| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
 My 'experimental' Apple IIe, with first few tries at interfacing breakout... | 270.51 KB |
I'm Patrick, from Oregon, and I got into all this geekdom in 1980 when Heppner High School got some Apple II+ computers. I learned BASIC and a little assembly but there were no real resources for 'hardware hacking' available to me at that time. I went on to other things (physics, business, life) and.....
About 20 years ago I was helping a customer with a PC at home, and he asked me if I wanted to salvage some old computers at the middle school in Condon (Oregon). I said sure....and I ended up with 13 Apple IIe's in various states of repair, complete with drives, and a few with serial cards. After about 10 years I had given away or (arghghhg) thrown away all but the two best machines. I'd also spent two years of hobby time during that period learning practical electronics again from scratch, and got into AVR microcontrollers pretty seriously, and then the Arduino-robotics stuff a few years after that.
I've been packing these two Apple IIs around since then, through several moves. Over the summer I finally decided to do something about them, and join my various realms of geekdom while I was at it. I found "Hardware Interfacing with the Apple II", by John Uffenbeck (and a lot of other references), and then I knew what I wanted to do. The picture above is my first (successful) interface project: a one-bye RAM. (Hooray!). Actually it is just a 74HCT374 8-bit latch, but....it DOES work.
My current success was the above...a 6264 RAM accessible 256 bytes at a time with the '374 latch used as a storage area for the 5 extra bits needed for some cheesy bank switching.
My long term plans with all this are nebulous, although an interface to AVR devices for A/D, D/A, serial, various sensors, motor controls, etc. is all on the table. I also would like to build a 65C02 single board computer, with the eventual idea of creating a functional clone of a IIe....
Lastly...if any body is having a hard time getting started with any of this, I'd love to help people to avoid all the swamps you are likely to wallow into on your way...
Patrick Struthers