I managed to get some pictures and info about the Sentech Midi Interface card for the Apple II. Thanks to Carlos Fernandez for the info.


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Well well well...Darn logic board was shagged!! I’ll de darned. I originally thought I had a good deal buying my Apple IIGS from the UK. Apparently not.



After buying a secondhand logic board from eBay, I had to return it in the end. No questions asked, but it was faulty as we have seen in the last post. I’ve now got my Apple IIGS cooking with gas. I just need to get some more peripherals.

A while back I purchased an Apple IIGS from the UK. Things started to fail soon after. First the serial port started spitting out strange code and then the 1MB RAM expansion card was not detected. I located a reconditioned logic board from ebay. Replaced mine and fired it up. All tests from the Apple IIGS Diagnostics disk seems to pass but when I booted up System 6.01 it froze while loading. Sometimes with an error. Read More...

I guess if all my Apple II stuff worked then it would be quiet boring. Half the fun is working out what is wrong and how to fix it. hmmmm.. I had a simple task ahead of me. Create a floppy copy of Ultima V so a friend could test out the graphics on his Apple IIe NTSC version to see if the graphics are displayed like my PAL version. My endless video problems seem to have no solution. The fact is I don’t even know if anything is wrong. Maybe all PAL Apple IIe’s graphics look like mine? As I have no reference I need to go about this the hard way.



So I located a new box of 10 double Density 5 1/4” floppy disks and fired up ADT-PRO. Errors…..more errors.. And this was on my Apple IIGS which worked a few months ago. arrrggh. I then tried my Apple IIe and the Super Serial card. Strange things are a foot at the Circle K. Looks like I have screwy Super Serial Card too. Darn. I’m sourcing one now. Fingers crossed it works.

*****Update: The problem in the end was with mac Mac Pro. The driver I was using was not installed correctly. I removed it and used the standard Aten one.

To try and resolve my on going video problems with my Apple II PAL editions I located this store in Japan. Hand crafted made to order boards that seemed amazing. Only one catch. Seems they are NTSC only as I’m getting some really strange results. The webpage for the cards is: https://tulip-house.ddo.jp/DIGITAL/english.html Read More...

Thanks to my mate George over in the USA I managed to score this Yamaha Music Interface Midi card for my Apple II. I was using a Synthtech card before which worked quiet well but I could not close the lid of my Apple II due to the midi cables connector not fitting through the hole. Read More...

There is not much info on the web about this card. The Wikipedia has some information but no photos. It's a very rare and hard to come by card but saying that most Apple II hardware is getting harder to find each day. The Passport Designs MIDI interface card allows you to connect midi devices to your Apple II o Apple IIe. Even some games like Origin’s Ultima V supported this device allowing the games music to be enhanced using MIDI for the sound track. Something Sierra would do with Roland’s MT32 in the years to come.

The card has midi in/out, thu plus for all your analogic minded people out there, tape sync in/out. Pretty much all you needed back in the days of midi. Do read the manual linked at the bottom of the pages as it goes into further details on connection and using the card. Thanks to Phillip for the scans of the card.

The front side:

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My original Apple IIe that I purchased off eBay came broken. The video rom was burnt out and displayed garbled graphics. In the end I could not source a replacement chip so I purchased a second Apple IIe to use as spare parts. Last week I found someone of eBay selling the Apple IIe Enhancement kit. Unfortunately it arrived with the US video rom chip which is a lot smaller than my Germany PAL version. You can see the size difference here: Read More...