Had a little extra time to finish a couple projects this July 4th weekend, one of them being a Phasor kit sold by Reactive Micro. Henry does a great job putting this together with all parts well organized and clearly labeled for easy assembly. I really enjoyed putting this together.
While in the process, I made a few changes (well, improvements in my way of thinking) that I thought I would share with the group.
Changes:
All IC sockets changed to vintage Augat gold machine-pin sockets.
Changed all resistors to the standard color-band resistors that don't wash off with cleaning solvents.
Added an 8-pin socket under the DIP Switch.
Changed the 220mfd Capacitors to ones that would sit flat on the board as designed.
Added Tantalum capacitors in place of the vertical electrolytic capacitors.
Changed the Rockwell R6522 IC's to vintage Ceramac & gold R6522ACE chips.
Added two Votrax SSI-263 Speech chips. (cost me more than 2 Phasor kits! Ughh!!)
Re-Labeled the GAL's for easier identification.
Here's a photo to share of the build:
Nice Job!!!
Adding to that, and in the spirit of Chris Torrence's on-line Apple ][ build, I decided to finish my Apple ][ Rev. 0 "prototype" board. I'm sure many have seen these as blank boards on eBay in the past. I thought the colorless board was a pretty cool addition to the Rev. 0 lineup. There is no silk-screening over the traces, so making "missed solder" marks over the traces is an easy task for the inexperienced board builders. I decided to use vintage colored sockets to identify certain sections like ROM and memory. I also used my most rare Integer Basic IC's and Ceramic 6502 for the build. The motherboard turned out perfect and works like the original Apple ][ Rev 0, requiring a reset on startup and a <ctrl> B to enter Integer basic. My goal is to use all my hand-wired prototype cards in this build along with my recent WOZ inspired (and copied) 13-Sector Disk ][ Controller card with dual Shugart 390 drives. Though it's not "original" per se', there are a lot of original parts and it at least brings an authentic look and feel to the project. I will follow up with a separate photo of the Motherboard assembly with the prototype cards installed. Might seem like a lot of work but I enjoy the crap out of doing this type of thing. Hope you all enjoy. FYI, the image shown below can be viewed to a much larger size by right-clicking "view image".
Apple][Rev0Motherboard_Sm.jpg
Beautiful board, sir!
I have one of those Phasor kits to finish too! I'd all but forgotten about it!
Interesting,
Not having a solder mask is very retro. There is an existing picture of a prototype Apple 1 made that way, but I have seen no evidence that there ever was any original Apple II PCB made without a solder mask.
regards,
Mike Willegal
This is a recreation board (unpopulated) that was sold on eBay within the last year. I built this because I thought it was a pretty cool retro-looking board that resembled a pre-production model. (one that likely never existed)
It's not in any way implied to be "official" in the sense that it was an original Apple created board. Same goes for my "Disk ][ number one" creation. Using official retro ROMS and an old ceramic processor doesn't hurt it though. Maybe 100 years from now, it might not make a difference, but I won't be around to ever know if it does. :-D
Yes, I get it.
Just wanted to clarify for folks that stumble across this thread and might not know the history of the Apple II development.
Note that first prototype Apple II boards were missing the SIP resistor packs that terminate the RAM address bus. Those boards didn't work very well.
regards,
Mike Willegal
I had an Apple II protoype system and ineed the board had no silk screen. Apple provided it to me in the spring of 1977 to port my Apple 1 Startrek t0 the Apple II. There was very little difference between the prototype and the Rev 0, the only change I know for sure was the addition of the 1K pullup and pulldown resistors on the RAM address lines. The resistors were added to damp the Address lines because the overshoot on those lines caused occaisional RAM errors. This was very frustrating so when the Rev 1 board became available I got a bare board and built one up with no sockets except for the RAM and ROM using the parts from the prototype and got rid of the flakey old board, old case and keyboard for up-to-date ones. This was 1977, who knew!!
I still have the prototyope Ceramic ROMs and a Ceramic Synertek 6502. One of the ROMs is different from production ROMs because Woz added a new Basic instruction (i think it was SCRN) in the production ROM set. The Ceramic Synertek 6502s are pretty rare and I don't know of any other protoype ROM sets but there must be some somewhere.
Gorgeous!