$95 for a new power supply? Should have shelled out for a soldering iron or station, pliers, new caps, which might have ended up cheaper in the long run (or not)
Yeah, I acknowledged my shame with this decision in the post. I did buy this $15 radio kit to "practice" soldering: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004YHZE0G, but I've already somehow oxidized my solder iron's tip to the point that it won't heat the solder anymore. I would love a dummy's guide to soldering (YouTube or books) recommendation if you have one! (Although, I'm sure practice, practice, practice is going to be the top suggestion).
Great piece. Haven't seen Beagle Bros mentioned. Their awesome catalogs: https://stevenf.com/beagle/contents.html Also haven't seen mentioned Pinball Construction Set- an absolutely amazing piece of engineering, by Bill Budge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set Last I checked, Budge was still working- for Google- on the V8 runtime. Think he is on twitter. And while there are a lot of 6502 assembly…
These all look great (esp. Pinball Construction Set!).
Regarding 6502 programming, I've been planning to follow along with Ben Eater's new course and kit on "Building a 6502 Computer": https://eater.net/6502 (once I finish up his previous kit for building an 8 bit computer with breadboards). Amazing that you still have those books in your library!
The Super Serial Card is a nice and you don't need any software to use it. Typing "PR#2" followed by "IN#2" (replace the "2" with the slot number the card is installed in) will give you access to a very simple serial communications terminal. Granted, it does take some configuration for both computers to understand each other.
You can also search for scans of books and magazines online. People have been working on preserving these materials since the mid-1990's, so there are many excellent resources.
Great piece. Haven't seen Beagle Bros mentioned. Their awesome catalogs: https://stevenf.com/beagle/contents.html Also haven't seen mentioned Pinball Construction Set- an absolutely amazing piece of engineering, by Bill Budge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set Last I checked, Budge was still working- for Google- on the V8 runtime. Think he is on twitter. And while there are a lot of 6502 assembly…
These all look great (esp. Pinball Construction Set!). Regarding 6502 programming, I've been planning to follow along with Ben Eater's new course and kit on "Building a 6502 Computer": https://eater.net/6502 (once I finish up his previous kit for building an 8 bit computer with breadboards). Amazing that you still have those books in your library!
Those look very cool! Though FWIW I wonder if there are differences between the breadboard memory space and IO and busses and the Apple II. I recall the graphics screen was fed from RAM at 2000-3fff, with an offscreen buffer in 4000-5fff. And there was a vertical blanking interrupt handler to hook into, so you could organize writes to screen memory when it was not being read by the video machinery, and avoid flicker. Getting that working as a kid- actually seeing butter smooth non-flicker animation in the simple games I was writing- big, big moment.
$95 for a new power supply? Should have shelled out for a soldering iron or station, pliers, new caps, which might have ended up cheaper in the long run (or not)
Yeah, I acknowledged my shame with this decision in the post. I did buy this $15 radio kit to "practice" soldering: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004YHZE0G , but I've already somehow oxidized my solder iron's tip to the point that it won't heat the solder anymore. I would love a dummy's guide to soldering (YouTube or books) recommendation if you have one! (Although, I'm sure practice, practice, practice is going…
I also suggest the CFFA hard-disk emulator. I always wanted a hard disk for my Apple II.
I have one of the old ones, its good, but the new ones look even better because you can copy images from the internet directly to it. OTOH, I also have the https://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/ for that. The CFFA is better as a HD, while the floppy emu is good for just plugging into random disk ports (IIGS/IIC/laser 128).
There are other options besides the CFFA. There’s a South Korean guy named Ian Kim who makes the awesome SD Disk ][ emulator. Sell it on ebay. It has the best firmware I’ve used on these types of devices. It has an LCD screen and onboard controls and menus with which you can scroll through all images & select the one you want to load.
Lovely. I love this kind of computer archeology posts.
I'm still sad my dad sold my C64, back in the day, in order to buy me a PC XT clone. I want to travel back in time and tell my dad to keep the C64, that future me would love it. Emulators just aren't the same :/
The easiest and fastest way to get software onto your new beloved: Search the internet for the FTP Apple Asimov server (there are http mirrors if you don’t want you use ftp). This is an archive of many thousands of Apple diskette images and software. Download stuff from the archive onto an SD card. Then purchase an SD to Apple disk emulator card (plugs into one of those 7 slots and emulates an Apple disk drive). You…
I also suggest the CFFA hard-disk emulator. I always wanted a hard disk for my Apple II.
I have a hard disk emulator and honestly have never used it on the //e. Maybe because very little software back in the day used them.