Ed in SoDak

That actually makes good sense since it might catch some syntax or other errors early on. I used to add little bits of on-screen data while a program was being tested. I'd reserve some screen space and place some relevant text there to point out anything I wanted to track during program execution. Might be the line number or code section, a couple variables I was having trouble with, etc. I'd place some placeholder text for routines that hadn't been written yet so I could test program flow. Like displaying "Here there be Monsters, Line 1640, M=10" or whatever, then return to the calling routine. That made it easier to check out prior sections rather than coding the entire program and then debugging the whole thing.

It would be a rare event to buy anything from me that was "untested." Now, we might enter into a gray area, where I knew it was dead, and gave up trying to do an easy or even complicated fix where I installed a lot of parts and then gave up, but I have forgotten the circumstances over time. That can happen when you have a shed of things that go back a decade or two. Even then, it ain't "untested" and I'll share any insights I have. If I think it works, I sell as "not DOA." I even refunded a couple buyers' total cost plus shipping just because they claimed an "as-is" but working set arrived broken. Not worth the bother to fight such bottom-feeders. As a result, you won't see me selling much on ebay. The risks go both ways. In my real business that pays the bills (note my avatar), we deal with new folks all the time and in that case mutual trust is what gets you in the door. All others get the revolving door, lol. -Ed

And there ya go! Do you happen to recall what your TI/Geneve setup with monitor and drives consumed? The new flat panels might be a better option than some older monitors. They have quite a few input options to boot. -Ed

Get a Kill-A-Watt and have hard figures on power consumption to either flaunt or deny, as the case may be. In your case, Rich, if you buy one, it may be wise to not disclose the means you used to obtain the measurement, as it's bound to later be used against you in some way if SWMBO gets ahold of it and starts checking all your toys. But it may help settle an argument in your favor. I'll bet she's the one watching TV a lot, for example, with a closet full of shoes to boot. All said with tongue firmly in cheek, my wife and I are both avid consumers and share the pain when the bill comes due. Of course, the cost of the Kill-A-Watt might be equivalent of several months of running a full TI system. On the plus side, it'll monitor actual usage of all sorts of typical household electric appliances or devices. I've been wanting one myself, since we recently went to demand metering during daily peak periods. That charge alone can add $30 or more to the monthly electricity bill. It's actually the 240-v big-demand things like cooking, driers, water heaters and heat/air that really bump up demand, and I don't think there's one of these that can check those items, but it'll check the 'fridge, window AC, lights, TV/stereo and computers 'n' such.

Hmm, never guessed on old PC/XT stuff ever having a following. <runs to dig into the shed>

I did a search on Ball Brothers Express which brought a lot of varied results, but one was for a ball-drop game.

TI Invaders thanks you for sparing them. No Disassemble!

I'm batchin' it while wifey is in North Carolina. "Father" to this pair, at least they haven't asked to borrow the car yet but who knows, they're still young!

Looks like Nukey Shay nailed it. The box of disks said DSDD, but some of the disks were actually DSHD. Prior to my discovering that bit of info that had been staring me in the face, I had opened the drives and cleaned the heads and write-protect sensors. When that still didn't work, is when I found my D-oh moment. So thanks a bunch to Nukey for pointing that out. Those same disks work fine on my TI, so I just grabbed 'em. I'm certain I'd tried reformatting the back side of one of the disks that came with it; it was a flippy backup of the sytem utilities disk and side B wouldn't read. That had failed before, but worked without a hitch last night when I used it to make a new copy from the original Apple disk. Dunno, but anyway it all seems to be ok now, thanks again to AtariAge and the group! Now, what to do with it? -Ed

I suppose you could find the key(s) that closed a given pair of traces, then follow those traces on past the connector to its solder lugs or some convenient spot on the board which leads to that point. That way you could verify which wires were losing continuity and you might only need to run one or just a few flying leads to replace just the bad ones. Kludgy, I know, but it's cheap and works (sometimes). Doing that with the keyboard installed on the connector and not making things worse is the hard part. -Ed

Cause? How long ago did it fail, or is that an unknown? Some of this old electronic stuff is going dead on the shelf. Things like Tantalum capacitors which can fail to a dead short and electrolytics, which have multiple failure modes and can be hard to test properly. Tants are easy, just Ohm 'em. Find one dead, redo 'em all with modern good stuff, no cheap China timebombs need apply. Panasonic and Nichicon are good. Orange drops or equivalent for the Tantalums, they're polarized, btw. Could be a power surge did it. Or a wayward connection to a port made by a child perhaps or a too inquisitive adult. I've been there many times as both a kid and an old fart. Did it look like someone had been inside before you opened it up? I never had a TI PS dongle/wallwart or internal regulator board fail to an over-volt condition, but it could happen. I've had to sub in regulator boards more than once. Consoles do run hot, I have a small PC fan sitting on top of the vents on mine. If it were blocked up and/or accidentally left running for some unknown long period, that might do it. I've forgotten mine for days before, then whoops! That's warm! Fingertips do track the shorts as you found out. Meter the power at the chip and compare it to the PS by itself. Sudden voltage drop is a sure sign. Might be able to Ohm shorts on the chip itself, but that stuff was always magic to me. It's either the chip(s) or where the chip feeds that causes the load. Old transistors and others have begun to grow tiny metallic "whiskers" off tinned connections inside the part. Enough stray whiskers that grow and connect to the wrong spot can short it out. NASA wrote about it, got them, too. And certain old transistor radios as well, like Zenith and others. We see more of that as time moves on and old parts grow a beard. I never did figure out why one of my consoles was dead. I probably have the transplant candidate you're seeking. And then some! -Ed

I still enjoy TI Invaders, play it in emulation as well as on the real thing. Poker/Blackjack is ok as well. Used to enjoy cheating in Chess. Seldom won a chess match otherwise! I actually bought the Star Trek module when it was released. "Welcome aboard, Captain!" in Spock's actual voice, too cool. Parsec is another favorite that uses speech. Alpiner, Attack, Pole Position are others I worked the joysticks to death playing. Pinball or Mancala work great on the keyboard alone as does TI Invaders. Even Tennis was ok for a go every once in awhile. Even though I know zip about tennis and never watch it on tv. A PE box and drives plus XB adds a whole 'nother layer to it. When I got mine, the TI became to me a "real computer" I could actually do stuff with. Why aren't you considering that option? Lack of funds, the space to set it up, no desire to go that route? On disk, I liked Spad XIII flight sim, and I spent countless hours playing Legends and trying to hack the program. I did create a cheater Super Team that was invincible if you just wanted to explore and not be bothered by any passing hoardes of pesky monsters. One hit from just one of my team would kill multiple monsters, heheh! Take That! Chainlink Solitare and other Solitare programs, other Poker programs as well. Have you tried any of the several excellent TI emulators? All of this and lots more is available to see what you like enough to get the real versions. What brought you to the TI? You seem to know your way around inside of one. -Ed

Typing on the Timex TS1000 was agony and exercise in near-futility as almost always something would go wrong. Save to cassette after typing just a dozen lines or so and using a different tape and further along on the tape instead of over the previous save. Then I kludged a TI99 keyboard onto the Timex, soldered on the RAMpack and things were much better! Interpreting the tiny graphics characters in the printed listings was fun (not), especially when they were used to enter a USR machine language section of code. Started with cassette on the TI as well when I moved to that in 1985. Typed a lot of programs from anywhere I could find 'em. Eventually we got disk drives and better-connected to get stuff already typed and saved on disk. Wrote my own programs too and rewrote or added to plenty of others. Been so long now, I mostly forgot it all when I went to try again recently. I used to really enjoy programming, now, not so much. For the TI, someone has done the work of entering the majority of published programs listing from the books and magazines of the day. Grab it off the net, load and run! -Ed

I'm using the factory internal drive and Apple's 5.25, got the Apple owner's manuals for the drive, software and the computer itself. It's a whopping 143K capacity, the blanks I'm trying are DSDD (360k on a PC) so they "should" work. Good tip, though! The few I did get to work I used the Duplicate option so it used the same format as one of the disks that read. All the disks that came with it are readable and work, and I can add files to the sample/tutorial disks and rename/delete these test files. Just no formatting. I've tried 4 different blank, unformatted disks from my TI stash, same results. So I think I've covered the "obvious" stuff, time to either tear into it or stow it away again. I've had the cases opened, just didn't feel like dissecting the drives far enough to get to the head and/or write protect switch. -Ed

Might be a job for DeOxit, as that will chemically remove oxidation which alcohol alone won't cut. I always used a pencil eraser, but then you have the rubber eraser crumbs in the mix, so that probably would do more harm than good. Probably far easier to get a "real" TI kbd with mechanical switches. -Ed

I guess I'll try that before packing it up again. I did find another system disk with yet another format choice and still no joy. Funny that I did get one or another disk to take a format about three times total, but repeating those same steps then failed. I have two drives, same problem and also same problem with only the internal connected. All my disks are ProDOS 1.1.1 but I can choose that for the format type, or select DOS3.3 or Pascal formats, and no difference. The head seek rattles on the stop a few times, then I/O error. Appleworks format option reports "disk not found." I read about the write protect LED giving problems with these drives, so I'll visit that, too. With this fault, it ain't worth much to me or anyone else, so it's sort of a got nothing to lose proposition. In all my old Mac junk, I may have an external Unidisk 3.5 which would give a new avenue to try. Meh. Thanks to evryone for all the help trying to sort it out! -Ed

Sounds like you're on your way! Good job tracking down a wire broken inside the insulation. Rare, but it does happen. Odd you have so many dead keyboards. I always thought they were pretty sturdy, but there were cheaper ones that TI used later on. -Ed

Do you suppose you could do a disk copy, and just flip the switch instead of swapping floppies as you would with a one-drive system? That would give you a form of read/write capability on either machine. There's a similar CF device for the TI that also provides either a serial or parallel port to replace the TI's toaster oven peripheral expansion box. But you either have the CF card or floppies, not both on tap at the same time nor at the touch of a custom-installed switch. Then there's this gadget, that lets you connect a floppy drive to your PC/Mac via USB which can read several disk formats. Too bad it's read-only and not read/write. Still, it might be a good way to transfer all those old floppies to your PC/Mac emulator without needing to send them via a term program and serial cable file by file or make archives of each disk before porting it. http://shop.deviceside.com/prod/FC5025 Maybe better yet is that RS232 to ethernet adapter thingy, since that allows live transfer both ways. Omega knows what I'm talking about here since he recently got connected this way. It'll even connect to a telnet BBS. -Ed

I did start one... When exactly was the deadline?

I had a console with one or more bad RAM chips. Like the OP, I removed all of them, socketed the board and installed new replacement chips. After all that, it still didn't fire up and I never did track down the problem. I still have the console stored away, it seemed a shame to waste all the work and parts. My answer to that setback was to stock up on spare consoles. I think I have 5 now; that one, another dead one and three still working. Two basic PE boxes with multiple floppy drives, plus speech and EXB for each. Back when I used it to handle my darkroom print processing, a working and reliable TI was literally indispensible! Not to mention helping with the books and officework, plus all the after-hours "fun" stuff I did with it. Glad you got yours running! My first thought would have been to check for bad solder joints or bridges on all those socket pins. I gotta also wonder if those other problems you found weren't part of the fail that caused you to replace the RAM in the first place? "A,S,D,F,G" Aren't these keys all tied to a common matrix connection? In which case, a simple keyswitch cleaning won't help (but can't hurt). The key layout is easy enough to find. Either a bad trace or perhaps a blown diode on that line? Spare keyboards are no problem to find if that's the easy cure. -Ed

Thanks again for the comments! I should rephrase my last comment a bit. The ][ did accomplish amazing things from shoestring beginnings. But, more than once later on, good programs or hardware upgrades were shot down after a lot of development work had already been done, since upper management had different priorities, namely the Apple /// and the Mac/Lisa. There was a finished ][ upgrade machine ready for its rollout, sitting offstage, when it was cancelled at the literal last minute. That's the sort of bad decisions I was referring to with the words "poor company choices." Like on the TI, the Apple ][ had some bottlenecks and constraints due to its older design and the excessive thriftiness of designer Woz. The TI has forever suffered from its use of VDP memory, also at least partly due to cost-cutting measures. Where both companies failed in providing upgrades, third parties stepped in and filled the gaps. Both machines could have been much more than the actual item shipped. Seemingly more due to poor business calls than raw capability of either machine. On either platform, the existance of unreleased and/or shot-down upgrades and apps points to this. Despite all efforts of various factions within Apple to quash the ][ and promote the latest/greatest, sales of the ][ continued to climb, while the other machines bit the dust. What could the ][ have become, had it been more enthusistically supported within the upper ranks of Apple? Or Job's ego concerning his own pet project, the Mac? Even Woz himself basically walked away from his brainchild at some point. Can't say I blame him. These Apple products were selling for well over a grand in 1986, which was around a third of the cost to produce. What if TI had seen the light and gone ahead with the 99/8 instead of entering the death-spiral of a price war with Commodore that TI couldn't possibly win? Or if they had gone open-source on the internals like Woz? It's all just so many chips under the bridge now, but interesting to think about. Coulda, woulda shoulda... I got my Apple ][ info from the apple2history site I linked to in a previous post. It details the internal corprorate stuff the average user of the day never saw. I've also followed the story of Apple/Mac and its principal founders over the years. Best quote I read recently went like "People think Apple has a brain, and that's where they're mistaken." Kinda sums it up. So yeah, I gotta agree the ][ is a cool machine. You're getting me more interested in it, and it's not where I need to be going right now. But I'm frustrated with the floppy formatting. Unless I solve that, it's futile to pursue it much further and besides, I still like my TI just fine in comparison. -Ed

I guess it can't hurt to look into ADTPro. I was hoping it could use an older Mac 3.5" floppy drive, to give me some transportability, but it would have to be the correct later type to work on either machine. I did a lot of reading at http://apple2history.org lots of details there on what's needed and a good history of the ][-series. Speaking of script languages, I see that Hypercard came in a version for the ][ or at least the ][gs. I still use that program for a few things. I had a salesman demonstrate the ][gs for me once in the early 90's. I recall it as looking like a Mac wannabe, with its gui front-end ported to the gs. Actually, it grew to be a competent system later on when it finally got some decent hard drive capability. I don't think it ever outgrew its roots and memory constraints due to Apple keeping backwards compatibility with far older models. Noble gestures, but it throttled back many aspects of the system as computing needs grew beyond the limitations. Overall, I was struck by many similarities to the TI, where poor company choices really hindered the further development of either system. -Ed

Thanks for the comments. Apple was always far more forthcoming with internal details than TI ever was. It was a hacker's wet dream, at just the right moment in time. Appleworks has a menu to format a floppy, and I also have the system utilities program. I managed to get a random format or two to take, but it was not repeatable. I opened it up and did a close inspection, reseated all the socketed chips, checked the cables, etc. No joy. Seems to run disks just fine and I saved a few Appleworks tests that seemed to work alright. I really don't have a use for it, I was mostly curious about what I had missed by going with TI back when this thing was new. I'm more likely to just move it on than spend money on getting it working better or downloading software for it. -Ed

Some several years ago, someone gave me their old IIc confuser. It had the stock Apple disks and a few other programs. No games or joysticks though. Dragged it out on an impulse since the wife is out of town and won't notice the clutter. I didn't think it worked when I put it in the shed way back when, but I was able to boot it up and try all the programs. It came with a mouse, but only a simple drawing program to use with it. Also an external drive and the cables to connect everything. The Apple Imagewriter still worked and I printed a few things. Only problem is I can read disks and do some saving of files but can't seem to format a blank disk. That one has me stumped. Too bad it seems Apple was just about as bad as any other computer company of that era. The ][c coulda been a much better machine if company politics hadn't got in the way. The Apple ][ line did enjoy a very long and successful run, regardless. Sales of it basically kept the company profitable while they stumbled around with the ill-fated Apple /// and the Lisa. Even the Mac didn't take off until several years after it's flag-waving, history-making launch in 1984. This ][c system was built in 1986, so most of the apps seem a little long in the tooth nowadays. Appleworks is a good, full-featured program which moved to the Mac platform and I still make good use of that program on my Macs. Other than that, most of the programs that were with this system didn't seem a whole lot different than what I've got for my TI. Actually, I prefer the TI versions for disk utilities and programming. Apple-formatted "Flippy" disks for system stuff seems just odd. Why didn't it support double-sided till way late in it's development? Internal corporate politics, since Apple didn't want their bread & butter ][ line always outshining their new platforms of the Apple /// and the Lisa/Mac. Silly, in retrospect, but there you have it. If I could format disks properly, it might be worth keeping, but I'm not really in the market to expand it, either. It does pack a lot of hardware into that compact case, though. Shades of what the TI mighta been, if only... Maybe if I had some of the better Apple ][ games and a joystick I'd like it more. So far, though, it's kinda ho-hum and given the choice, I much prefer my ol' TI. -Ed

I run a little computer fan from a wallwart, it just sits on the top on the console over the vents. At 7.5v, it's not too noisy and still does a good job keeping the TI cool.