68kMLA Classic Interface

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Apple IIe Woes

Posted by: MacDoctorFL on 2017-12-29 14:33:43    So Christmas is coming and I wanted to take a crack again at a few games like MS FilghtSim 1.0, Drol, DigDug to name a few. My  AppleIIe had a 4mhz Transwarp card that wouldn't cut FlightSim. A whopping one frame a second while sitting on the runway. This just wont do. So I ordered a FastChip. Awesome card easy to setup. Love the variable speed control. First game to try LodeRunner. It loaded up but when I tried to play things went south.    I went back to configure FastChip and wasn't able to access the setup routine. After many attempts I pulled all cards and powered up to the ] Prompt. Tapped letter q and got qv as output. See picture below. Suspecting a keyboard or bad encoder chip I borrowed a keyboard assembly from a spare unit hiding in the closet. Same thing, same output. So its a logicboard problem. Noting years of dust I scrubbed the board with denatured alchohol, q-tips, and a couple of discolorations with a q-tip dipped in windex. Pulled and reseated all chips.  Powered it up and... Same thing still getting 2 for 1 on keyboard output. See picture below: starting with 1h, 2f, 3g...  Any ideas what happened? Unit boots, loads floppy but keyboard not so much now. By no means do I blame FastChip for this problem, or even think its related to this weirdness. I checked voltages from PSU  +5 = 5.1v  +12v = +11.8v   -5v=-4.0  -12v = -10.5v   . I don't think the negative voltages could be causing issue but throwing it in for review.

Posted by: MacDoctorFL on 2018-01-02 16:49:28 I've narrowed it down to possible keyboard decoder. Ordered one in with any luck will have it fixed in 10 days.

Posted by: MacDoctorFL on 2019-02-26 06:45:40 New Encoder Fixed it.

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