Hello and welcome back to the 8-Bit Guy! So, for the last couple of years,
if you looked at my website on the donations section, one of the things I’ve had in my
want-list was an Apple IIc Plus. And I actually picked this one up about 4 or 5 months ago. So,
there was a guy up in Oklahoma who actually had a lot of things for sale
and I bought the whole lot from him for like 500 bucks and this was one of the things
that was in that lot. So, this is a little bit of a rare computer and it’s a little bit different
from your typical Apple Iic, and I’ve been looking for one for a while. This one obviously needs
restoration, so that’s what we’re going to do and let’s take a look at what makes it interesting.
OK, so taking a look at this, it’s not in terrible shape, but it is pretty yellowed and dirty. So far
nothing I can’t take care of. I did want to show you right quick what makes it different from the
regular Apple II. One thing is it runs at 4 Mhz instead of the usual 1 Mhz. Also on the side, as
you can see the Iic Plus uses a 3 and a half inch floppy drive instead of the usual 5 and a quarter.
Looking around on the back, there are a few more differences. Noticeably they’ve
changed the serial ports for the modem and printer to be the smaller mini-din style
such as used on the IIgs and the Macintosh. But, more importantly,
the power supply is now internal and you can use any standard 3 prong power cable, which is
nice and helps with portability since you don’t have to carry around the power brick with you.
This thing has been sitting for who knows how long. So,
I guess what we need to do next is plug in a monitor and a power cord, and see what happens.
Well, that seems to be a good sign. The computer is working.
I do get a kick out the error message “unable to find a bootable disk
online.” I think the term online had a very different meaning in 1988 than it does today.
So, I wanted to test out the keyboard here in BASIC. I can tell you one thing right away. The
key switches are very different and much better than the key switches in my older Apple IIc.
And it does seem the keyboard is working fine.
OK, so the next thing I need to do is test the disk drive. And there’s not really a lot of Apple
II software that came on 3.5 inch floppy. And so, don’t get mad but this is quite literally
the only thing I have, and that’s because I make these myself. Anyway, let’s give it a try.
Ok, power on… And. Nothing.
Same boot error. I tried to eject the disk, but absolutely nothing happened.
OK, well, time to disassemble this thing and see if we can get to the bottom of that.
It’s pretty easy to take apart, just 6 screws. And there we go. And I think
I immediately see what the problem is. The floppy drive cable is disconnected.
Not sure if that was on purpose or not. But let’s plug it in.
Now let’s try booting again. And what do you know. It’s booting.
And here we are. One thing I noticed right away is that everything is moving too fast.
And that’s because this machine defaults to booting in 4 Mhz mode,
and Apple doesn’t include any internal hardware timers on these machines. So all delays are done
by counting CPU cycles. For example, this robot should not be pacing back and forth this quickly!
But before I show you how to fix that, I want to show you another weird problem this thing
has. Quite often, when power cycling it, the screen comes up to garbage. And I actually
thought there was something wrong with it, until I watched one of Adrian Black’s videos
where he explained this phenomenon. Apparently some Apple II RAM chips are different
and have longer persistence. And so if you don’t leave the machine off for long enough,
this happens. One way around it is to hold down the open-apple key, which tells the
kernel to perform a cold boot no matter what. And as you can see, that will solve that.
But if you want to boot to 1 Mhz mode, you can hold down the escape key as well,
which will force the computer into compatibility mode.
This is very handy when running the vast majority of Apple II games,
so that it runs the correct speed. And as you can see the robot is moving at the correct speed now.
However, I noticed when I tried to eject the disk… there was a problem.
Do you hear that? The motor is just spinning free, but
nothing is happening. I can, however, eject the disk manually since the case is open.
So, the floppy drive in this thing is basically the same mechanism you find in the original
macintoshes, the Apple IIgs, and so on. And they are notorious for this same type of break down.
Now, what they’ve done here is they have created a cage that encloses the drive
and makes it fit in the same space as the older 5 and a quarter inch drive.
Probably so that they needed to do less redesign to the computer to accommodate the smaller drive.
I’m going to go ahead and do a complete overhaul on this drive. I learned how
to do this by watching one of Adrian Black’s detailed videos on this topic.
I am not going go into that sort of detail here, but I’ll let you get the gist of what I’m doing.
This is the motorized eject mechanism. I’m going to remove it for the moment,
but we’ll come back to this shortly.
Once I’ve got these pieces apart, I’m going to douse them in alcohol, and start scrubbing.
THere’s old dried up lubrication everywhere that needs to be removed.
I’ll also clean the heads with alcohol.
And now I’ll re-lubricate the drive rails.
And then I’ll re-lubricate all of the other moving parts.
OK, let’s test the loading mechanism. Ahh yes, it works much better now
OK, so let’s have a look at this eject mechanism. These things are notorious
for breaking. It’s actually a gear inside that breaks, they just get old and brittle.
I think about 80% of them out there in the world have already broken.
So, basically you just need to pop this metal bracket off. And well,
it doesn’t take long to see the problem. I’ll remove this one gear here.
And then I’ll need to get all of these little left over pieces out of here.
Then I’ll use some alcohol to remove the old lubrication. So there we go, that’s pretty clean.
So here’s what’s left of the old gear. And here are a couple of replacement gears that
were given to me by my friend Kevin Trinkle. I’ll go ahead and relubricate this area,
then I’ll put the replacement gear in. And of course, the little gear that goes on top of that.
And as you can see, if you have the replacement part, the repair is actually pretty quick and
simple. Now I’ll just put the metal cover back in place. And then put this thing back in the drive.
Of course to test it, I’ll need to put it back in the computer. And let’s give it a try.
And how do you like that? It works perfectly now!
So yeah, I think the drive is working like new at this point. I’ll go ahead and re-assemble
the little cage that goes around it, and then put it off to the side because what
we need to do now is start taking the rest of the computer apart for retrobriting.
I’m actually going to screw the top and bottom pieces back together for this process. I think
it will make it easier to scrub on it to get all of the little scuffs and marks cleaned off.
And since it is the middle of summer here in Texas, I’ll just use sunlight for the
retrobrite process. I’m going to use this bag of rocks to help hold this down under the water.
It’s already afternoon at this point, so I’m only going to get a few hours in today.
And while that is going on, I’ll start work on this keyboard. Even though it is pretty nasty,
I don’t actually think any of the plastic has yellowed except for the space bar.
But anyway, let’s get started pulling these keys. I’m not quite sure why
the space bars on these always turn yellow. I am guessing they are made
from a different plastic or maybe even a totally different supplier.
Anyway, I’ll clean it up and get it ready for retrobrite. All right,
I think what I’ll do is just put this in its own little bag so that I don’t have to
worry about it floating to the top. I’ll just put it right there next to the case.
And back to the keyboard. I’m going to pull all of
these little metal pieces off and clean the crustified lubricant off of them.
OK, so I’d kind of like to disassemble further, because you know it’s really dirty and I’d like
to be able to clean it more easily. However, I’m not entirely sure how. This thing is actually
individual key switches and they are soldered directly to a board, and then there’s this
metal plate and I can’t figure out how on earth you would take that metal plate out.
So I guess I’ll just go to town on this thing with a brush and vacuum. And I think
that worked decently well. There’s some sticky stuff between some of these keys
that looks like maybe a drink was spilled in there a long time ago,
so I’ll work that with the tooth brush. And I think that’s about as good as it’s going to get.
And now I’ll begin the laborious process of cleaning all of these
keys by hand. This usually takes an hour or two. Here’s a comparison of
the two shift keys so you can see what a difference it makes.
Now I’ll add some lithium grease back to these metal pieces, and snap them back where they go.
I usually like to install all of the large keys that use these metal latch things first,
since it is easier to do them with the rest of the keys off.
The space bar isn’t done yet, but I’ll go ahead and reattach all of the keys.
OK, time to check on the retrobrite. I had to leave this outside while I ran across town
for some other projects and it was dark when I returned. So I’ll have to bring it inside to see
how it looks. And here it is. I just need to dry it off. But this thing looks pretty good already
after just half a day in the sun. It’s like 90% done, but it’s going to need some more time.
So the next morning I put it back out out and gave it a fresh jolt of peroxide.
I’m a bit worried about the clouds today. It’s not quite overcast, but it is very cloudy.
Anyway, so let’s fast forward to evening, and see how it came out.
Notice I actually put the space bar in the same bucket because the little bag developed a leak.
OK, let’s dry this thing off and see how it looks. I think it’s done.
I’ll go ahead and install the space bar right quick. And
here’s the finished keyboard. It’s amazing the rest of the keys didn’t even need retrobrite.
Well let’s put it all back together.
OK, so before I put the case back together, I wanted to do a test. And I ran into a bit
of a weird issue. The keyboard did not appear to be working. Everything I typed came out as
garbage and I was afraid I had messed something up. But after a bit of research I realized there
was this button, as you can see labelled on the case here that says keyboard. So,
I toggled that switch and sure enough everything is fine now. Apparently this
changes the layout of the keyboard to a Dvorak layout instead of qwerty. Who would have thought?
One minor issue, apparently I forgot to through the volume slider in with the retrobrite,
so it’s still a bit yellowed. But I’m not going to worry too much about it.
OK, so let’s put the top cover back on. Man, that is sharp looking.
For dramatic effect, let’s review how it looked before, and of course how it looks now!
You know, the Iic Plus actually has a different color scheme for the keyboard than the regular
IIc, so it looks extra white. But this should be exactly how it looked from the factory.
I hooked up the color television so I could see how that looks,
and played a little Petscii Robots, since to be fair that’s about the
only thing I can play without attaching an external 5 and a quarter inch floppy drive.
Speaking of floppy drives, let’s make sure it ejects properly with the case on.
Yep, there we go.
So let’s talk a little bit about restorations for the moment. So, I know a number of my subscribers
say those are their favorite videos, where others say they don’t care for them so much. And I just
wanted to say that I’ve actually become a little bit weary of them myself for a number of reasons.
For one thing, they, it feels like they become just a little bit repetitive. I mean,
like how many times do you want to see me restore a particular computer.
The other problem is, I feel like they become a little bit competitive. Especially, ever since I
released that video a couple of years ago on the oily VIC-20 that I found, I feel like the retro
YouTuber community has gone into some kind of competition to try to one-up each other on like,
who can restore the most horrific condition computer. And that’s not really a competition I
want to find myself in. For a number of reasons, for one thing I’m actually afraid it’s going to
lead to faked videos. Which we already see that kind of thing in other areas of YouTube, like car
restorations and stuff like that. And I just don’t want to see that in the retro computing world.
In fact, even that Nintendo that I found on the side of the road, that I restored a while back,
if you look at the comment section, there’s a number of people accusing me of faking that video.
Which, by the way, I didn’t. So, for the last couple of years, I’ve really only done
restorations projects for specific reasons. For example, when I need it for a documentary. So,
like when I did the Amiga 1000 restoration, that was for an upcoming documentary. Likewise,
This Apple Iic, eventually is going to be used in my Apple II documentary series, which I’m hoping
to get to sometime later this year, where I want to cover all of the Apple II systems. In fact, I’m
going to have to re-retrobrite my original Apple IIc that I did a restoration on back in 2016. So,
that was 6 years ago. And an interesting thing is, this computer didn’t start to turn yellow
again until about 4 years after the original restoration. It has not been exposed to UV
light or heat or any of the things that we know to accelerate the process. So, on the bright side,
it should not take very long to retrobrite it again because I don’t have to repair it and I
don’t need to do any of the deep cleaning that was originally done, because it’s already clean. I’ve
been actually considering clear coating some of these machines after I’m done retrobriting them.
The idea being, that if you can keep the oxygen away from the plastics, then hopefully they won’t
turn yellow again. The downside to that is, if I’m wrong, and they do turn yellow again,
then it’s going to be really darned difficult to retrobrite them again because peroxide won’t
be able to make contact with the plastic. So, I’ll just need to clear coat something that I
don’t really care about as an experiment, and then unfortunately it’s probably going to take
years to find the answer as to whether it actually worked or not. Oh and the other thing I wanted
this computer for besides the documentary. Is making duplicates of Petscii Robots. The last
year or so I have been including the 3.5” disk as part of the distro along with 5.25”. And I’ve been
using an Apple IIgs to duplicate these, which is kind of a pain to dig out because I’ve got
to get out an external keyboard an external floppy drive and all of that kind of stuff.
And this machine’s kind of all in one. It’s going to be real easy to dig this out when I
need to make a, you know, an extra bundle of these disks. So, that’s the other thing I wanted it for.
But that’s it for this episode. As always, thanks for watching!