II+

apple
Apple II Plus

This machine was given to me in non-working order a few years ago; its previous owner wanted to get it going for his kid. Not confident at the time in my repair skills, I tracked a IIe down for him and got him going with that. I walked away with the II Plus. As it turned out, the power supply was dead and some chips on the motherboard were loose. When the PC-type power supply went into the Stealth GS, its power supply (drilled for extra ventilation) went into the IIe and the IIe’s power supply went into the II Plus. As for the motherboard, reseating each of the dozens of chips and disassembling and cleaning the keyboard put it back in working order. Here’s what I have:

  • The computer itself, with 48K.
  • No floppy drives…those were left with the customer in his “new” IIe. I picked up some Disk II floppy drives and a controller a while back.
  • Microsoft (!) 16K memory expansion, compatible with Apple’s “language card.”
  • Hayes Micromodem 300-bps internal/external modem (an interface card inside the machine with a cable leading out to a box with the phone jack and analog circuitry).
  • Repeaterrrr keyboard enhancement…if I’m not mistaken, this adds auto-repeat to the keyboard and makes lowercase input in selected programs possible (I don’t recall if a lowercase character-generator ROM was installed along with it…probably not).
  • SCRG Paddle-Adapple dual-joystick adapter.

Here’s the out-of-the-box configuration for a II Plus:

  • 1.0-MHz 6502.
  • 16K-48K RAM, expandable through at least a couple of methods. The most common is a 16K “language card,” named because Apple sold it for use with its Pascal system. A language card is also required for ProDOS 8 to work. Note that this functionality is built into all later Apple IIs.
  • Eight standard Apple II expansion slots.
  • Integrated graphics that supported the following modes:
    • text: 40×24
    • Lo-Res: 40×48, 16 colors
    • Hi-Res: 280×192, 2 colors or 140×192, 6 colors
    • mixed mode: four lines of text at the bottom with a reduced amount of Lo-Res or Hi-Res graphics above
  • Integrated keyboard capable of generating the first 96 ASCII characters. Lowercase input is not supported out of the box, though a “shift-key modification” was commonly applied to enable lowercase input in programs that supported it.
  • Integrated DIP-16 joystick port.
  • Input and output jacks for an audio-cassette recorder for data storage.

Some of the links at the bottom of my Stealth GS page may be of value to II Plus users. A fair chunk of the software that found its way onto the Internet requires at least a IIe, though there are “warez” archives (check comp.sys.apple2 for names) that have games and other software from when the II Plus ruled the roost in Cupertino.

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