I bought an Apple ][e recently at an estate sale. Loved playing with it and worked fine at the sale, but failed (monitor is fine but main board no longer turns on, no hard drive grind on startup, etc) after ~15 minutes of use. I found some troubleshooting manuals and got, then replaced, a bunch of main board chips. Still no luck, so I replaced the PS.
So I’m giving up my sunk costs on getting this actual Apple ][e into working shape, but I’ve decided to settle for hollowing it out as a sort of classic computer arcade cabinet? (with the help of a apple-keyboard-connector-to-USB dongle I found online), putting in a rpi4, and perhaps running an emulator to start (since I’ll be specifically reharnessing the original keyboard). This means I’ll trash the main board (and perhaps disk drive enclosure, which I have no use for) and also need to find a flatscreen to very safely and carefully put into the A2M2010 monitor enclosure after removing the CRT component (lovely green phosphors, sad I won’t get to see more of it).
Anyways, all of this is to say that this device is lovely and I might get when if another piece of classic hardware falls into my possession. :)
So I’m giving up my sunk costs on getting this actual Apple ][e into working shape, but I’ve decided to settle for hollowing it out as a sort of classic computer arcade cabinet? (with the help of a apple-keyboard-connector-to-USB dongle I found online), putting in a rpi4, and perhaps running an emulator to start (since I’ll be specifically reharnessing the original keyboard). This means I’ll trash the main board (and perhaps disk drive enclosure, which I have no use for) and also need to find a flatscreen to very safely and carefully put into the A2M2010 monitor enclosure after removing the CRT component (lovely green phosphors, sad I won’t get to see more of it).
Anyways, all of this is to say that this device is lovely and I might get when if another piece of classic hardware falls into my possession. :)