'll figure that one out later the internal components are pretty neatly laid out back then it would be common to actually repair a power supply instead of just replacing the entire thing like we tend to do today that extra screw turned out to be the connection for the ground lead which was held in with a lock washer and nut i needed to get the board out of the case to better inspect it which meant taking out six more screws i also got the wiring harness grommet taken apart so i could free it from the housing then i was able to lift the board out i had to set the housing off to the side since it was still connected to the ac socket which i didn't want to desolder and here's a site we don't see on pcbs anymore notice how all the traces are curved the layout for this board was likely hand drawn using cad to design pcbs was still pretty new in the 80s the caps in this power supply like those in the monitor all looked to be in good shape no signs of leaking anywhere and the tops weren't bulging no doubt part of this is due to the use of good quality caps like these rubicons but there was one cap i did spot for replacement and it's a very common one to see in vintage computers it's this ac input filter cap made by rifa and when it fails it doesn't usually damage anything but it does blow up in spectacular fashion and produce a lot of smoke and a bad smell failure seemed to be a function of time and not just use so when i spotted cracks in the casing of this one that meant it was time to deal with it desoldering the old one was easy since this board comes from before the days of lead-free solder new replacement caps are still being made so i bought a few and dropped one in a couple of quick solder joints later and it would be good now for another 30 years so with everything in the psu looking good i got it put back together then reinstalled it in the computer okay time to test things out i got the monitor hooked up to the 2e held my breath and powered it on ah success i got the startup beep and an image on the screen i could hit ctrl reset to break into basic then type out a simple program the keyboard was working fine and even felt halfway decent to type on the program ran so things were looking good for this machine and speaking of looking good it was time to get rid of those security pads they were stuck on with double-sided foam tape and i was able to slowly pry them off with the help of a plastic spudger these spudgers are made of a softer plastic than the case so the risk of scratching things up was pretty low of course a bunch of residue was left behind so i scraped off the big pieces with the spudger then used some goo gone on the remainder one of my worries was that the area under the pads wouldn't have yellowed like the rest of the case and end up standing out interestingly though that wasn't the case it was just as yellowed and in fact in the middle it had gotten even darker i can only guess this was due to some kind of chemical reaction between the adhesive and the plastic the last thing then was to deal with those cut ribbon cables on the expansion cards i have no plans to connect a printer to this thing so i don't need to worry about the ribbon coming off of the grappler card but the floppy drive was something i wanted to take care of i bought off ebay a 20 pin ribbon cable kit it came with a length of bulk cable and a number of connectors so you can make your own ribbons whatever length you wanted i slid the ribbon through the connector making sure to align the pins correctly i found using a bar clamp from the hardware store to be the best way to crimp these connectors on it applies strong but even pressure the direction of the connectors does matter since these cables carry power to the drive get one end wrong and it can fry either the drive or the controller so i made sure to copy how the ribbon was crimped on the original cable ends to fix the other end i had to disassemble the drive this is really easy just four screws in the bottom then the metal housing slides off the cable goes through a strain relief then loops around a couple of ferrites before connecting to the drive's analog board i figured that those ferrites were probably important so i ran the new cable through them before crimping the connector on these disc 2 drives actually pre-date the 2e by quite a bit they were designed in 1978 for the original apple ii by steve wozniak himself they were considered quite the feat of engineering at the time because of their relative simplicity other computer manufacturers offer floppy drives of course but they all used more complex and thus more expensive circuitry was had a reputation for making things work with the fewest number of chips and this drive is definitely no exception i got the ribbon cable sorted easily enough and there are lots of other tests and maintenance i could do to the drive's mechanical parts but i don't really have any spare five and a quarter inch floppies and even if i did i don't have any other systems i can use to write disk images to them so for now instead of using this drive at all i picked up a really cool replacement a floppy mu from big mesa wires as its name suggests it's a floppy drive emulator you load disk images onto a microsd card and can configure it to behave like a few different models of drives it's compatible with both the apple ii series as well as classic max and includes a ribbon cable adapter for connecting to machines with db-19 floppy drive ports it plugs into the disk 2 card in the 2e just like the original drive and gets its power from that interface too you can navigate through folders of your disk images then simply select the one you want to use the display also shows activity including the virtual track on the disk image the computer is accessing unfortunately having real programs for the computer to run revealed a problem when booting some disks just through an error message and others simply froze but sometimes the problem was more subtle like when playing moon patrol i couldn't get the vehicle to jump i could shoot so it was registering keyboard input and i confirmed earlier that all the key switches were working the game just refused to acknowledge that the jump button was being pressed and something similar happened with up and down i couldn't control the buggy what gave me an idea when troubleshooting was a different message that some programs would produce relocation slash configuration error that didn't sound so much like a drive problem to me so i powered the machine on while holding down both apple keys this kicks off its built-in self-test and sure enough it failed normally it should say system okay but in my case it was indicating a memory fault now this isn't necessarily surprising even though they're solid state it's not uncommon to see the ram chips and vintage machines like these start to fail thankfully the ram diagnostic indicates which one is bad in this case it's the chip in position 12 on the motherboard unfortunately i don't have any spares on hand and proper replacements are becoming less easy to find i bought some from a reseller in china for just a few bucks but shipping is slow so it's going to take a while before they get here and that's where we need to leave this one for now the voltages in the system look good and the capacitors show no signs of failure so i think a bad ram chip is all i'm facing if that changes well i already have replacement caps on hand i can swap in and otherwise i'm pretty impressed by the condition of this system considering its age and that it had been dumped in an e-waste pile it doesn't really show anything other than the signs of normal use this specific setup also really brings back memories for me in elementary school the computer lab had about 30 of well these an apple 2e with monitor 2 and single disc 2 floppy drive i remember having computer class once a week and playing educational titles like number munchers oregon trail and carmen san diego whether this one came from a school well i don't know there aren't any identifying marks or labels like you'd expect to see and the general condition and lack of screen burn in suggests it wasn't used a whole lot my best guess as to this one's origin is something like a study room in a public library but regardless of where it came from it's great to rescue a piece of classic computing history like this one from the scrap heap yeah it may still need some work but that's just part of the fun and as much as i learned from one of these back in the day it's kind of fitting that i'm still learning things from it even now i'll likely do a follow-up when those ram chips arrive so keep an eye out for that until then if you like the video i'd appreciate a thumbs up and be sure to subscribe you can follow me on twitter and instagram this does not comp and as always thanks for watching

Channel: This Does Not Compute

Views: 243,497

Keywords: Apple, Apple IIe, IIe, computer, 8-bit, retro, technology, restore, floppy, Floppy Emu, game, gaming, Number Munchers, Oregon Trail, Carmen Sandiego, repair, DIY, capacitor, This Does Not Compute

Id: upJd9Q_nEyU

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020