Hello, welcome back to the 8-Bit Guy.
So, not too long ago I agreed to be part of Perafractic’s Think Different Challenge.
Now, let me start by giving you a little back story on that.
It started out when he ended up with a spare, empty Apple IIe case, and he decided to put
a Raspberry Pi inside.
He found a device to connect the existing keyboard to the Raspberry Pi, and he hot-glued
everything to the inside of the case, which was something I was very skeptical about when
I saw it.
He wired up the internal speaker and managed to load up the Pi with Retro Pi, so that it
can play all sorts of games from old systems, including the Apple II.
He managed to get it working on HDMI and Composite so that it works with an old original CRT
display.
When he was all done, he signed his name to the bottom of the case, then he nominated
somebody else to improve it.
So I’m going to launch what I call Perifractic’s Think-different challenge.
What I’m going to do is nominate Jan Beta.
So, off it went from California to Germany so that Jan could work some magic on it.
One thing he did was create bracket and add in a standard 3-prong AC power adapter in
the rear, which he mounted on a custom metal plate, along with a few other modifications.
He also used even more hot-glue to secure the power supply inside.
He signed his name to the case, and then he nominated another YouTuber to take the project
even farther.
I think I am going to challenge my friend Mark, better known to the community as Mindflare
Retro I guess, so Mark, over to you, in Canada, are you going to accept this and try to bring
this to the next level?
Jan, thank you very much for the nomination and I humbly accept.
So off it went from Germany to Ontario Canada.
And by the time he got ahold of this machine, some of the hot-glue, surprise surprise, had
already come loose.
As a temporary solution, he used blue-tac to hold things in place while he could work
on them.
Mindflare spent some time working on this, and added a standard parallel port to the
back, and ran into all sorts of other little issues, most of which he was able to fix.
And of course, he also signed his name to the case.
At the end of this, Perifractic nominated me as the final person to see what modifications
I could do.
And one name keeps coming up.
It’s the 9-bit, sorry, 8-bit guy.
So off it went from Canada to Texas.
And now, here it is.
All right, and so here we are.
Before we get started, I wanted to tell you a funny little story.
So, when Perifractic first contacted me about this several months ago, and I agreed to do
the challenge, we started discussing the details on getting the computer shipped to me.
And I was warning him not to ship it at these particular dates because I was going to be
in London in the United Kingdom.
And, by sheer coincidence, it turned out he was also going to be in London around the
same time.
So, I said, well hey, why don’t we meet up?
And so that’s what we did.
And, we spent the day together and it was pretty fun.
And I have a funny little story for you.
We actually ended up eating together at a place called Dukes, now we didn’t think
much about it at the time, but when we went in and we got the menu, we noticed they actually
serve a product called the Duke Burger.
And, we thought this was pretty funny because if you’ve ever played Duke Nukem 3D, there’s
an entire level in that name called Duke Burger where you have to fight out in this restaurant
called Duke Burger and they serve a product called the Duke Burger.
So anyway, I just thought that was a funny coincidence.
But anyway, now that I’ve got the computer here, I already see quite a few things that
I would like to improve about it, and I’m going to start by pretty much just removing
everything out of this computer so that I can mount things properly.
Because the hot glue has obviously not been successful.
Yes, of course, primitive.
So, I continued to clip zip ties and remove everything from the case.
This is the speaker wire.
Perifractic used an external USB sound device for some reason.
However, this appears to be held on with double-sided tape.
And since it is so light weight, I don’t think it’s going anywhere.
So I may leave that where it is.
Now to remove this power supply.
I can see the hot glue has already come loose before I even touched it, but it seems to
still be held in place by something.
I realized Jan used a screw through the bottom of the case, which I don’t remember seeing
in his video, but maybe I just missed it.
And the screw was a good way to mount it, but it’s a pity he didn’t use both screw
holes, instead of the hot glue.
Speaking of, I’m just going to pull this hot glue off.
OK, so now it’s time to go shopping.
I have a lot of things I need to buy, and I’m going to start here at the hardware
store.
The main thing I needed here was a number 6 drill tap, but the smallest they had was
a number 8.
So moving on, I went to Fry’s which is one of the few remaining electronics stores in
the area, since over the last 15 years we’ve lost Computer City, Electronic Discount Sales,
CompUSA, Service Merchandise, Circuit City, Incredible Universe, and finally RadioShack.
However, even Fry’s often disappoints.
I found a few things I was looking for, like these standoffs, but they never seem to have
what I’m looking for these days.
They did have some rubber feet, but not the size I needed.
I was also looking for a panel mount RCA jack.
While they did have some, I ended up not buying anything at all.
You see, if I have go to Amazon to buy one of the parts, I might as well buy everything
I need on Amazon.
And, of course, about 8 hours later my packages arrived.
And yeah, here’s all the stuff I needed for this project.
OK, so one of the first things I wanted to check was, I bought this HDMI panel mount
cable.
And it plugs into the raspberry Pi like this, and then I can mount this end somewhere on
the back of the Apple II case.
Ideally, I’m going to try putting it in one of these slots, so let me remove this
cover.
And yeah, I think this will fit nicely in here.
I still need to do a little clean up work here, such as removing the left over hot glue.
You can see how easily this stuff comes off, that’s why it isn’t a good choice for
mounting stuff.
Then, also there is this sound cable that Perifractic designed.
And, I noticed he used electrical tape.
I’m not a fan of electrical tape in this scenario because over time it always loses
its adhesion and starts to unravel, and just leaves sticky gunk everywhere.
So, I’m going to replace it with heat shrink.
However, what’s worse is now I see these wires aren’t even soldered.
They are just twisted together.
So, yeah, I am going to need to redo that.
So, I’ll go ahead and get started on that.
I’ll tin the leads first.
So, normally Perifractic does solder stuff, so I asked him why he didn’t do it this
time and he said his soldering station was not functioning at the time and he was on
a tight schedule to get this shipped off to Jan in Germany, so that’s his excuse anyway.
Then I’ll cut off some of this heat shrink and slide them over the wires like so.
Then I’ll take a larger piece and slide it over the whole wire here.
Then it’s just a matter of melting this together.
By the way, I would be a lot more steady than this if I wasn’t trying to film it.
In case I’ve never mentioned, it is challenging to film soldering stuff because the camera
is always in the way, plus you have to make sure your hands aren’t in the way of the
action, or that you aren’t creating any shadows in the way of the action.
Anyway.
I always follow this up with some pliers so that I can smooth out any sharp points that
may have formed.
Otherwise, it could puncture through the heat shrink.
And time for a little heat to finish it up.
And there we go.
I feel much better about sending off this computer to somebody now that these have been
soldered.
OK, next thing I want to do is properly mount this power supply.
I’m going to show you a little trick I learned a few years back.
I’m just going to trace out the shape of the power supply on this piece of paper like
so.
Then I will cut out the shape with some scissors.
Next I’ll use my finger to feel around for the hole, and then I’ll get the other one.
And now I have a perfect template for the power supply.
So I’ll flip the computer over.
So this spot here is precisely where I want it to go.
So, now I know exactly where to mark the two holes.
Next I’ll come back and drill a couple of pilot holes.
Then I’ll come back and enlarge these with the correct sized bit.
And then I can put in the screws.
And as you can see, it is nice and out of the way, plus that sucker is not moving.
Again, I feel much better about sending this to somebody with this properly mounted.
OK, so I really like this little 7 port USB hub that Perifractic picked out.
And one reason is because it actually does fit really nicely right there in this open
slot.
Now, if you’ll notice, there are these two standoffs on either side of that slot.
And I’d like to make use of those.
There are a few products that I think may help me with this.
I could use this regular double sided foam tape, but I also found this extremely strong
mounting tape.
And I think I’ll use that in combination with these things.
These are for use on aluminum fences, but I like to use them for a variety of things.
They are flexible enough to actually work with, since you can bend them by hand, but
they are also strong enough to use for mounting things.
So what I do is bend them around the object in question, then use pliers to form little
loops at the ends so that you can mount your screws.
Then cut off the excess.
So, I’ll put some of this mounting tape on the bottom.
The tape is great for preventing things from scooting around.
But not too great for keeping things attached to something.
So, using a combination of the tape and a mounting bracket, it should hold this in really
nicely.
I ended up using an extra piece of foam tape at the top because there was a small gap I
needed to fill.
And now I can plug in the sound device to it.
Moving along, the next order of business is to mount this keyboard converter.
Since this is the cable it needs to connect to, I’m going to mount it right about here.
More or less where Perifractic mounted it the first time.
But, I’m going to do things a bit different.
I’m going to use a sharpie to mark the 3 hole positions.
And you should be able to see the 3 dots I made on the metal.
Now, I’m going to use this punch to make a tiny indent right in the middle of those
holes, that way my drill bit will stay centered when I drill my holes.
Just like before, I’m going to start with a tiny pilot hole.
Unfortunately, I realized I couldn’t reach the other two holes with the drill, so I had
to remove the case.
That should make life a lot easier anyway.
And now I’ll put in the larger bit and widen the holes a little.
And now, here’s where that number 6 drill tap comes into place.
This will put threads into that hole for me.
And now, I can mount one of these standard motherboard standoffs just like the ones used
for ATX computer cases.
Now to see if the board lines up.
And it does.
However, I ran into another problem.
The holes in this board are slightly too small to fit the screws I need to use.
So, to fix that, I’m just going to run the drill through and widen them a little bit.
All right, so let’s try this again!
And it works perfectly.
And this sucker is mounted great, it’s definitely not going to go anywhere!
And now I need to do the same procedure with this Raspberry Pi.
I’m not sure where to mount it.
The only cable that is critical do to its short length is the HDMI cable.
So I think I’ll just go ahead and mount the board here.
And so, fast forwarding a bit, here are the mounts.
The Pi only has 2 holes in it, so I hope that is enough.
So, here we go.
Everything lined up, and it seems pretty stable.
So I’ll go ahead and plug in the HDMI cable.
Moving on I did want to take a look at this top cover piece which is slightly yellowed.
In fact, if you look at the unboxing video here, you may notice the top cover doesn’t
match the rest of the computer.
I think the top piece was mismatched from another Apple II at some point.
This area here doesn’t look too bad because I suspect there was a monitor sitting there
shielding it from the sun.
But you can clearly see over here that it is yellowed and I’m going to try to fix
that.
So, I’ll use my regular retrobriting method.
Since this is fairly small I can use a smaller bucket.
One concern I have is possibly whitening it too much and then it may still be mismatched
but instead be too light.
Oh well, I guess we’ll find out.
Now I’m going to use these little sticky mounts, to help tidy up some of the cables.
These use double-sided tape, so I hope they will not come loose.
So, for example, I’m going to stick this one here.
I did clean the metal off first, so it should adhere well.
Then I can place my zip-tie through like so, then tighten it up, and cut of off.
By the way, while I’m in here, this would be a good time to sign my name to the case
as well.
Something else I want to do is, I want to install one of these RCA in the back for composite
video.
I thought maybe I could put it through one of these plastic slot covers.
Well, that didn’t go too well.
These are so old and brittle it just broke.
Well, I think I can salvage this.
So, I’ll go ahead and start drilling a hole in it.
Unfortunately, it ended up snapping into pieces.
So, I have this other heavy duty RCA jack I’ve been wanting to try in something.
I had the idea to maybe mount it in this hole here.
But the hole isn’t quite big enough.
Fortunately, I discovered this nickel was almost the perfect size, so I used it as a
template to draw the correct shape around the hole.
And there we go.
So I just need to cut that much out.
For this job, I will use this attachment on my Dremel.
You can see how this thing works.
So let’s go to town.
This actually worked really well.
I went very slowly to make sure I didn’t overshoot past the line.
It took about 5 minutes but the result was perfect.
OK, so I had planned to do this horizontal, but it looks like I’ll need to turn it to
a vertical position to make it fit.
I’ll just draw some circles for the holes.
And then, I’ll drill them out.
Next, I want to solder this RCA cable to the jack.
And with this style of connector, that turned out to be pretty easy.
So all that’s left to do is run the wire through the hole, and screw this thing down.
I’m going to be using two nuts on the inside to hold the RCA jack down.
And there we go..
That looks very sturdy.
And on the inside, I’ll just connect this to the Raspberry Pi’s composite video port,
and tidy up the cable.
All right, and here is everything finished, there’s only one little caveat.
So, there’s parallel port that was added on, well, there aren’t enough internal USB
ports to connect this.
And I don’t think a lot of people are going to be possibly using that, so I’m just going
to leave that and if anybody absolutely wants to use it, what they’ll have to do is they’ll
have to run it out of this hole here and plug it into one of the USB ports down there.
That’s just the only way we’re going to be able to do that.
I will also say that there’s one thing I kind of wish that I had done, which is to
route the audio from the raspberry pi to the back with some RCA jacks as well, that way
you could choose either internal sound or external sound and you could do it via software
and you would have ports on the back for that but, I think I am done with this and now it’s
time to test it.
OK, now it’s time to put the cover back on.
OK, so one problem we’ve got is we have two feet back here but we are missing two
feet up here.
And I just happened to pick up some feet on amazon.
These should be the right size.
Yeah, I think that will work.
Let’s do the other one.
Yes, perfect fit.
Now it has all 4 feet again.
And it's been about an hour and a half so I'm going to check on the retrobrite process.
Looks like it is about done.
so let's see if it matches the rest of the case now.
I'd say it looks a lot better!
Time to test this thing, and I’m going to try it with an HDMI monitor first, so I’ll
plug in to my external HDMI port here.
And then we’ll plug in some power to Jan’s power port.
And let’s power it on.
And it works!
I played around with Retro Pi a bit, and I admit the controls are somewhat clunky being
it is a bunch of different emulators all being controlled by a single front end.
But it works.
I also wanted to test the keyboard, and that appears to work as well.
And the next thing I wanted to try was the composite television.
So, I’ll plug that into my fancy RCA jack.
And I did realize I have to unplug the HDMI so that it will output composite, but it does
work.
Well, everything but the Apple II emulator, which requires configuring it separately for
composite video.
But everything else worked.
For example, this is the Sinclair spectrum emulator here on composite.
All right, so I think I am finished with my part.
Now, I was asked to improve the hardware pretty much however I saw fit.
And, I think I actually did a pretty good job of improving both the hardware mounting
and some of the cosmetic appearance of the computer.
But, you know, this is a project that could essentially never end.
I mean, you could keep sending it to different people and improvements could keep going pretty
much forever.
But, I think for all practical purposes, we can call this machine done for now.
So, that being the case, I’m going to turn it over to Perifractic where he can tell you
about the details of the giveaway.
Cheers eight, mate.
Sorry.
Welcome to Perifractic’s retro recipes kitchen.
Retro with a twist.
Where, on the menu, among other things we usually have Commodore 64s in dishwashers,
extreme refurbs, Amigas doing modern email, don’t eat it!
don’t eat it!
Dogs trying to retrobrite their noses, don’t eat the bl…
NO!
Don’t eat the bleach.
And of course, C64 minis installed inside of C64s, because why not?
And if my 8-Bit mate and I travel in that TARDIS he showed you back in time, to when
this Apple IIe was nothing but an empty case, I had no idea the cool improvements that would
follow on the highly recommend channels of Jan Beta, Mindlfare Retro, and of course the
8-Bit Governor.
Bringing it even closer to emulating the beautiful retro machine it once was.
As I often say, these machines deserve our care in return for all of the happiness they
gave us as kids.
So, thank you all for your hard work and dedication in finishing up the Apple Pi.
But, also, if we travel back to episode 1, I said that we’d each autograph the case,
and give the finished machine away to one lucky viewer at the end of the project, so
it can continue to give a big kid happiness today.
Well, the end is nigh.
And entering the contest is easy as pie.
Just click on the link in the description below to enter the free giveaway.
And then cross your fingers unless they’re in lots of pies.
I’ll announce the winner on my channel in true retro style.
Feel free to subscribe if you don’t want to miss that.
Good luck everyone.
May the nostalgia be with you!
And by the way, I do hope this will inspire future think different challenge collaborations
between other channels.
It would be really great to get more diversity out there too, instead of just us bunch of
knuckleheads.
Maybe we can even get some dog retro gaming channels involved as well.
dance.
Yeah.
No, that’s an Apple IIe, we don’t dance with those.
Thank you so much for watching.
And until next time, from the 8-Bit Guy, and from me, cheerio, y’all.