Apple 1 Replica using original components and layout

I just checked the web-site again. The bidding is at $2550.00. (It was at $449 just a few hours ago). I have a feeling that the winning bidder will try to sell it as an "authentic Apple I". "It looks like an Apple-I, it works like an Apple-I. Gee, it MUST be an Apple-I!" Beware potential buyers! There probably will soon be a forged Apple-I on the market!

There were markings on the board that suggest the use of the 6800 instead of the 6502. Has anybody done this yet?

This is exactly why I did not make an exact replica. I never wanted anybody to pass mine off as original. The work is very nice, unfortunately it can be counterfitted to those who don't know what to look for.

PS Wonder where they got the 25xx IC's from?!

Well, it states in the auction that it is a recreation. I would imagine component dates would be later than when the Apple 1 was produced. Anyway....

....Does anybody know the designer/creator? Has anyone used a 6800 instead of a 6502 in an Apple 1?

They appear to be 6502's in the recreation. However the 6501 was a knockoff of the 6800. The 6502 was the 6501's replacement after Moto sued. It switched the pinlayout around and added a few features for machine code.

Now it looks like there are kits for sale to build one...
http://cgi.ebay.com/Apple-1-Computer-Vintage-Parts-Kit_W0QQitemZ8742010035QQcategoryZ80286QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

This is what I've wanted. Great work... If only to get the origional PCB in my hands with no components and no $50k deposit.

I've asked him if the pcb is origional layout and to what degree he spent making sure that it was...origional...

Vince, you were wondering about the 25xx series parts. I have a supplier for these but he wants me to buy a lot of them and I don't see it worth it at the moment.

Its a minimum order of 25 of EACH part.

The 2504 is $10
The 2513 is $6.95
The 2519 is $20

If you're interested in going in on a deal like this with me let me know. He has 600 of the 2504, 200 of the 2513 and 100 of the 2519. These are all signetics parts and the correct character set for the character generator.

Well, I bought the kit. I'll let you guys know how it turns out.

Where did you buy the kit? eBay? I thought this was an auction? I may be interested in the chips but is a lot for parts that are very prone to failure.

I guess I should have said I committed to bidding.

I'm not too interested in the Signetics parts right now. My plan was to duplicate the Apple 1 like Steve on ebay did.

I've since bought an altair 8800 and will duplicate that. That will be a fun project because the parts are actually touchable. I'm desoldering all of the components and getting the raw PCBs scanned into gerber files. It costs $120 per board, but sure easy to get an exact duplicate of the board.

Please, by all means, keep us up to date on your Altair reproduction. I could be interested in building one of those as well.

I didn't get an Apple 1 kit!!!

Oh well, he said I could buy one off Ebay. Someone bid it up to $570. I noticed bidders like compmuseum.

I sure hope that these aren't going into museums! The value of a real Apple 1 just went down 30 grand!

I got one on the second or third round of these being up on eBay. It was only $399 then. The guy making them seems pretty cool. Anyhow, I got the kit last Thursday and started putting it together that night. I got as far as havng all the sockets soldered in before I could no longer focus on the tip of the soldering iron... LOL.

Next day saw the installation of diodes, resistors, caps, and transistors. And then the cleaning of the board. Went through a can and a half of Flux-Off, but got it clean.

Saturday, I built the power supply and checked the output voltages at least a dozen times. Satisfied with that, I donned my antistatic wrist strap and inserted all the chips. Then I built a video cable, hooked the board up to the composite input of my little 5" TV, and powered up. Got a screenful of @s and dashes. Cool!

I shunted RESET to ground to reset it, then shunted CLS to Vcc to clear the screen. So far so good!

Next I had to hook up the keyboard. Since I didn't want to cut the rainbow ribbon cable up, I built a "translator" board to match the pinouts of the keyboard to the pinouts of the computer. That turned out pretty good -- only about an inch square, and I brought the RESET and CLS pins out to a 4-pin header. This board plugs into the 16-pin DIP socket on the keyboard.

So now that I had a keyboard hooked up, I entered the test program from the Apple 1 manual -- got the ASCII characters dumping to the screen. Again, cool! A working Apple 1 reproduction.

Notes:

Instructions are sparse. Very sparse. Had to hit the web for documentation; high-res photos of real Apple 1s were very helpful with component placement.

Most of the ICs have date codes from the early 80s, though I do have a handful with 1976 date codes. Mostly the 2504s if I remember correctly.

Fairly significant differences in the boards if you know where to look. The "Apple Computer 1" text is in a block font rather than Helvetica. The text "Copyright 1976" text is obviously missing. Traces are largely in the same place, but don't appear as graceful as on the original -- hard angles rather than smooth curves; some traces that are at an angle don't run parallel to each other as on the original.

On the other hand, I got the full "This must have been how Woz felt In a 1976 California garage" feeling of stuffing and soldering a fairly large board, and powering the thing up. Because I gotta tell you, seeing that thing actually displaying and running a program was an awesome feeling.

The guy who makes the kit is going to make the cassette board available in the near future. Which begs the question -- How in the world do I get a cassette of Apple 1 BASIC? I'm still VERY new to 6502 machine code, and I'd like to be able to do something reasonably useful, reasonably quickly with this machine.

I took photos throughout the assembly process. Should I post those here?

Thanks!
--
Bryan

I also purchase the kit from the same guy on e-bay. Assembly took about 6 hours. When I powered it up it didn't work. It turned out that the 6502 CPU was bad. When I replaced it with the one I pulled out of my Apple II+, the Apple 1 kit came to life. It works fine. I am also looking forward to get a cassette interface, though the maker of the kit said that he is not planning to release one in the near future.

I posted some photos of the construction of my Apple 1 replica. They're on my .Mac page.

http://homepage.mac.com/bkvines/PhotoAlbum16.html

--
Bryan

I bought one too, finally. It got mine at 470, but I don't mind because Steve has helped me quite a bit on the Altair Project.

I have been building my Apple 1 and am having problems with the transformers. I have the two brown wires going to pins 1 and 2 and the green wires going to pins 3 and 4. If I put the yellow from the P-8667 on pin 5 like in the manual, it pops the fuse. Can you show a diagram of how you wired yours?

I recently built this kit (assume it's the ebay one) with success. It sounds like you have the power connector wired up correctly. Correct pin-out can be determined by referring to the apple 1 manual (on this site) and using a VOM/DMM to determine correct transformer voltages/center tap.

Here's a close-up of mine:
http://photos.marmoset.net/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=2884

When I first powered mine up, I did it before inserting any ICs to verify that the power supply section was supplying the correct voltages. I hope you're doing the same to avoid damaging the many hard to find ICs.

Also check to make sure the regular or ICs and rectifier diodes are inserted correctly. Verify that the filter capacitors' polarities are correct. Check diodes to verify that they are not shorted/damaged. Same with regular or ICs - should be no shorts/low ohms between pins. And, of course, solder bridges.

Good luck!

I too took some pictures of the assembly of mine.

http://photos.marmoset.net/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=2811

It sounds like we have ours wired the same. Look at the close-up of my power supply board. I don't use the yellow wire on the transformer that has the two brown wires. Looking at the picture, the wires correspond to pins 1 thru 6. (I can take other close-ups of the power section of the Apple 1 board if you need).

1 = Brown
2 = Brown
3 = Green
4 = Green
5 = Yellow (from the P-8667 transformer with green wires)
6 = Connected to 5.

Almost working, I have proper voltages now. I had the 12 and -12V regulators wrong, duh.

Hopefully nothing was seriously damaged by having the regulators in the wrong spots.

Which sites do you recommended for good views of the Apple 1 circuit
board. I just got one and want to make sure to get it right !!

I have also just finished building one of these kits.

Unfortunately it has a problem with the keyboard output. For example, when I push a 'Q' a 'I' will appear on the screen This happen with more than half the keys.
As far as I can tell there is a problem with the 5th and 6th bit in the 8 bit sequence that the keyboard sends. They get scrambled somehow, somewhere.

I'm racking my brain as to what it could be. I've checked all the soldering and it looks good. Checked the keyboard adaptor I built, no shorts or misconnected wires as far as I can tell.

I also got one of Vince's I/O boards, however it does not work. It is possibly related to the same issue as the scrambled keys. When I plug in the card, everything seems fine but the CS button now does not work so I can't get any further to test. Strange!.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what my problem is?

Picture here:
http://www.applefritter.com/node/17740

Cheers
Phil

P,S, I'm also looking for an Apple ][ original keyboard...would anyone have one for sale? Thanks.

Double check your keyboard connection.

If the wires for data bit 3 and 4 are flipped (starting at 0 as the first bit), Q would become an I.

ASCII Q is 0x51 or 01010001
ASCII I is 0x49 or 01001001

You can see they are the same, except bit 3 and 4 are switched. Does pressing R print a J on the screen?

The serial interface should work, it works fine on mine.

If the serial interface doesn't work with the keyboard disconnected, I would suspect a defective 6821 pia ic.

Good luck, hope you get it working.

A = I (01000001 changes to 01001001)
E = I (01000101 changes to 01001001
I = I

D = H (01000100 changes to 01001000)
L = H (01001100 changes to 01001000)
H = H
etc...

Sorry for the confusion. I have checked most of the keys and it always seems to be the 5th and 6th bits that change or get scrambled. Sometimes,and very rarely I have noticed that the keys change, sometimes to the correct key, or sometime to another scrambled key.

I have also swapped the 6821 pia ic that came with the with the Apple 1 kit with the one that came with the I/O card from vince...same problem.

* One silly mistake I did when I first turned the machine on was to have the keyboard socket plug in the wrong way around (pin1 was at pin9 etc.). Could this damage something? It was like this with and without the I/O card, as I was trying to find the problem, in intill I realized my real mistake.

Cheers

Phil

One thing I have just realized is that the 5th and 6th bits relate to pins B3 and B4 on the keyboard connector...with the Apple keyboard ribbon mistakenly plugged in 180 degrees off, as I first had it, these two pins would have been connected to -12V and +12V !!!

Could this be my problem, have I have damaged something? Maybe the keyboard?

Phil

I have the same keyboard as you, Franklin Ace one, and I made the same mistake at my replica 1. when I plugged connector (180 degrees off) I burned that 74LS374 chip because 12 V got into it... it was completely burnt. maybe you had a bit more luck and it still works, but in wrong way (inside it are weak flip flop components)
I replaced it by a 74HC374 (it's compatible, and much easier to find), and now my keyboard is fully working again.
I think you could try to put by hand ASCII codes at apple keyboard connector, I made at my replica and it works, and maybe it is useful to know where the problem is (but take a lot of care doing this!!).
if it's ok, try to change that chip

hope you will solve your problem soon, your apple looks great!

Thanks Luis,
With some advice from you and some advice from Steve G. I decided to removed the 74HC374 (as you sugested it may be faulty), and while I was at it I also replaced the 7406. Both are now socketed, and it ws a simple task to track these IC's down, and now everything works perfectly ;-)

I don't know which IC was broken, but my gut tells me thet it was the 74HC374.

Thanks for all your help.

Cheers
Phil

Looks like he's selling a cassette interface card reproduction kit now.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Apple-1-Computer-Cassette-Interface-Reproduction-Kit_W0QQitemZ8789135532QQcategoryZ4193QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Yeah! I bid and won one of the cassette interfaces on eBay. I plan on adapting it to my Replica I and FINALLY try to load some of the tapes from the old Apple-I days (tapes are circa 1979). Wish me luck. If I get anything off these old tapes, I'll put them on-line for everyone.

I too bid on and won the cassette interface kit on eBay. It arrived today. I blew the dust off my tape deck, only to find that the belts inside are all bad and it no longer works. So I used a laptop to record the Apple 1's output. I set the first 16 bytes to FF, wrote them to tape. Powered down the Apple 1, then powered it back up. Checked the first 16 bytes to be sure they were random. Then successfully read the bytes back in.

I used the Briel serial interface to load basic and the lunar lander game (found on this site) and wrote both of these out to "tape". Both of these were succeffully re-loaded several times from tape.

As the instructions indicate, the volume of the tape player (or computer in my case) should be set to just light the LED.

Basic can be found here:
http://www.marmoset.net/apple1/basic.wav

To load:
Start the tape program with C100R
Then enter E000.EFFFR
Run basic with E000R

Lunar Lander Game
http://www.marmoset.net/apple1/lunar.wav

To Load
Start the tape program with C100R
Then enter 0300.09B8R
Run the game with 0300R

Sorry for the large wave files, coudln't get the Apple 1 to read MP3s.

Does anyone have a link to a cassette interface manual? A schematic would be great also to see how Woz did this with only three chips (plus the program in the PROMs).

Pictures here:
http://photos.marmoset.net/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=2811

Monzsca - here is all the info I have collected on the Cassette interface in my various research on the Apple-1, I hope it is of use to you. I didn’t win one of the obtronix cassette interfaces this time but hope like before there are more forthcoming, as one clearly belongs in this collection.

http://www.cpmuseum.com/Library.aspx?section=Apple/Apple-1/Cassette Interface

Did anybody tried this cassette interface on a replica 1?

Hi, Wondering if someone can share the actual part numbers of the transformers and a wiring diagram itself. I bought one of these kits without the transformers or schematic and now I'm just itching to get it all together.

And also if anyone has a schematic of the video output lines as well.

Thanks!

Yes, I bought one and, with Vince's interface, have been trying to download (and upload) programs to the replica. So far, no luck. There is an inturruption in the signal from the interface (and I assume an inturuption incoming also) that keeps me from getting a pure "tone". Any suggestions?

Larry