I'm in the Apple-1 Club!

[Action Retro]

I bought an amazing wave-soldered reproduction board from Armin Hierstetter, and holy heck have I been having a lot of fun with it.

I found a shelf at a thrift shop that's the perfect size to mount it, and stained it. I used two NOS 70's Stancor transformers that the original manual recommended. I also have a reproduction Datanetics keyboard. And it lives!

Well, after I found this errant pin on a chip

I got the software jukebox which includes almost every bit of software written for Apple-1, which is amazing!

And I went online via WiFi, just as Woz probably envisioned all those years ago

I'm hoping to use my Apple-1 kind of like someone would have back in the day - mess around with mods, use the breadboard section, etc.

 

[skate323k137]

Welcome to the club! Though I'm not "officially" in the club, as all my Apple 1's are Briel Replica 1 Plus and not full repros like this. Awesome work.

The cards from P-LAB are amazing. I have their SD card, and likely will be sharing some related news with their WiFi card soon too.

Did you build out a cassette interface as well?

 

[Action Retro]

Yeah that WiFi card is so cool! I'm planning on building out the cassette interface. I found the perfect woodgrain cassette deck to go with my build

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

I absolutely adore wood grain. It is THE missing option in personal computing. Who needs rose gold when you can get wildwood or mahogany veneer.

 

[skate323k137]

I'm glad you're all about the breadboarding etc. experience, it's really what these are about, I'm afraid so many of these replicas are just "wall hangers" even with people spending money on the obsolete ICs.

This is a mod I did to the Briel for the P-Lab SD card, it's probably not really applicable for your build, but it's still neat:

Also I -think- I have some spare prototyping PCBs for the expansion slot, if you want me to look around, I could likely find them if you wanted a couple.

 

[eric]

I got the software jukebox which includes almost every bit of software written for Apple-1, which is amazing!

Where did you get yours? I see the site but now how to build/get one https://p-l4b.github.io/jukebox/

I have a replica-1 and while, sure i could hook it up via USB and load software that way, this is pretty neat.

 

[skate323k137]

Where did you get yours? I see the site but now how to build/get one https://p-l4b.github.io/jukebox/

I have a replica-1 and while, sure i could hook it up via USB and load software that way, this is pretty neat.

The JukeBox last I talked with Claudio (P-LAB) is not Replica-1 compatible. However, the SD card is, and it's fully featured (see my youtube video above). I was actually the 1st to use the SD card on a Replica 1

You can PM the user P-LAB on Apple Fritter, or, if you don't have an account there, PM me and I'll provide you his email for ordering.

 

[Action Retro]

Where did you get yours? I see the site but now how to build/get one https://p-l4b.github.io/jukebox/

I have a replica-1 and while, sure i could hook it up via USB and load software that way, this is pretty neat.

I emailed them, and they have them in stock (in Italy)

 

[Patrick]

oh neat, i have 2 of the replica-1's boards. one i just purchased. teh 2nd i got as a kit and built myself. (to practice soldering iron skills)

I simply tried to load programs via serial. but i was never able to adjust the timmings correctly. Which resulted in many programs being corrupted. So I only played with it a couple of times.

 

[skate323k137]

oh neat, i have 2 of the replica-1's boards. one i just purchased. teh 2nd i got as a kit and built myself. (to practice soldering iron skills)

I simply tried to load programs via serial. but i was never able to adjust the timmings correctly. Which resulted in many programs being corrupted. So I only played with it a couple of times.

If you set a character delay of .015 and line delay of something stupid high like .040, it'll work. But it takes forever.

Cassette interface is faster than USB Serial, but by far the P-LAB card is the fastest. And building a cassette interface for the Replica 1 was something I only accomplished by beta testing a revision for 'Uncle Bernie,' who has improved the design of the ACI (Apple Cassette Interface) itself. But he doesn't sell that kit by itself.

It can take several minutes to load a large program over USB terminal, perhaps 20-60 seconds over cassette, and literally a couple of seconds off of P-LAB's SD card.

 

[Byte Knight]

Looking forward to your next video of you playing Minecraft on this thing!

 

[Action Retro]

Looking forward to your next video of you playing Minecraft on this thing!

I did try to connect to CQ on it

 

[pfuentes69]

You got a quite nice set, I like your wooden things.

This is mine...

Custom built getting the PCB and the components separately... the keyboard is also quite hand-made.
I'd like to get the jukebox board... it makes it far more useable, now I use the cassette interface reading the audio files from the iPad and it's quite annoying as it fails 2 of each 3 attempts.

 

[skate323k137]

You got a quite nice set, I like your wooden things.

This is mine...
View attachment 8668

Custom built getting the PCB and the components separately... the keyboard is also quite hand-made.
I'd like to get the jukebox board... it makes it far more useable, now I use the cassette interface reading the audio files from the iPad and it's quite annoying as it fails 2 of each 3 attempts.

Have you done any modification to the ACI for reliability? The original design is certainly unreliable especially with low volume. Older iPods on maximum volume seem to do pretty well.

Also, P-LAB has some utilities which are very useful, I used this to help find the best audio source and volume level:

apple1-videocard-lib/demos/tapemon at main · nippur72/apple1-videocard-lib

Contribute to nippur72/apple1-videocard-lib development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Let me know how it works if you mess with it It has the program, and an audio file which is a stream of testing packets, which are indicated on screen as received, so you can see the impact of your volume changes in real time in regards to corrupt data.

 

[Action Retro]

You got a quite nice set, I like your wooden things.

This is mine...
View attachment 8668

Custom built getting the PCB and the components separately... the keyboard is also quite hand-made.
I'd like to get the jukebox board... it makes it far more useable, now I use the cassette interface reading the audio files from the iPad and it's quite annoying as it fails 2 of each 3 attempts.

Love your monitor! I see you've connected your Quicktake to it... Apple really took backwards compatibility seriously back then!

 

[retr01]

@pfuentes69, you made the right display choice - a Sony Trinitron monitor! Nice set up!

 

[pfuentes69]

Love your monitor! I see you've connected your Quicktake to it... Apple really took backwards compatibility seriously back then!

That would be cool... and display the photos in ASCII
That was during a mini-VCF here in Switzerland, and this photo of my table was made with the QuickTake...

 

[pfuentes69]

Have you done any modification to the ACI for reliability? The original design is certainly unreliable especially with low volume. Older iPods on maximum volume seem to do pretty well.

Also, P-LAB has some utilities which are very useful, I used this to help find the best audio source and volume level:

apple1-videocard-lib/demos/tapemon at main · nippur72/apple1-videocard-lib

Contribute to nippur72/apple1-videocard-lib development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Let me know how it works if you mess with it It has the program, and an audio file which is a stream of testing packets, which are indicated on screen as received, so you can see the impact of your volume changes in real time in regards to corrupt data.

I just wanted to make my first built as much standard as possible, so I decided finally not to do the modifications proposed for this by Uncle Bernie.

I didn't know about that utility! That actually is great, and maybe it will help me also to get a real cassette to work, as until now I only had (limited) success with the iPad... But I need to figure out how to get the audio file of that binary, because I don't have other means to load code (unless I type the bytes by hand).

 

[skate323k137]

I could probably generate it for you (the audio file) later today. I would hate to see you have to go full WOZ and type it in.

I'll get it on my Briel via serial and then use the cassette interface to output it for you.

 

[skate323k137]

@pfuentes69 Here you go. I loaded it on mine, but it is an improved one. I amplified it as much as I could cleanly for you.

Load at
0280.0450R

Run with
0280R

To be clear to anyone else in the future, this is just an audio conversion of nippur72's tapemon linked above. it needs to be used in conjunction with the packets wav in the repository.