Joudan
Member
Hey all,
I bought a Japanese Apple II clone recently and am in the process of restoring it. It appears to have a dead power supply, so I've rigged a PC/AT PSU for the time being and sure enough it powers on to the Apple ][ prompt. Everything seemed to be working at first... until I hit "Shift" + "/" to get a question mark, at which point the computer started beeping rather rapidly and filling the screen with a combination of "?" and "/" line by line. Sometimes when this happens, the backgrounds of the characters are coloured too. Hitting Return stops it, and hitting the "/" key without shift works fine. It also happens with some other symbols such as ">", but it doesn't happen with every Shift-modifiable symbol key - every alphabetical and top-row number key works fine with and without Shift.
I tried removing each logic and rom chip, dusting them and their sockets, and reinserting them but nothing changed. I also tried doing the same to the two chips on the keyboard PCB but still no change.
Here's a photo of the problem: https://i.imgur.com/QTMXTFH.jpg
I'm 99% sure the weird colour bleeding/artifacting/whatever is due to the cable I'm using. This clone has a 3.5mm headphone jack for video, and the cable it came with is fairly old and stiff, so it should probably be ignored unless you think it might be related to this key repetition problem.
Also, it occasionally starts spewing question marks immediately on boot until I hit enter, but this isn't a consistent problem like the one I described above.
So, any ideas? Could the rom chips be failing, or is it maybe a memory problem? How would I go about diagnosing this? It might be worth mentioning that I have a Spectrum Micro Engenho 2 (Brazilian II+/IIe clone) that I could try stealing the chips from to test things, but I haven't confirmed that it even works since the internal power transformer is dead (another thing I need help with! But this Japanese clone comes first ).
Thanks!
I bought a Japanese Apple II clone recently and am in the process of restoring it. It appears to have a dead power supply, so I've rigged a PC/AT PSU for the time being and sure enough it powers on to the Apple ][ prompt. Everything seemed to be working at first... until I hit "Shift" + "/" to get a question mark, at which point the computer started beeping rather rapidly and filling the screen with a combination of "?" and "/" line by line. Sometimes when this happens, the backgrounds of the characters are coloured too. Hitting Return stops it, and hitting the "/" key without shift works fine. It also happens with some other symbols such as ">", but it doesn't happen with every Shift-modifiable symbol key - every alphabetical and top-row number key works fine with and without Shift.
I tried removing each logic and rom chip, dusting them and their sockets, and reinserting them but nothing changed. I also tried doing the same to the two chips on the keyboard PCB but still no change.
Here's a photo of the problem: https://i.imgur.com/QTMXTFH.jpg
I'm 99% sure the weird colour bleeding/artifacting/whatever is due to the cable I'm using. This clone has a 3.5mm headphone jack for video, and the cable it came with is fairly old and stiff, so it should probably be ignored unless you think it might be related to this key repetition problem.
Also, it occasionally starts spewing question marks immediately on boot until I hit enter, but this isn't a consistent problem like the one I described above.
So, any ideas? Could the rom chips be failing, or is it maybe a memory problem? How would I go about diagnosing this? It might be worth mentioning that I have a Spectrum Micro Engenho 2 (Brazilian II+/IIe clone) that I could try stealing the chips from to test things, but I haven't confirmed that it even works since the internal power transformer is dead (another thing I need help with! But this Japanese clone comes first ).
Thanks!