Sunday, October 23, 2016

Apple II+ Logic Board Repairs

Here are the two Apple II+ logic boards that I have for repair. They were mostly stripped of integrated circuit chips, and even have some ports and connectors that were de-soldered to repair other boards (back in the 1980's).

I chose to repair the board on the left due to the missing D6 RAM socket on the other board and a possible damaged trace under the F8 ROM.

I swapped the power connector and added a missing audio jack. These are still available on eBay as "panel mount mono jack":

A word of caution. I have found that the solder on these old boards has the potential to make you feel sick and hung-over. Drink some milk before you solder and work in a very well-ventilated area.

I was able to replace most of the missing IC on the board from the box of spares I had, and from the other board. I have no idea if they work, so that will probably require a lot of troubleshooting.

The only IC I could not replace from old pulls was the one labeled "9334" in the J14 position. Fortunately, this IC can be replaced by a 74LS259, which I had on hand from my early experiments with my SPI based Disk II emulator.

Finally, I did not want to have to troubleshoot with old, possibly bad RAM, so I have some 64K 4264 DRAM chips on hand to see if I can replace the original 16K 4116 chips. This will require some modifications to the logic board (due to the different power requirements and slightly different pinouts), which I hope I can complete before the end of RetroChallenge.

No comments:

Post a Comment