New iie hardware

A new replacement for the //e mainboard would >= £2000. 

You would not save money in that route, even if it were to exist. Establish what cards you want and need to accomplsh your goals. 

You need to realise that the cost on repop bards is so high because the production volume is so low. A replacement //e mainboard that incorporates all of these things would reuire many tens o thousands in time for desig, the the parts alsone would cost £2000. That means that a break even cost would exceed that.

I hae designed retro HW and brought it to maket. It is not a cheap prospect, ad the reason that all of this HW costs so much to the consumer, is simply because it costs that much to produce and to manufacture. In an ideal world, one of us woud own a PCB mill, one of us would have a huge stock of alterra parts, and one of us would own a plastic factory. In reality, when you want something as simple as a custom connector the overhead is US£25K+.

I designed custom HW for other systems, and the cost for one connecotr that I needed was 25K tooling, n a minimum order of 5K pieces at US$10/piece. Thus, US$75K ust for one part on a product where that was only one of many parts. When I needed custom springs made to provide stock to service old 80s disk drives, I had a US5k tooling cost an a minimum order of 5000 springs a US$0.20 a piece. Spread the tooling cost across the springs, and I need to sell every one for US$1.20 us to break even.  Considering my projected volume need was < 200 pieces, I would need to charge US$40 per spring  to break even. 

Can you imagine paying that for one extension spring? People would accuse me of price gouging, but that was my legitimate raw cost, and I would not even make a profit in the process, while being accused of trying to fe over clients. t ust is not worth it. 

Paying a few hundred for cards isn't price gouging. Most people who do this barely break even. 

I second what Timelord is saying.  I did the Apple IIe diagnostics card and it took alot more time and money than I thought it would, but I learned alot.

GGLabs makes a clone of the Apple II SCSI card.  It's available as a kit.  $20 for a bare PCB or $30 for a bare PCB and all the PLAs (if you don't have a GAL programmer).  You supply everything else, including a NLA scsi controller chip (that for now is still readily available on ebay from various shady Chinese electronics scalpers).  It was a common chip in many different scsi cards for many different architectures, so I don't see it getting too rare anytime soon.  Board requires soldering SMD components, but they are all 1206 size iirc and aren't too difficult to deal with.

I'm happy with mine.  Here's my assembly video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4Ag-sr4JeI

The BMOW Apple2Pi is essentially a super-serial card with no ROM.  If you added the ROM, a MAX232 or two, and a DB connector, you'd have a super serial card I think.  I've built it (without the ROM) on breadboard before.  It's a pretty simple board.  Problem is the new-production 65C51 chips have a critical bug in the hardware implementation, so for full compatibility you have to get an older out of production 6551.  These are still available on ebay from the same shady Chinese electronics scalpers, but they are getting pretty expensive and given how popular they are with all the rest of the 8-bit community (lookin' at you, C= guys. ;P ), I 'spect the price will continue to rise.  It appears that WDC has no plans to fix the bug in the 65c51, and have basically been telling people to "design around it".

GlitchWorks sells a protoboard with an Apple II bus connector on it.  It probably wouldn't be too awful to strap up a serial card on it, but I don't think I'd want to do anything too super complicated on protoboard.  Well, I guess one could wire-wrap for more complicated stuff, but that would get in the way of the neighboring slot or two I 'spect.

Where can we get the Apple II SCSI card for $20?  Looks like GGLabs is out of stock.

Anyone else carrying these?

I've purchased a total of 3 super serial cards over the last 2 years. If you keep your eyes open, I've been able to get 2 of them for around $25 including shipping and actually scored 1 of them for about $12 due to a mispelling and bad choice of categories. Takes some time, but it turned out to be worth it. Now both //e's and the IIGS have SSCs.

IIe has some custom chips on it. II+ was all off the shelf. You can pick up a II+ MB for like 50$ on fleaBay right now. I've bought a few boards from this seller in the past. Nice guy. Solid products so far: https://www.ebay.com/itm/APPLE-II-8-BIT-HOMEBREW-COMPUTER-PCB-w-PS2-KEYBOARD-ADAPTER-GOLD-IMM-TRACES/254833356022

You can get sound card kits and other kits from ReactiveMicro: https://www.reactivemicro.com/product-category/apple2/

You can also find new ROM card boards on fleaBay:  https://www.ebay.com/itm/Old-style-maximun-12K-ROM-card-for-Apple-ii-Apple-ii-plus-and-Apple-iie/313277969963?hash=item48f0d2762b:g:DRwAAOSwlARfmqme

And SD floppy drives:  https://www.ebay.com/itm/Floppy-disc-drive-Emulator-for-Apple-ii-iie-iic-Laser128-sd-card-emu/143928360065?hash=item2182cc7c81:g:g-8AAOSwWUVc2sEf 

There are designs complete with gerbers floating around the web as well.  Like this dual GOIP interface: https://gitlab.com/salfter/a2gpio 

Or you can search HackADay: https://hackaday.io/search?term=apple+ii

Lots of optiojns out there. 

Also lots of old books on fleaBay to get you started on building your own designs. Or just fab what's in the book. :-)

~n99

Recreating a board is not too hard.

You only "need to have balls" to strip a working card, clean it, scan it, repopulate it to a working card again and use the scan as a template for i.e. SprintLayOut 6.

Then get the schematics for the card or reverse engineer it yourself.

The hardes part is getting the special chips and the firmware for some of those proms, eproms, etc.

I did a Commodore 250407 board replica for myself and went through all those steps. 

All together on and off it took me around 9 month to finish.

3 weeks after I was done and assembled my first own replica PCB a guy named Rob Taylor on tindie sold 250407 replica ...

If you are into gambling: utsource.net sometimes has special chips for various retro computers on sale but it is a gamble if you get working ones.

Paypal payment is a must to get your money back if the chips are bad.

If you need PCB --- JLCPCB or PCBWay are good and the prices are acceptable.

If your PCB got errors that, are not vissible on the gerbers you sent them ... a foto of the board / the place with the failure is enough and they sent you either a new error free set of boards at no cost or give you a refund / discount.

I would like to do a Apple IIe replica board but: I do "not have balls" to strip my only Apple IIe and I have no idea where to get those Apple specific IC that are on the board.

A very good Apple II Rev. 0 I build myself is on the net at willegal.net

And of course, if you can't find ROMs or want burn EPROMs with adapters, there's always ROMXe coming soon.

ROMXe.png