Broke my Apple II cherry yesterday...

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Broke my Apple II cherry yesterday...

first post, I'm just a sponge for information at this point.

There was a Craigslist ad here in Denver, someone had 3 compact macs and a IIe all for $40. Naturally I was all over it like a fat kid on a cupcake.

Even made a video about what I got: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBRr1OrCCrw (Shameless self promotion, I know)

The macs are not why I'm here. I'm breaking new ground with an Apple as I haven't had one under my hands since 1992? (ish) I had the standard early 90's upbringing, Oregon Trail in the computer lab. I remember someone making a mock presidential vote on the apple 2. I remember 'voting' for Perot, I always the rebel.

This won't be my first foray into old machines. I have plenty of experience with the TI-99/4a so its not much of a stretch from there to the IIe. I'm sure quite of few of you will properly educate me if I'm wrong. First thing I'm looking for is a easy-to-use 'inbetweener'. The hopes I had of using a one of these classic macs has been dashed. I'm likely to start off with the audio port ADTpro thing and go from there. I'm going to keep my ears open for the compatibility card for the LC macs.

Before I left elementary they had an after school program where we put special cards into the IIe machines and they would control small motors and lights. There were special LEGO projects we could build. streetlight, washing machine, etc. Is any of this ringing a bell?

Anyway, I have many pans in the fire so I don't know if I'm going to be the most chatty member. Most of this comes down to getting more pieces to the machine, and going from there.

Speaking of hardware, there is a Coex card in slot 2. I've heard it might be a parallel port. Confirm/deny? Also, I found the missing 4 keycap INSIDE the machine, I will need to perform a root canal to put it back.

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Re: Broke my Apple II cherry yesterday...

The Coex Card is indeed a parallel printer card. Traditionally, it belongs in Slot 1.
You can use it in most any slot but by the old standard, PR#1 is normally the printer slot.
Good luck with your newfound treasure.

PS - Don't side-slap a Macintosh computer with a hard drive in it. Best way to kill a drive.
Probably not a good practice anyway. :mac:

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Re: Broke my Apple II cherry yesterday...

Well, I didn't hit it THAT hard.

going back to the parallel card, I can't seem to find a pinout for the card. I have plenty of IBM parallel cables that I can re-wire. So that is my plan here. Are there any specific cards I should prioritize over others? I'm thinking of a serial card, and then maybe a CF "hard drive".

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Re: Broke my Apple II cherry yesterday...

A "Super Serial" (Apple) card is a good one to have on hand, as you can tie in from your PC directly to your Apple ][, that & it works with the Apple ImageWriter printers as well. For the most, parallel cards have lost their luster on the Apple II, though you still see a ton of them on eBay. (likely for that reason) A Compact flash card or an SD card such as the "SD Disk][ Plus" card by Ian Kim is a really nice one to have. That one's nice in that you can transfer disk images directly from your PC to your APPLE ][ with relatively little hassle.
If you're into collecting, the sky's the limit. There's pretty-much everything out there for the original Apple ][ now.

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Re: Broke my Apple II cherry yesterday...

going back to the parallel card, I can't seem to find a pinout for the card. I have plenty of IBM parallel cables that I can re-wire. So that is my plan here.

I'm a little worried it might not be trivial to make that card work work without the manual. My guess is that the pinout of it is close to the original Apple PPI card, manual here:

https://archive.org/details/Apple_II_Parallel_Printer_Interface_Card_Installation_and_Operating_Manual

But it doesn't appear to be a strict clone of it so... your mileage will probably vary. Mostly what concerns me is those solder jumpers near the top. I'm guessing they serve a similar purpose to the jumper block area described in the Apple manual, but without documentation as to what they do it might be hard to get the card set up for just any old printer. (Granted, Centronics parallel isn't rocket science so it might "just work" as long as you get the 8 data bits, STROBE, and BUSY correctly matched up.)

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Re: Broke my Apple II cherry yesterday...

Well, I would hope the glue logic would be mostly the same between parallel cards. The saying goes "there are only so many ways to skin a cat".

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Re: Broke my Apple II cherry yesterday...

Sitting down and actually reading the manual for the Apple card suggests to me that maybe it won't be a big deal, as long as you can suss out the pinout details. The reason the Apple card has such a complicated jumper block system is it was designed to work with basically any 8-bit parallel printer, including a number of printers (Like the SWTP PR40) that predate the Centronics standard. (The jumpers are for defining how the handshaking works, including options for reversed polarity, etc.) My guess is the COEX card was probably a cheap thing bundled with a printer, and hopefully said printer *was* Centronics compatible. Given the card was pulled from a 1983 vintage machine, not a 1979 one, it seems like a reasonable thing to hope for.

Just for the sake of confusion, note that the very popular "Grappler" line of printer interfaces for Apple II machines use a 26 pin cable, so if you do ever see a pre-assembled Apple II printer cable there's a good chance it complies with that standard instead of matching the Apple PPI.

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