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hello and welcome back to the 8-bit guy
so i've been wanting to do a documentary
about the apple one for a really long
time the trouble is if you want to make
a good
episode about the apple one you kind of
need to have
an apple one on hand there were only a
few hundred produced i think there's
somewhere around 200 of them still left
in existence
and if you got about half a million
dollars in the bank you could probably
afford to buy
an apple one but obviously i don't have
that kind of money
so there's a couple other choices one
you can
build your own apple one which is
exactly what i'm about to do
this is actually a pretty long process
just finding all of the parts
to put one of these together so i'll
talk about that more a little bit
another
option is you can buy several different
kinds of kits this is an example of one
it's called a smartie kit
and this is an apple one compatible
computer so it's not a real apple one
but it
it will run apple one software but
let's go ahead and get started putting
this thing together i'll start by
soldering in all of the ic sockets
as far as soldering goes this is the
most time consuming thing
there's around 63 chips on this board i
know it doesn't look like that many but
it's a lot and that's somewhere around 1
000 solder joints just for the sockets
alone it took me about six hours to
complete this part
i will say this gives me great respect
for jobs in wozniak assembling these in
a garage
i mean this would have been a monumental
task in fact it's quite interesting to
think about that
as this is quite literally the exact
same thing
they were assembling
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unfortunately it turns out i installed
these axial lead capacitors in
backwards now for some reason i was
thinking the arrows pointed to the
positive side when they
actually point to the negative i
honestly don't think i've ever had to
solder in
axial leak capacitors before anyway
it was easily corrected and i'm just
glad i found out about it before
powering up the board
most of the soldering is done now so
it's time to use some alcohol to clean
the flux off of the board
for authenticity i'm also building a
power brick based on the original design
and now it's time to test the power
brick
okay since nothing blew up i'll test the
voltages
and it looks like everything is working
correctly
so now i'll take it one step further and
test the voltages on the board
here's the 12-volt rail and here's the
5-volt rail
everything's looking good at this point
i need to explain a few things about how
this computer works
i want to draw your attention to these
numbers along the bottom edge of the
board going from 1 to 18.
likewise along the left edge there are
letters a b c
and d now these actually form a nearly
perfect grid across every major chip on
this board
and this is used a lot in the
documentation and between hobbyists to
identify
specific chips or regions of the board
okay the next thing i want to mention is
that you can also roughly divide this
board into three
sections over in the top corner you have
the regulated power supply
down here at the bottom two rows this is
the actual computer this is where the
cpu ram and rom live
up here the top two rows is the video
section what's interesting is that this
section works almost independently of
the computer section
in fact it's essentially a copy of a
glass teletype style terminal
like this these terminals essentially
just take in ascii characters and print
them to the screen
taking the place of the older typewriter
style teletypes that
print characters to paper so the apple
one actually sends ascii characters one
at a time from the bottom of the board
to the top to be displayed now this was
considered one of the selling points of
this computer
for example a year earlier you could buy
a chem 1 a single board computer also
based on the 6502
but it did require a terminal in order
to use it and while the chem 1 was
decently affordable on its own
the terminal could easily cost a
thousand dollars or more so the apple
one which sold for 666 dollars was
a pretty good deal the heart of the
video display boils down to this
character rom which contains the bit
patterns for 64 characters
and guys this is it these are literally
the only characters that can be
displayed on the apple one
there aren't any graphics modes there
aren't any graphics characters like the
pet had
there aren't any reverse characters and
in fact there aren't even any lowercase
characters
what's more interesting is the way in
which this thing works um the screen is
40 characters wide by 24 characters tall
so you need to store 960 characters but
where is all that data stored you see
there isn't any video ram
either well at least not in the
traditional sense it uses shift
registers
now a typical shift register is a chip
that handles eight bits of data
and all eight bits are exposed as their
own pin on the chip
so that each bit can be input or output
and then the data can be shifted around
these are used for all sorts of things
but the apple one uses a really unusual
type of shift register
this one has 1024 bits i can't even draw
them all on the screen
and only one bit is actually exposed at
a time as such the chips are
surprisingly small
here are some of them right here on the
board as you can see they're only little
eight pin chips
of course one of these chips wouldn't be
enough to store all of the characters on
the screen
but if you have six of them together now
you have enough to store
1024 characters unfortunately this
creates one of the biggest limitations
of the apple ones video system
there is no way to modify characters at
random on the screen
you're pretty much limited to sending
out new characters and having the screen
scroll
of course this was quite common on older
text terminals because
they exactly mimic the behavior of a
teletype which is obviously limited to
printed characters in this manner
as you can imagine you aren't going to
be playing any arcade games on this
thing so
back to our assembly i'm going to
populate all of the chips needed to run
the video display only because for the
moment
that's all i want to test and so here we
go
in theory this should give us some sort
of video display
okay so i've reached the point where
it's time to test now
granted i'm only i've only populated the
video section so the computer's not
going to boot up but i should get
some sort of display since the video is
essentially entirely independent from
the rest of the computer
um but i'm really nervous about it
because i have literally spent the last
two weeks working on this project it is
by far
the hardest build that i've ever done
it's not just the soldering yeah there's
a lot of soldering i probably spent like
eight hours soldering stuff
but it's just been so many other things
that have made this uh much more
difficult than your typical
like computer kit that you would put
together i would not recommend this
project
to anyone who is uh looking for a
beginner project this this this
is is way harder than i thought and i'm
also probably about
800 in the hole for this already in
other words uh these parts are not cheap
um they're really hard to find and
they're really expensive when you do
find them so if i fry something here
this it's not a trivial thing so um
i've also spent the last few months
looking for the perfect monitor for this
computer now you have to think about
this for a moment you got to go back to
1976
what kind of monitor would you use on a
computer i mean televisions did not have
composite inputs
back then right so you'd have to get an
rf modulator if you wanted to use a
television
there was no such thing as a computer
monitor at least not that the consumer
could go get but
there were these
now what i have here is a cctv security
camera monitor
and it's just a black and white monitor
and it does have a composite input
and this is exactly the sort of thing
that an apple one user would have
probably been using
in 1976 now um actually even many apple
ii
users actually ended up using monitors
like this so uh anyway this is about the
right the
right from the right era and uh i think
this will be a perfect match for my
apple one so
let's hook it up and see if we get a
display
well at first i thought it was dead
then i remembered that there was this
little adjustment on the board for video
levels so i tried turning that and
what do you know i have a video signal
the fact that it looks like random
garbage characters is not a problem it
just means the video ram hasn't been
cleared yet
so this is a really good sign actually
the next thing i'm gonna do is
manually apply five volts to the clear
screen circuit
and sure enough that works and i get a
blinking cursor at the top
left and yes the apple 1 uses an at
symbol for a blinking cursor
so time to move on i'm going to populate
all the chips for the computer section
here's the most important chip of all
the 6502 microprocessor
and so i think i'm ready for the next
power on
well i don't even think there's any cpu
activity as the screen is still
junk characters um but then i remembered
that i had neglected to solder a few
connections on the board
such as this one there's a little pad
you need to put a blob of solder on if
you're using a 6502 microprocessor
now believe it or not this board is also
designed to take a motorola 6800 cpu
instead
but you need some extra things to make
it work for example you need to put a
chip in this
socket notice it says 6800 only and
this whole area up here would need to be
populated but since i'm using the 6502
i'll just solder across this little pad
oh and i also need to set up the ram
banks um
these are very configurable and this is
a testament to the fact that this
computer was designed
for hobbyists to tinker with anyway i'll
need to put some little jumpers here and
there to configure the ram setup
and even if i did get this working i
need a keyboard to test with
i bought this one online i think it may
have been a pull from an apple ii but
it's close enough to the right arrow i
think it'll work uh the trouble is it
won't sit flat on the desk because of
the daughter board on the bottom
so i cut out these little pieces of wood
and they look like door stops actually
but i think they'll work fine to prop
the keyboard up
the next thing i needed to do is build
an adapter cable based on this design
here since the pin out of the apple ii
keyboard is different from the apple one
okay so here goes nothing i'm gonna
power it on and now i'll clear the
screen as there's
no key on the keyboard to do this and
then i'll press reset on the keyboard
and ladies and gentlemen i think it's
working so the operating system on the
apple one is
insanely primitive the rom code is only
256
bytes compare that with something like
the commodore vic-20
which has 16 kilobytes that's literally
64 times the amount of code
there's no basic or anything like that
it boots up to something called wazmon
which is really just a simple system for
typing in code
the idea is you can type in machine code
from the keyboard which
let's face it was quite common in that
era but the operating system on this
thing is
just one step above a computer with
toggle switches to enter in the bytecode
so that being said uh what can we do
with this thing well
now i have an excuse to show you these
manuals this is a perfect recreation of
the apple one manual
now these are made by a guy named armin
who lives in munich germany
and the manual isn't huge but it does
contain the entire source code of the
operating system
of course it fits on just two pages
because again it's just 256 bytes in
size
it also contains a full schematic of the
computer which was not uncommon at the
time
and of course apple computer's first
ever warranty page
i also have here a recreation of the
magazine advertisement for this product
it was advertised as a microcomputer
system with a video terminal and 8k of
ram
but anyway what i really want to draw
your attention to is this example
program in the manual
uh this is just a test program and it's
only 11 bytes long
so this shouldn't take too long to type
in and so as i'm typing this into osmond
i'm thinking about the fact that this
was most likely the very first thing
most apple one owners would have typed
on their computer
and they were probably anxiously
awaiting to see the result
and so here we are i'm gonna have to
list back the machine code
everything looks correct so now i'll
tell it to run the code
and there we go this is probably the
very first thing
every apple one user saw when they set
up their computers back in 1976
and they probably saw it on a monitor
just like this it's basically just a
repeating pattern showing all of the
characters that the computer can display
and it'll keep scrolling forever so what
about running basic
well a lot of your modern apple one
clones like this guy for example have
basic
built into rom which is really
convenient but the original 1976 model
didn't have basic in rom so you had to
load it from cassette
but in order to do that you'll need the
aci or apple cassette interface
now this plugs into the expansion slot
and it also contains two more prom chips
which adds another 256 bytes of rom to
the system
let me demonstrate if you boot up the
apple 1 and ask wasman to show you the
memory contents at c100
you'll see that area is totally blank so
now what we're going to do is insert the
card
obviously with the system powered off
and while we're at it let's go ahead and
connect up a cassette recorder now this
is about the closest thing i have for
the time period
we just need to connect the earphone and
microphone jacks and they will connect
right here on the cassette interface
now i'll repeat the same test having a
look at the memory in the c100 range
as you can see there's rom data there
now this is reading straight off the aci
card
so here's how you use it uh we'll tell
wazmond to start the rom code at c100
the asterisk indicates we've entered the
cassette interface software
so now i'm going to tell it to load a
program in the memory range of e
thousand to eff
and uh the r at the end stands for read
if i wanted to write i'd put a w there
instead
at this point it's waiting on some data
from the cassette i have a copy of basic
on this cassette so
i'll load that in there and press play
and there we go it's loading you don't
really get a lot of feedback that
anything's happening
but at the end of the load you'll get a
little backslash which indicates you're
back in wazmon again
so we can start basic by executing the
code at e8000
and it works and the way we know we're
in basic is that the prompt has changed
from a backslash
to a greater than sign and of course you
get more friendly error messages like
syntax error but anyway we'll write a
small test program just to see
and i apologize i still don't have a
backspace key wired up correctly so i
can't fix my typos
but uh anyway there you go basic code
running on an original apple one
of course basic programs can be
considerably more complex which is
easier to show with an emulator here
and there are even some very primitive
games like this one where you try to
govern an ancient city which
apparently i did terrible as all of my
people starved
you can also even run the classic game
star trek from that same era
so obviously most people aren't going to
have the time money or
patience to assemble an apple one
replica but i wanted to show some
alternatives and i'll start by showing
the smarty kit which i mentioned at the
beginning
this kit is a solderless design it uses
microcontrollers for the video and
keyboard input
putting this together is more like
putting a puzzle together than
electronics unfortunately i didn't have
time to finish this before the video i
think i got about 25
of it complete i also wanted to mention
the pe 6502 computer which is also apple
one compatible and i did a whole video
on this
a few years ago so there are a variety
of apple one emulators out there to play
around with but the one that might
surprise you the most is this one that
runs on a commodore 64.
it's called green delicious but i
hesitate to call this an emulator though
it's more like a virtual machine
uh the main difference being that the
code actually runs natively on the c64
cpu
since they're both 6502 derivatives the
only thing the c64 has to emulate is the
keyboard and terminal display which
isn't really that hard for c64 to do it
completely emulates the font and even
gives us a colorful apple logo for the
flashing cursor
and everything pretty much works as
expected
f1 works as the hardware clear screen
button
f7 works as the cpu reset button f3
changes the screen colors for common
monochrome styles like green white or
amber
f5 will toggle between the apple logo
cursor
and the standard at symbol cursor that
the real apple one uses for authenticity
now while i don't think it can read
apple 1 cassettes it has included basic
and rom which is handy
and they've given us a makeshift disk
loading system so we can load additional
software from disk instead
along with a few example programs
clearly the apple one never supported a
disk drive but
this is pretty handy and here i am
playing the apple one version of star
trek on my commodore 64.
who would have thought so i'm not
planning to cover
any of the history of this computer
because i feel that that's really well
documented in some
high budget movies as well as some other
youtube channels but i wanted to give
you an overview of how this computer
actually works and let you see a real
one
in action i'll say real i mean this is
about as close to you as you can get to
the real thing
and while uh this episode is coming to
an end uh the story of this computer is
not yet done
i'm gonna hand this over to my brother
uh who's going to
build some sort of case for this and do
an episode on his channel
the geek pub so keep a lookout for that
i also wanted to give a shout out to
uncle bernie who runs an ebay store
carrying some of the more
obscure parts it's really hard to find
for this and he was also able to answer
some questions i had which was
very helpful in getting this thing put
together so i'll put a link description
for that
too but uh that's about it for this
episode so as always
thanks for watching
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you