OJ’s projects…usually breaking stuff.

[olivier.jan]

New project incoming. Not Atari but an impulsive buy last week, seeing a very good price on retro hardware.

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[HigashiJun]

What could it be ?



According to what is written on the box, it came from Germany...

[olivier.jan]

So here is a good old Apple //c with a Z80 card.

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All components are present but one.
It will need a bit of cleaning but it’s not too yellowed at least compared to my original one which is nearly orange.

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It was advertised as missing a chip and floppy drive unreliable but sold for 80€ including the Z80 card.
Replacing the missing IC shouldn’t be a problem and I hope cleaning and adjusting the drive will fix it.

The Z80 card on the other hand might be difficult as I can’t find documentation and there is a jumper wire to attach « somewhere ».

[HigashiJun]

Nice one !

[olivier.jan]

I spent some time scrubbing during my lunch break, the machine was not too dirty inside. Obviously the keyboard needs to get cleaned too and the rubber membrane designed to protect the motherboard from any drink spilling has served its purpose more than once.
Not sure I will be able to save the membrane, the rubber is disintegrating under the tap water.

Finally cleaned all the plastics, the keyboard, the motherboard. Added some contact cleaner on all connectors, power switch and all keyboard switches. Now let it dry.

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[rubber_jonnie]

Very nice, I'd love to get my hands on a IIc,

[olivier.jan]

Yes it’s a nice machine, not as open as a //e but so much easier to store.
Looks like this one is going to need more work than a new RAM chip though.

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[olivier.jan]

In order to diagnose the issue, I burnt a diag rom image from Adrian Black bit as I only had 27SF512, I had to modify the motherboard to accept 32k EPROM instead of the original 16k. It’s very simple on the 2c and it worked without issue.
The diag rom didn’t report any more memory errors, so I burnt a 32k ROM (ROM 4x) to the eeprom, plugged it in and… it worked fine.

So the machine boots, I reassembled keyboard and motherboard and tried the floppy, but no success. I cleaned the head, didn’t change a thing.
Most disks do not even try to load, but a few gives me an error. So the floppy is alive, just having a hard time…

I’ll look into it later tonight or during the long weekend ahead.

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Oh, and the keyboard works well.
And even if this post is not Atari related, the small DRAM chip (41256) comes from a 520ST, so I guess there’s a bit of Atari in this 2c

[olivier.jan]

Finally managed to get some disks to load, it seems the drive needed some exercise. I will clean it thoroughly over the weekend and do some speed adjustment(using good old Locksmith, the drive seems to be slightly off in terms of speed).
Hopefully by Monday there will be a //c fully restored.