Retrocomputing

Adventures in Retrocomputing: Troubleshooting a GS-RAM Plus

Brent Retrocomputing, Technology Leave a comment

One of the outstanding items on my IIGS checklist has a bigger RAM card, because while 4mb is nice, I want to be able to push this thing to its limits. Fortunately, I’ve recently come a bit closer to completing the checklist. I sourced a 6MB Applied Engineering GS-RAM Plus for about $100 – a very reasonable price for a card like that, especially considering that the seller said that the card was tested to be in good working condition.

So, I bought the card, got it home and tried it in my IIGS – no luck. A little bit of research suggested that a GS-RAM plus would not work correctly on a ROM 03 IIGS if it had the 1A version of the GAL instead of the 1B version. This one, of course, had the 1A version. So, I popped it out, pulled my ROM 01 IIGS out from under the desk and tried it on that one. No luck there either. Got the same “checkerboard” screen on both machines, which can apparently indicate RAM or CPU problems, improperly seated chips, or a bad add-in card. Since the machine was working both before I installed the new RAM card, and after I took it out, I figured that it must be the culprit. So, I took a closer look:

m_45738_1As you can see, the chip right above the connector, on the left, has a hole in it. (This is the eBay seller’s original picture, so it must have happened in between the testing and the listing.) That, to me, looked like a likely culprit.

So, I contacted the eBay seller, asking their permission to try and fix the problem myself before returning the card (recycledgoods.com – they were an absolute pleasure to work with) and set out to find a replacement chip. Fortunately, just about every chip on that card is socketed (a nice feature of late 80’s technology), so it would be easy to replace.

The trick, of course, is finding the right one. The hole was right in the middle of the model number on the chip, rendering the middle two characters unreadable – so I had to find another source of information. The product manuals were of no help, being mostly concerned with how to install the card. So, the next best option was to find a picture of the card (which appears to have gone through a couple of revisions) in a high enough resolution that I could read the model number off the chip. I busted out a little Google-fu, and eventually found this image kindly uploaded by the folks over at ReactiveMicro:

GS-RAM Plus - 6 Meg Board ShrunkFortunately, it was a GS-RAM Plus of the correct vintage, and the picture was high enough resolution to make a positive identification of the chip (The full sized picture is huge! 6068px × 2028px and 10MB – it was easy to read the fine print on all of the chips).

Now that I had a model number, the next step was to find out what the chip actually did. Fortunately, it was an off the shelf part (made by Samsung) and Google makes finding datasheets easy. With the datasheet in hand, I was able to determine that it was designed to be used in “implementing buffer registers, I/O ports, bidirectional bus drivers, and working registers.” Or, in other words, it would not contain any custom program logic or configuration, so can be easily replaced.

Fortunately, these are still readily available, so I checked out a few chip suppliers. Unfortunately, they all wanted me to buy in quantity, so it was back to eBay. I tracked one down for $1.78 plus shipping and had it sent out. It got here a few weeks later, arriving last night, and I swapped it out, plugged the card into the IIGS, and everything booted up just as expected.

It’s always nice when the problem ultimately turns out to be simple, even if it takes a bit of Internet spelunking to figure out the details!

Adventures In Retrocomputing: IIGS Project Update

Brent Retrocomputing, Technology , , 2 Comments

It seems like with any sort of popular product, there is a certain cycle regarding it’s availability. At first, you can buy it new at retail fairly easily, then the next new thing comes out and it gets harder to find at retail, but is marked down significantly. Then the secondary market opens up (ie. eBay, Craigslist, Garage Sales, Flea Markets, etc.) and you can get whatever you were looking for for dirt cheap because everybody wants to blow it off. Then, finally, as things get more rare or collectable, they begin to fetch higher prices. I’ve noticed classic video game consoles start to trend this way within the past few years – still highly available, but people are beginning to ask more for them (more about that in another blog post), and the Apple II seems to be heading toward the tail end of this cycle.

Looking at various info sources, it looks like even as recently as 5 years ago, old IIGS hardware and accessories were cheaply and readily available through eBay. Nowadays, basic systems are still plentiful (for example, I could have picked up a full Limited Edition “Woz” last week for $150 plus shipping) but they typically don’t come with much in the way of upgrades, and it is becoming more and more difficult to find the upgrades on their own. For example, a Transwarp GS card was listed a couple of weeks ago, and sold for $425. One of those might pop up once every few weeks to a month.

That being said, as long as you are patient and keep an eye on the auctions, you can find the occasional gem. While the Apple 1MB RAM cards are still relatively plentiful (even if most of them are only fitted with 256kb) 4 and 8MB RAM cards are almost impossible to come by on eBay nowadays (although you can still purchase Sirius cards from 16sector.com. They’re a bit pricy though.) – fortunately for me, I managed to find a 4MB Sequential Systems RAM GS card for a decent price, and it works! So, with 5MB of RAM total, I’m now able to take better advantage of the hardware and run GS/OS software and games that I couldn’t before. Another item off the checklist!

Adventures in Retrocomputing: The Apple IIGS

Brent Retrocomputing, Technology , , 2 Comments

When I was a kid, the Apple IIGS was the computer to have. It was the cream of the Apple ][ line, with a great library of games and software. Unfortunately, I didn’t get one as a kid. Instead, I got a Macintosh LCII, which was definitely the right decision in 1992. The Apple ][ line was just about dead, and the Macintosh was the future. I got many good years out of that computer, and last time that I checked, it still works.

However, one of the nice things about growing up, (and the invention of eBay), is that you can now afford to get the “toys” that you really wanted as kid, usually for a reasonable price. The same principle applies to those who collect classic cars.

So, starting last February, I did a bit of research, then took to eBay and started collecting parts. By consulting various sources, I came up with the following list of must haves to assemble a capable “modern” IIGS system:

  • A IIGS CPU (ROM 01 or ROM 03)
  • A color monitor (either an AppleColor Composite Monitor or the preferred AppleColor RGB monitor)
  • A monitor cable (harder to come by than you’d think)
  • A Keyboard, Mouse and Joystick
  • A printer (Probably an Imagewriter II – a Laserwriter if I’m really lucky)
  • Disk drives (At 1, preferably 2 each of the 5.25” and 3.5” floppys)
  • A Memory Expansion card (Min 4MB, 8MB preferred)
  • A SCSI card (Apple Fast SCSI preferred)
  • A hard drive
  • A CD-ROM drive
  • An uthernet Ethernet card (http://www.a2retrosystems.com/)
  • An accelerator card (a Transwarp GS or ZipGS)

Long list, eh? I also needed media, and a way to get software from a modern computer to the IIGS. The community has long had a solution for in the form of ADTPro.

I’ve been making good progress down the list, acquiring a ROM 03 IIGS, an AppleColor RGB monitor, (although it took me another 6 months to get the cable for it) and a disk drive. I even wound up acquiring a complete ROM 01 IIGS system with composite monitor, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 2 disk drives, and printer (and bonus Kensington SystemSaver IIGS) because it was cheaper to buy the whole system and only use what I needed, rather than to buy individual parts. Unfortunately, the printer got destroyed in shipping, but insurance covered it.

By the beginning of the summer I had all of the components together, but the ROM 03 system that I had was fairly barebones – I think that it may have originally come from a school – so it had no expansion cards, and even with the ADTPro software, it was rather tedious to copy floppy images over. Pickings were slim on eBay, so I put the project on hold. I was not too keen on investing in a 30 year old hard drive anyways, especially when much more modern technology was available.

Back in February, I had put myself on the waiting list for the next run of CFFA3000 cards. These let you plug in a CF Card or USB flash drive and load disk images (both hard drive and floppy images) from it, allowing you to use modern solid-state technology to replace old magnetic media entirely. In September, Rich Dreher announced that he would be starting the new run of cards, so I put in my order, and received it early in November.  This let me put the system properly through its paces, installing GS/OS 6.0.1 and trying out a few games. Everything worked great!

Now I just need to source some more software, and a Memory upgrade, SCSI card, and a CD-ROM drive to bring the system to it’s full potential. An accelerator would be nice, but not necessary, and I have some good news on the uthernet front – a new production run should see the light of day before too long. No hard dates of course, but the project is still alive.

It’s nice to see that the community is still alive and active, and I look forward to getting deeper into this project, as soon as I can scrape up the last few parts that I need.