The written musings of a long-time Apple //e and Macintosh tech nerd. Opinions are my own.
How about a little retro gaming fun to close out #Appril2? While looking for replacement RAM chips for my Applied Engineering GS-RAM card for my Apple IIgs, I ran across an Apple Joystick IIe and IIc. Not finding one at the VCF East 2023 consignment sale, I snapped up this one on eBay at a reasonable price.
Now that I have a joystick for my Apple //e, it’s time for a little 8-bit retro gaming nostalgia!
What happens when you tumble down a retro-rabbit hole? You end up making an accidental Apple IIgs upgrade video for the retro computing Appril2 community event!
What started out as just trying to figure out how to use the Drive/Turbo CF flash card hard disk emulator turned into a chip pulling and drive servicing bonanza that had me going bananas by the end of the day.
Come watch me try not to use spicy language while I try to get a 3.5″ floppy drive from 1988 put back together again so I can us it with my Apple IIgs.
This past weekend was the Vintage Computer Federation‘s annual VCF East show in New Jersey.
I was a first timer to VCF and I was fairly impressed by the show that was put on. The exhibits were interesting, and the vendors had good products on sale. For me personally, I really enjoyed the speakers, and the hands-on labs – Glitchwrks XT-IDE board build and Commodore 64 BASIC programming.
VCF East was held on the InfoAge museum campus which featured early UNIVAC computers, several military artifacts, communications, and electronic warefare exhibits.
I am already thinking about next year’s trip. In the meantime, I put together a “what I saw” recap video. I hope you enjoy it.
So, apparently, #Appril2 is a thing. And that is right up my Apple //e loving nerd alley!
Here’s my #Appril2 teaser video staring my Apple IIgs.
Safety Notice: No real Raspberry Pi computers were harmed during the making of this video.
As part of this year’s #MARCHintosh event (yes, I’m late, or am I really early for the 2024 event?), I started a project to restore and upgrade a vintage Apple Macintosh LC III. Originally released in 1993 at a starting price of $1,349 for a 4MB/80MB system, this Low Cost Color computer was intended for home users who wanted and inexpensive color Macintosh and at schools who needed a way to leverage their Apple II software library through the use of the optional Apple IIe Card, a $250 add-in expansion peripheral.
This repair was more work that I originally expected. To get this old Mac back up and running, I needed to replace the 80MB Quantum ProDrive ELS hard disk drive with a BlueSCSI v1 hard disk emulator. Then, I needed to take apart and service the 1.44MB SuperDrive floppy disk drive to remove the old grease. Thankfully, getting the Apple IIe card and Motorola 68882 FPU co-processor working was straight forward.
Overall, this was a fun project to work on, but there is still more work to do. While restoring this Mac LC III, there was plenty of evidence that I’ll need to address the issue of leaky capacitors to get the internal speaker working normally, perhaps add some more RAM, and wow! is that internal fan loud! It sure would be nice to have a quieter fan in there. However, that will be work for a future video.