My dad has been cleaning out his piles of hoarded things from over the decades as he prepares to move house, a task with which I've been helping a little, and as a result I've just inherited the Apple //gs Woz edition that we had when I was in high school. Unfortunately it has not been subject to complete hoarding, so there are some important things missing: a keyboard and mouse (replacements already ordered from ebay), all the software disks (I'm thinking of getting a Floppy Emu), and I'm not sure whether or not the hard disk that's been stored with it actually went with that computer (but see above re: Floppy Emu - we may just have to do without the original experience of physical disks). I'm looking forward to the project of getting it back in working order, and introducing my own kids to it as a retro gaming platform (and whatever else they want to try doing with it). At this stage, my plan is as follows:
- replace the clock battery (fortunately it has not leaked over the years, so it should be a straight remove-and-replace job - I already have the replacement)
- restore the PSU with a ReActiveMicro PSU kit (the original is probably ok, but I don't want to go to the effort of putting things back together just to have the PSU fail once it starts being used again)
- get the monitor working
- order a Floppy Emu, put it all together, start playing around with it
The observant among you might have noticed my throwaway line of "get the monitor working". I say that because when I plugged it in - just to test basic functioning of the CPU and monitor (nothing else connected) - I found that the monitor doesn't display anything. I can hear the monitor power on, and I noticed that a loose bit of tape was affected by the static charge on the screen, but the green light doesn't come on and nothing is displayed, regardless of how I move the brightness and contrast dials.
Now, I've done some searching around, and found a number of suggestions as to where to go from here. As someone who has built a few hobby electronic kits, but never repaired a TV or monitor before, I'd certainly appreciate the advice of people who have done it a lot. This reddit post (with no actual solution) seems to be identical in behaviour to what I'm seeing - although I never heard the popping sound they mention. I see specifically that they have already tried a full capacitor replacement using the console5 kit. I also found something from a different forum giving Apple // monitor repair advice, which talks about crystallised solder on the power supply board. The latter talks about it working for a period of time before going dark and the light going off, but perhaps in some cases - maybe with a fully broken solder joint - it would never properly power up, jumping straight to the failure mode. Any advice on that would be very welcome!
If I can't get the monitor working again at all, I'd be inclined to go down the route of installing a VidHD card. So far, my attempts to email enquiries about that card have not received responses - does anyone happen to know if those cards are still being made?
- replace the clock battery (fortunately it has not leaked over the years, so it should be a straight remove-and-replace job - I already have the replacement)
- restore the PSU with a ReActiveMicro PSU kit (the original is probably ok, but I don't want to go to the effort of putting things back together just to have the PSU fail once it starts being used again)
- get the monitor working
- order a Floppy Emu, put it all together, start playing around with it
The observant among you might have noticed my throwaway line of "get the monitor working". I say that because when I plugged it in - just to test basic functioning of the CPU and monitor (nothing else connected) - I found that the monitor doesn't display anything. I can hear the monitor power on, and I noticed that a loose bit of tape was affected by the static charge on the screen, but the green light doesn't come on and nothing is displayed, regardless of how I move the brightness and contrast dials.
Now, I've done some searching around, and found a number of suggestions as to where to go from here. As someone who has built a few hobby electronic kits, but never repaired a TV or monitor before, I'd certainly appreciate the advice of people who have done it a lot. This reddit post (with no actual solution) seems to be identical in behaviour to what I'm seeing - although I never heard the popping sound they mention. I see specifically that they have already tried a full capacitor replacement using the console5 kit. I also found something from a different forum giving Apple // monitor repair advice, which talks about crystallised solder on the power supply board. The latter talks about it working for a period of time before going dark and the light going off, but perhaps in some cases - maybe with a fully broken solder joint - it would never properly power up, jumping straight to the failure mode. Any advice on that would be very welcome!
If I can't get the monitor working again at all, I'd be inclined to go down the route of installing a VidHD card. So far, my attempts to email enquiries about that card have not received responses - does anyone happen to know if those cards are still being made?
