Restoration of Apple ][c

This Apple //c came from the squat “Centro Sociale Ask191” in Palermo; it was fitted in a pile of old electronic equipments, forming a sort of cyberpunk sculpture; it was donated to us during the Hackmeeting 2008 by the squat fellows 🙂

Cleaning it was a real mess, using water and industrial liquid soap. We collected a lot of… tobacco coming out from the keyboard!

Turning it on, it showed a garbled screen; we tested all socketed ROM reading them, finding the keymap ROM blank.

During the debugging, a tester probe accidentally shorted two pin in the power supply side; after that, all RAM were burned and become very hot! So we had to change every of them.

After that, the system reacted very well; we just discovered another faulty RAM.

The last work was to create the keymap ROM; we red an identical one from another Apple //c (brought by Alessandro, red as a 2716). Our programmer can’t write 2716, so we duplicated his content and wrote a 2732 instead, that fit perfectly!

Now the system is back to work! 🙂

NOTE: The system mount 128K of RAM but use normally the first 64K. So, a video glitch as you can see in the pictures (those 2 characters in the middle of the screen) has to be found in the first RAM bank. If they are socketed, just swap the chips to test this.

The ROM images of our Italian Apple //c and some manuals / info can be downloaded from this link:

http://museo.freaknet.org/files/apple-2c/

Other useful info, ROM images etc. about this and other APPLE computers can be found here: http://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ (Thank you, speedyG from http://www.applefritter.com 😉