To each their own Halloween! Or the rebirth of an Apple IIe.

Because these days, Google's homepage proudly features an artistic representation of Pac-Man.

By sheer coincidence, it turns out I just rebooted an Apple IIe.

I acquired an Apple IIe a good number of years ago, maybe about ten years now, during the move of a retiring computer science teacher's classroom. While clearing out his cupboard of items he hadn't collected, which were thus destined for the dumpster, a superb Apple IIe stood proudly. I couldn't bring myself to send it to its destruction, so I recovered it and stored it in my garage for years.

Since then, I had the chance to take it out to test it and found it was in very bad shape. On the motherboard, a number of integrated circuits were placed haphazardly, and I didn't know if they were functional. Some had even been placed backwards in their sockets. And yes, here in France, the computer teacher was 'necessarily' a mathematics teacher, as was quite standard in the 80s, completely mediocre in his subject and incompetent in computing. Hence the place that France holds today in the field of computing. But, by luck, the laxity of these national education staff being what it is, this Apple IIe had probably been lying around for about thirty years in its damp cupboard, a fitting image of the French national education system.

Upon inspection, I found that an integrated circuit in one of the disk drives had literally exploded. This certainly had consequences, causing the machine to no longer boot. Hence the 'attempts' at repair by what I could qualify as an imbecile.

I therefore systematically replaced the logic chips and assumed that the specific circuits, like the CPU, the MMU, etc., were functional. This was the case. On the first power-up, the machine booted into Basic.

And there you have it! I had no resources for this machine, no floppy disks, I didn't know what to do with it. I stored it away and, since I hadn't been able to verify the functionality of the disk drives, I put it away again and stored the expansion cards, though I no longer remember where. And that's when the drama occurred.

During a cleanup of my garage, I came across this machine again. Without the expansion cards, it was impossible to attempt anything. So I did some research online and came across Bradley Bell's Github, where he had recreated a number of expansion cards for the Apple II, including the Disk card and the Superserial card.

That's when I told myself it was worth giving it a shot. So, I had these two cards manufactured.

 
I managed to find the specific components at a local retailer who looked at me in a funny way, given that he didn't remember ever taking the box containing the R6551s off the shelf...

I assembled these cards without any difficulty. I replaced the old and unobtainable transistor pairs on the Disk II card with modern Darlingtons, and everything worked on the first tests inside the Apple II.

Afterwards, I spent some time trying to understand how ADTPro works and finally managed to download both the latest version of ProDOS and an image of a version of PacMan.

To do this, I still had to thoroughly clean the disk drives; they were making a real 'saucepan-like' noise when operating.

It's a pleasure to see the back of this Apple IIe with the serial connectivity that allowed the machine to be brought back to life.

Alternatively, in a more fluid way:

It's a satisfying sight to see the back of this Apple IIe equipped with the serial connection that brought the machine back to life.

Not only does this Apple IIe now boot without any problem from the ProDOS disk, but it is also able to boot from the PacMan disk, allowing the game to start.

And there you have it, this weekend, I too have my PacMan.
And I must say it satisfies me more than Google's PacMan logo, even if it's not in color.

Which leads me to think that it would be interesting to add an HDMI card to it, since that type of extension now exists.

 

The A2dvi plus card :