68kMLA Classic Interface

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Any thoughts on this....it arrived!!!
Posted by: falen5 on 2016-12-21 17:27:10
Posted by: techknight on 2016-12-21 17:27:54 I had a feeling someone would grab that auction lol.
Posted by: falen5 on 2016-12-21 17:35:04 hi techknight its still sitting on the table downstairs - havnt done anything with it yet - its probally an apple ii clone... but said i would share what i found so far before i do anything - gonna try bring this thing back to life
Posted by: falen5 on 2016-12-21 17:47:35 the white wires soldered onto the back of the analog board goto the card in slot 4 - they might be the video signal. Should take pictures of everything before i knock any wires off. After allot of searching I found these pictures of the origional machine - http://www.retrocomputer.tux.hu/index.php?option=com_wgpicasa&view=album&album=5975666009977580785&page=1&Itemid=14 theres 6 pages of pictures of the machine in there
Posted by: techknight on 2016-12-21 17:48:34 Well after skimming through the video, I was screaming at the camera at you... LOL... Take the cards out! take the thing apart! its no good to anyone if we cant really see what it is, what it can do, or what it did.... Watching how you were trying to remove the cards was painful. LOL. its like friggen pull the card out already. sheesh. Anyways, Rant aside. I think the large board on the side is a memory expansion. To access the HDD, it would had to have a modified ROM so it can boot from it, or a special floppy to load the HDD drivers. I can only "assume" one of the card is an MFM controller.
Posted by: falen5 on 2016-12-21 18:11:50 good man techknight - i want to tear it apart like yesterday - but there are wires soldered all over the place and i have to take pictures of everything. I dont like putting too much force on boards - would it be ok to lever the cards up instead if just pulling them straight up - this thing is old....might end up ripping the entire slot of the board. Is there any point in spraying wd40 into the slots. That colored ribbon cable i held up to the camera has a pretty good length to it - me thinks it was plugged into some external machine, looks like this may of been used in industry . I think the 4th slot is a video card - it has thoes white wires coming out from the back of the card - i think they are the same wires soldered onto the analog board analog board does not look like any apple board im getting older and more paitent man. I intent to strip this baby bare and ill take pictures of everything and share the here,
Posted by: falen5 on 2016-12-21 18:41:09 my god.. these cards were stuck in there pretty bad - levered them out - Video card had 2 wires attached and 2 that seem to have broken off.... BEFORE I TOOK IT OUT!!!!.... Motherboard says apple on it - i only have apple ii e's - dont know if its a clone or not looks like language card/ memory expansion card serial card z-card - is that the same as z-engine c/pm card? video card floppy controler ide or scsi controler card - dont know which? will start taking it apart tomorow
Posted by: rickrob on 2016-12-21 19:24:36 That Z card has an SGS Z-80 CPU,so it might be a CP/M card. I replaced a ton of those SGS cpu's from Italy way back in the 80's. They were used in bar code readers and had a high failure rate.
Posted by: Trash80toHP_Mini on 2016-12-21 19:58:27 Put stickers over the window of those EPROMs. I figured it had to be an Apple II recase hack. What the heck kind of setup was that ISKRA?
Posted by: joethezombie on 2016-12-21 20:04:11 I have to say, it's pretty incredible! What an absolute beast. I really hope you can get it working!
Posted by: Anonymous Freak on 2016-12-21 21:11:31 Put stickers over the window of those EPROMs. If they've been un-stickered this long, I don't think it matters any more!
Posted by: bibilit on 2016-12-22 00:59:34 The board with a blue connector looks like a Printer card. The one named Videx is a clone also, spoken here (french forum) http://www.silicium.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=41249 and information is here too, 80 column card i think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videx The big board on the side, yes probably memory expansion. Logic board is an original Apple II one, clones are not supposed to have Apple Computer written all over it.
Posted by: bibilit on 2016-12-22 01:19:24 Logic board is Apple II http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/apple2/h/a2board.jpg
Posted by: Floofies on 2016-12-22 08:14:11 Eugh! What is that green slime on the motherboard!?
Posted by: Huxley on 2016-12-22 09:06:31 Oh man, this is the coolest thread I've seen in a while! That machine is crazy, and I'm delighted that it ended up with someone on this board - I'm dying to see where this goes... 🙂 H.
Posted by: Carboy7 on 2016-12-22 09:06:56 If you can ever take out the logic board and fix it up, there's an original Apple II board for you. Now, when was it made? 😉
Posted by: Gorgonops on 2016-12-22 11:07:06 Now, when was it made? 😉 I think it's more likely it's a II Plus board, and not a particularly early one. (It's totally missing the 4k/16k jumper blocks, for instance.) Without getting my Plus down and taking a look I'm sort of inclined to say it's one of the post-1982 ones that says "Singapore" on the back, because that's what's in mine and it looks suspiciously like the same thing.
Posted by: Gorgonops on 2016-12-22 11:33:21 W Anyways, Rant aside. I think the large board on the side is a memory expansion. To access the HDD, it would had to have a modified ROM so it can boot from it, or a special floppy to load the HDD drivers. Do you mean the big board to the left (looking from the rear) of the drive cage? No way that's a memory board. Notice how it has three ribbon cables coming off it, one of which goes to a slotted card in the motherboard (see below). That's pretty obviously an MFM-to... something, disk controller. I want to say that "something" is SASI, 1978's paleolithic predecessor to SCSI, but it could be something proprietary. (I don't think it's Corvus, it looks like that used fewer pins.) The board with a blue connector looks like a Printer card. Given that it appears that this connected to the board above I'd say it's the host interface for the hard drive adapter board above.
Posted by: Gorgonops on 2016-12-22 11:44:17 ... been skipping through the video, per an observation at around the 11 minute mark, a IIplus motherboard doesn't have a joystick port. But you've probably figured that out by now. 😉
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