Academician
Well-known member
As I posted in Conquests I recently bought and just today got an Apple ][e Platinum. It came with a 5.25" drive and an RGB Monitor (which I'm pretty much using as a large paperweight atm). The RGB Monitor of course won't work the the ][e, and as I suspected it's just something the recycler stuck in the auction just to get rid of, it is ungodly yellowed and suffers some nasty case damage, and I have as of yet not tested it.
The computer itself has inside a 5.25" Drive Controller, a Super Serial Card (which we originally assumed was a parallel card), the Mouse Control Card, and some memory expansion card in a small slot one the opposite side as the rest.
When it arrived, the mouse card and the super serial card were out of there sockets and tumbling around inside the case, how this happened is unknown. So much for the guaranteed professional packing and pre-sell testing of the product.
When I first opened it of course I found a recycled school ][e in some need of tlc, which I happily tended to. I managed to get the machine relatively clean, inside and out, even though the case yellowing is still quite noticeable due to the fact that the area where a monitor would generally sit is still in factory color condition.
I had vacuumed the large layer of dust off of all the internal components, and I had taken the keyboard to water to clean out all of the gunk that was clearly visible. Of course before the next step I allowed ample time to dry, and even assisted using a hair dryer.
After I had everything hooked back together I hooked up the power to the machine, the video out connection to my TV, plugged in the 5.25" drive, and let'er rip.
The very first bootup seemed normal, it showed Apple \\e on my TV, and checked the disk drive for a system disk (which I don't have anyway). It then displayed the prompt...but the keyboard wouldn't type in any text.
I tried hitting the Reset key on the keyboard but this didn't do a darned thing. So I performed a cold boot. The screen filled with garbage, no discernible text, and this did so every cold boot until I allowed ~10 seconds after I shut it off until I turned it on again.
This time it booted up again to the prompt, and I was able to type text, so I thought it might have been just bad luck. I then popped in a Wheel of Fortune game disk I have from my IIGs (labelled IIe compatible). I hit the reset key, which again, did bupkis. I did another cold boot after waiting 10 seconds, and it seemed to read the disk, but did nothing. It continued to the prompt.
So I removed the disk and did another cold boot, this time I was greeted by simply the Apple \\e on my TV, and it sat there, no prompt, no nothing.
I left the machine off for a while, and then popped my Bard's Tale II disk into the drive to see if I could illicit a response. It booted one again to the Apple \\e on my TV, read the disk for quite some time, stopped, and froze. I then popped out the disk and performed yet another cold boot.
This time it went straight to the prompt, no Apple \\e on the stop of the screen. But something was up, if I entered a command, the error I was returned was in..SPANISH Oo? As far as I can remember the first time I got to enter text at the prompt returned english errors, so I'm confused as hell.
At this point I'm starting to consider this machine a lost investment, but I'd sure love to hear all of your thoughts on what may be wrong. I've decided to put off working on it until tomorrow, wait for maybe any excess moisture I missed to evaporate. My first step will probably be to remove the expansion cards to see if they were out of their sockets for a reason, but I sure hope that isn't the case.
If any of you have any other troubleshooting tips or tricks I'd love to hear them. I'm too new to the ][ world to know wth is up with this machine.
-Academician
The computer itself has inside a 5.25" Drive Controller, a Super Serial Card (which we originally assumed was a parallel card), the Mouse Control Card, and some memory expansion card in a small slot one the opposite side as the rest.
When it arrived, the mouse card and the super serial card were out of there sockets and tumbling around inside the case, how this happened is unknown. So much for the guaranteed professional packing and pre-sell testing of the product.
When I first opened it of course I found a recycled school ][e in some need of tlc, which I happily tended to. I managed to get the machine relatively clean, inside and out, even though the case yellowing is still quite noticeable due to the fact that the area where a monitor would generally sit is still in factory color condition.
I had vacuumed the large layer of dust off of all the internal components, and I had taken the keyboard to water to clean out all of the gunk that was clearly visible. Of course before the next step I allowed ample time to dry, and even assisted using a hair dryer.
After I had everything hooked back together I hooked up the power to the machine, the video out connection to my TV, plugged in the 5.25" drive, and let'er rip.
The very first bootup seemed normal, it showed Apple \\e on my TV, and checked the disk drive for a system disk (which I don't have anyway). It then displayed the prompt...but the keyboard wouldn't type in any text.
I tried hitting the Reset key on the keyboard but this didn't do a darned thing. So I performed a cold boot. The screen filled with garbage, no discernible text, and this did so every cold boot until I allowed ~10 seconds after I shut it off until I turned it on again.
This time it booted up again to the prompt, and I was able to type text, so I thought it might have been just bad luck. I then popped in a Wheel of Fortune game disk I have from my IIGs (labelled IIe compatible). I hit the reset key, which again, did bupkis. I did another cold boot after waiting 10 seconds, and it seemed to read the disk, but did nothing. It continued to the prompt.
So I removed the disk and did another cold boot, this time I was greeted by simply the Apple \\e on my TV, and it sat there, no prompt, no nothing.
I left the machine off for a while, and then popped my Bard's Tale II disk into the drive to see if I could illicit a response. It booted one again to the Apple \\e on my TV, read the disk for quite some time, stopped, and froze. I then popped out the disk and performed yet another cold boot.
This time it went straight to the prompt, no Apple \\e on the stop of the screen. But something was up, if I entered a command, the error I was returned was in..SPANISH Oo? As far as I can remember the first time I got to enter text at the prompt returned english errors, so I'm confused as hell.
At this point I'm starting to consider this machine a lost investment, but I'd sure love to hear all of your thoughts on what may be wrong. I've decided to put off working on it until tomorrow, wait for maybe any excess moisture I missed to evaporate. My first step will probably be to remove the expansion cards to see if they were out of their sockets for a reason, but I sure hope that isn't the case.
If any of you have any other troubleshooting tips or tricks I'd love to hear them. I'm too new to the ][ world to know wth is up with this machine.
-Academician