What did I do to my Apple IIGS? Pink and green boxes at boot

derFunkenstein

New Tinkerer
Aug 5, 2025
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Hi all!

This is a crosspost with a thread I created on the MLA, so if it looks familiar that's why. :D

I always get so very excited about my latest acquisition, such as my recently acquired Apple IIGS. It was working great, although it only had 768k of RAM and I was booting it off of a Floppy Emu. I thought "hey it'd be cool to get a RAM expansion and a SCSI card" so I bought one of each - a GGLabs RAMGS/8 and a clone of a Cirtek SCSI card that I found on eBay. The RAM went in first because I didn't want to mess with trying to figure out boot at the same time as testing memory. And then I installed the SCSI card with my external BlueSCSI attached and a GS hard drive image I got from the BlueSCSI folks on the SD card.

But I installed the SCSI card backwards in the slot. I didn't immediately recognize this, but on boot it just said "check startup device" and then I looked at the BlueSCSI and the light would flicker on very quickly and then off for a couple seconds. I quickly shut off the machine and flipped the card around the right way, and restarted the IIGS. Now all I get is the photo below.

There's very little online about this exact thing that I can find, but maybe I'm just not searching the correct terms. One of the posts I found suggested it might be the RAM. So I pulled out the GGLabs card and get the same result with just the stock RAM and also with the 512k RAM expansion it came with. Another said it might be the ROM. This is a ROM 1 version.

It won't even boot into the self test when I hold the requisite keys. I pulled the SCSI card when I removed the RAM. I cannot get to the control panel via Ctrl + Open Apple + Escape.

So I'm stumped and I'm just beside myself because it's my own stupidity that did it. Anybody have any ideas? Is it possible I killed the ROM chip? Did the memory do something weird? Did inserting the SCSI card backwards murder my logic board?

BTW I also got the GGLabs RGB to YPbPr and ran it into a RetroTINK 2X Pro and my goodness, it looks great. Look at how sharp those artifacts are.
 

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@GamesMissed

New Tinkerer
Mar 28, 2025
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gamesthatimissed.com
I have the same reproduction Cirtech card, and I did the exact same thing you did: installed it the wrong-way round. In my case, I blew up the card (released some magic smoke) but didn't do any harm to anything else in my computer. I fear you may have been unluckier than me, and you may have damaged something on the logic board itself.
 

derFunkenstein

New Tinkerer
Aug 5, 2025
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That's kind of what I figured. I ended up sourcing a new system and I made a "best of both worlds" kind of thing where I took the port covers and best looking case pieces from the old one and transplanted the new one. It works. I'm afraid to put the Cirtech repro back into it. I think I'll just boot off the Floppy Emu for now. :D

I did get bold/stupid and swapped the ROM (both are ROM 01) and CPU from the new one into the old, and it didn't make a difference. I really effed it up.
 

@GamesMissed

New Tinkerer
Mar 28, 2025
13
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gamesthatimissed.com
When I installed the Cirtech card backwards and it went "pop," the seller asked me to mail it back to him so they could check it out. They verified that the card was very, very dead now, and then sent me an entirely new one at no charge so that I could get to using it. Very nice person.

I made extra-sure to install the second Cirtech card correctly.