Apple II

I purchased a IIe several months back and all was well except for the keyboard missing a couple of keys. I finally got my hands on an excellent quality replacement keyboard and I replaced the broken keyboard with the new one. I don't fire up the machine that much as I'm waiting on my CFFA3000 order to arrive before I dive in too much. Before I replaced the keyboard, the encoder/decoder (AY-5-3600-PRO) was functioning perfectly. After replacing the keyboard I powered on the IIe to make sure all keys on the keyboard functioned properly...which they did but to my dismay all of the keys repeated for a short amount of time. The IIe wasn't registering the key release quickly enough it seemed. I can get only one character for a key, but I have to be REALLY fast in pressing that key. I usually get 8-12 repeats of that character before it starts.

Oddly enough, the spacebar doesn't work either. The behavior exists for both of the keyboards I have (new one and the old one with broken key studs).

I've taken out the AY-5-3600-PRO with an extractor (even filed the contacts a little so new metal is showing) and reseated a couple of different times but it didn't make any difference. Everything is making it into the socket. For kicks I also reseated the IOU. The circuits on the main board are good as well (nothing has come lose under the decoder socket).

I figure this is a textbook example of a AY-5-3600-PRO in need of replacement but before I went to that trouble I figured I'd get a second opinion. The price of IIe's on eBay are astronomical at the moment else I would just get a POS one as a spare for this chip. A few months ago I could have gotten one for a song.

I do have a multi-meter laying around, but I'm not sure how I would go about verifying that the decoder is definitely bad.

FWIW, I did search around for a while to find a similar thread, but I didn't see one here or in the Apple II forum. Maybe one exists somewhere, but then again, I want confirmation for my issue independently anyway.

Thanks!

at ebay there are again Mockingboard clones of the Mockingboard A for the Apple II+ / IIe availiable.

I'm interested in learning about hardware development, especially in the Apple II arena.

I have some known good disks that will load fine on one of my II+'s, but won't load on the other with the exact same floppy drive and card. The drive just spins endlessly.

Since the disk subsystem isn't to blame, I'm wondering if this is some kind of RAM or power issue, or perhaps something else on the motherboard. I could go about replacing ICs one by one, but before I do that, I wanted to see if anyone knew of any immediate "things to check" for this particular issue - bad ICs known to cause this, etc.