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My New Old Apple IIe Computer

charlieharrington.com

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Re: My New Old Apple IIe Computer

#71

Post by StillBored »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #64
StillBored wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure dearth is the right word here. Sure the total volume of information was less, but the quality was massively higher. Sure, you might get incorrect information from BBS's or friends, but the manuals were detailed, technically accurate, and usually complete. AKA, you didn't get through reading one and go "but what about..." only to discover a dark hole. There was a bit of that, but usually 3rd parties stepp…

That was our point... manuals were better. Dearth is correct only if you compare those manuals to today’s resources... YouTube videos? Can you imagine Ben Eaters videos in 1983? We both would have killed for something like that!

Hmm, maybe. I find the technical depth lacking in those videos. Hooking something up, or writing a couple lines of basic/assembly isn't anything compared with the list of peek/poke/call addresses in the back of two or three books books from the 1980s. I have the original apple ][+ manual with the assembly listing for the ROMs. I will put that manual up against every youtube video I've seen for technical depth (it also has schematics).

Re: My New Old Apple IIe Computer

#72

Post by jbgreer »

In 1983 I bought an Apple ][e with a monitor, dual floppy drives (but not the fancy duodisk verson), and an 80 column card. A friend and his father had bought several as a speculative investment, and when his parents left town he needed cash for a party. I took advantage of this situation and got a smoking deal.

A very short time later I bought a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 from someone wanting to avoid advertising in the local paper. Again, a smoking deal. At one point I dialed 60 BBSes a week.

A very short time later I bought a Z80 card so that I could also run CP/M.

It was glorious. I regret selling it.

I learned to type so that I could be more productive on that machine. That, and my handwriting was already atrocious. I programmed Apple Basic, Apple Pascal, 6502 assembly, and C on that machine. I used Apple Writer to transcribe and print a literary magazine for my school. I typeset calculus notes on the machine. I plotted star charts.

So much fun, and, yes, such a wonderfully expandable machine.

Re: My New Old Apple IIe Computer

#73

Post by sgt »

codecamper wrote: post #29

And the keyboard works! My MB Pro's keyboard? Not so much.

Send it in. The butterfly ones can be fixed under warranty. It's not going to be perfect but will solve the sticking key issue. I just use a Magic keyboard with an external screen 90% of the time though.

Re: My New Old Apple IIe Computer

#74

Post by cferr »

whatrocks wrote: post #51
raverbashing wrote: post #50

$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 recommend getting a brass wool tip cleaner and using it often while soldering. Also some good quality flux will really help. I recommend Amtech for the flux, and the tip cleaner I use is Hakko branded. You can find both on Amazon and elsewhere.

Re: My New Old Apple IIe Computer

#75

Post by StillBored »

mansilladev wrote: post #68

So.. back in the day, I used to do random PEEKs, POKEs, and CALLs, and there was one particular call that I stumbled upon that could quickly render a disc unbootable. Two questions: 1. Can you give it a try? It's CALL -20480 2. Anyone know what in the hell that one actually does? It takes about a millisecond to render the disc useless.

Without spending much time on it, you probably jumped to DOS's RWTS or similar and wrote a track out (or something similar). That appears to be 0xAFFF which doesn't ring any bells but is roughly where DOS might load depending on machine/etc.

Try https://github.com/iKarith/beneath-apple-dos/blob/master/ch0... for more info.

Re: My New Old Apple IIe Computer

#76

Post by mtalantikite »

I once was walking in my neighborhood in Brooklyn when a couple doors down from my apartment I saw some beige boxes in the trash in front of a brownstone. Just laying there in the trash was a Macintosh SE, a Macintosh Plus, and a Macintosh (512k). No keyboards, but I still couldn't believe it. I totally forgot about what I was going to do and immediately grabbed them and brought them up to my apartment. They all booted fine. I ended up giving the Plus and SE away to friends, but I still have the 512k in my office and play around with it from time to time. What a great machine!

Re: My New Old Apple IIe Computer

#77

Post by Terretta »

jonahbenton wrote: post #42

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…

Came here to mention Beagle Bros. In particular, for this:

> Other than AppleSoft BASIC (which was written by Microsoft! For Apple!!), which is burned into a ROM chip on the Apple II, there's also some sort of built-in assembler that you can access by typing this into the BASIC prompt:

    CALL-151
> I believe this is where I'll be able to do some of the more Commodore 64-like peeking and poking directly at memory. I have a feeling there's a lot of exploring (and fun) to be done here. I need to read up more on this.

Try the "Beagle Bros Peeks and Pokes Supplement":

https://apple2online.com/web_documents/Beagle%20Bros%20Peeks...

There were collections of cheat sheets, you want the Peeks and Pokes one:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/i-heart-cheatsheets/

Also multiple delightful "catalogs" and tips books:

https://apple2online.com/web_documents/Beagle%20Bros%20Catal...

Unfortunately, I can never find the big compendium they produced, vaguely recalled as a brown legal sized paperback with their logo on the front and chock full of everything.

This is available and good tho:

Assembly Lines

"... designed for students of all ages: the nostalgic programmer enjoying the retro revolution, the newcomer interested in learning low-level assembly coding, or the embedded systems developer using the latest 65C02 chips...

https://smile.amazon.com/Assembly-Lines-Complete-Roger-Wagne...

- - -

EDIT: I FOUND THE BIG TIP BOOK!!!!

https://archive.org/details/Beagle_Bros-The_Big_Tip_Book_OCR...

It's 250 pages, and previously couldn't find it because Beagle Bros wasn't in the name. Brown w/ the logo tho, heh.

Re: My New Old Apple IIe Computer

#78

Post by mattpharr »

mansilladev wrote: post #68

So.. back in the day, I used to do random PEEKs, POKEs, and CALLs, and there was one particular call that I stumbled upon that could quickly render a disc unbootable. Two questions: 1. Can you give it a try? It's CALL -20480 2. Anyone know what in the hell that one actually does? It takes about a millisecond to render the disc useless.

So -20480 works out to be 0xAFFF.

My trusty copy of "What's Where in the Apple", which includes a catalog of where everything is in memory, says that the routine to write the VTOC from its in-memory buffer to disk starts at $AFF8.

The VTOC is the volume table of contents (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AApple_DOS#Volume_Table_...), so calling into the middle of that presumably ends up overwriting the VTOC with junk, which would indeed make the disk useless.

Re: My New Old Apple IIe Computer

#79

Post by dekhn »

Terretta wrote: post #77
jonahbenton wrote: post #42

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…

Came here to mention Beagle Bros. In particular, for this: > Other than AppleSoft BASIC (which was written by Microsoft! For Apple!!), which is burned into a ROM chip on the Apple II, there's also some sort of built-in assembler that you can access by typing this into the BASIC prompt: CALL-151 > I believe this is where I'll be able to do some of the more Commodore 64-like peeking and poking directly at memory. I hav…

Beagle Bros was one of my favorite things when I was a teenager. I had the peeks and pokes poster (http://beagle.applearchives.com/the_posters/poster_2.html) among others up on my wall and used GPLE (an editor) which was really nice. What I alwayss liked was their "Style" (old barbershop) and jokes.

Now I have an Apple IIe right next to my work computer (Floppy Emu). I connected it to a linux terminal and was able to do text Google searches and the SERP still renders fine at 80x24.

Re: My New Old Apple IIe Computer

#80

Post by dekhn »

StillBored wrote: post #30
mjg59 wrote: post #19

> Some wizards at work told me that I probably cannot just plug this into a modern phone line and expect it to work, though. Is this true? I can't think of any immediate reason it would fail, but finding something to actually dial into seems like a harder problem.

Doubtful, some quick googling seems to indicate that the micromodem iie is a 300bps modem (vs the micromodem II, for which the manual pops up right away). Even if its 1200 or 2400bps, its still likely way to slow to be affected by the codec issues/etc that others have pointed out. You have to remember people are still running fax and home security systems with modems in 2020, so the vast majority of VOIP codecs handl…

I had to run my modem at 300bps on my Apple IIe because the built-in serial terminal was "too slow" (scrolling up one line took so long that the buffer would overflow and the beginning of each line would be missing). I ended up talking to the Proterm developer at AppleCon and he said he solved it by using buffers and interrupts, which I knew nothing about.
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