Hey gang-
(Sigh) I have to admit that I am guilty of technocide, as I apparently killed off my Apple IIe, but I'm not certain how.
I have a IIe platinum, and I was playing Choplifter when I pressed ESC to pause it to go downstairs to get a cup of tea...and when I came back the IIe was acting REALLY weird.
Essentilly it's acting like it's rebooting a'la ctrl-open apple-reset, over and over. The APPLE //e header pops up for a quick moment and beeps right before a screen of garbage characters appears for an instant, then the screen goes blank and the system goes silent for about two seconds. It then repeats this cycle forever. No disk access occurs, and the green power light on the front of the case as well as the red LED on the motherboard only comes on for an instant when it beeps, then immediately turns off again.
I thought I may have pushed the power supply to the limit as the thing was REALLY loaded (every slot had a card), or maybe the system became overheated, so after letting it cool down I removed everything, even the disk controller, and it still goes through its APPLE IIe, garbage text, and blank screen cycle ad infinitum.
SO I gotta ask- any particular suspects that I ought to look for? Shot power supply? Fried ROM?
Thanx.
-Dave
. . . with the computer turned off you could try opening the lid, touching the power supply (to remove any static charge from your person), then start pushing down on the chips the see if any of them have suffered from "thermal creep" and are raising out of their sockets. There weren't many socketed chips with this unit, but start with the CPU (that's the big one). Wow, and this particular model was really hard to kill too. Before the death, did you notice that the air venting out of it was very hot?
Mutant_Pie
Check here for some debugging ideas... it sure sounds like something stuck in resetville:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.apple2/browse_thread/thread/3f9c0fa21f4a0123/5c5dbb6eb2aa02b0
MP is right... this particular model is pretty hard to kill. Try reseating the ROM and CPU... probably your best bet.
Read this Apple //e Repair guide
http://www.1000bit.net/support/manuali/apple/repair2e/repair.htm
i will pray for your apple, okay
In case anyone cares, I finally found the culprit that caused my system to die...I purchased another Apple platinum off of Ebay and swapped parts until it started back up. It was the power supply!
I'm not certain if I overloaded it (it was powering everything from a SCSI card for an external HD to a mouse controller) or if it was just its time to depart this cruel world. Just out of curiosity I should take a multimeter to the terminals to see what kind of freaky voltage it's putting out...but I don't really care that much. Choplifter is waiting for me and those hostages aren't going to be rescued by themselves.
Thanks, gang!!!!
P.S. I can't *believe* how many flipping screws are holding these machines together!
You can get a beefier Power Supply Here http://gse-reactive.com/