Gold Purple Ceramic chips from 1976

I picked up a few (about 22) NOS gold ceramic DRAM and two 6820 chips recently. Here they are on an Obtronix board where I tested them. Out of the two 6820s, one doesn't work. The DRAM chips appear to work. These chips will eventually live on the Apple-1 Mimeo that I recently built.

The DRAM chips are MOSTEK 4027 P-3, most made in the 14th, and 19th weeks of 1976. The Motorola 6820L was made in the 48th week of 1976. Note the gold grounding straps on some of the DRAM chips.

Aurelien Zavattiero's Hand Wired / wire wrapped Apple 1 up and running

Hand Wired / Wire wrapped Apple-1 = WOW

My friend Aurelien Zavattiero sent me these images earlier this week. He has spent the last 5 months working on a wire wrapped Apple-1 from scratch! Look at this, it's a work of beauty!

Aurel is very close to having the video section working as you can see in the images.

A1-Mimeo clone up and running (BASIC)

Apple-1 (Mimeo) Clone with the BASIC firmware card attached, shows the BASIC up and running, Hello World!. After a 2+ hour debugging session with Mike Willegal's help, we determined that I had a bad connection at RAM location B-14 (X4) on pin 1. The oscilloscope image above shows the signal, (about 2 volts peak-to-peak split between + and - voltage levels) I had on pin 1. Pin 1 SHOULD show -5 volts.

This all started when I could not read the data I had just deposited into memory anywhere in Bank X. Mike had me test using 0 and FF at different memory locations, for example:

0:FF (deposit FF at mem location 0000)

0:0 (deposit 0 at mem location 0000)

1000:FF (deposit FF at mem location 1000)

1000:0 (deposit 0 at mem location 1000)

After doing the deposit, we checked the data with a read:

1000.1000

Output: 1F

What we were seeing was 5 bits that were"stuck" 0001 1 1 1 1

(wrong, this should have been 0 or 0000 0000 )

The next thing we did was swap the chip select jumpers:

Before:

W=>1

X=>0

After:

W=>0

X=> 1

Normally, the PROM monitor will use the X bank, so what we did here was to use the W bank of RAM instead. I switched the jumpers, and ran the tests again. Bank W was working correctly.

So this was a pretty good indicator that the problem was somewhere in the X bank and not somewhere else on the board. At this point, we started probing the ground and power pins at each X bank DRAM chip. I checked +5v (pin 9), +12v (pin 8) and lastly -5v (pin 1) until we found the problem.

UPDATE (June 18, 2010): Here is a test program Mike had me use for testing the RAM -

0: AD 00 10 4C 00 00

This HEX code is : LDA 1000 with a Jump back to 0

That will loop forever and generate an alternating square wave (toggling) on the oscillocope at pins 1 and 2

A1-Mimeo (Apple-1 clone) stuffed - first power up test

No keyboard attached. I turned on the power and quickly went around the board with the back of my hand, looking for hot chips, and watching for smoke. No issues found. Everything looks good.

Initial Power applied to the A1-Mimeo before stuffing the board

If you're wondering about the power supply and how to build it, please see my earlier posts when I built the first clone. I am using the same power suppy here to test the Mimeo-1. Before stuffing the board I checked each voltage source and ground at each DIP. I checked the big blue caps as well. Everything looks good. In this image, I have the scope set for 5 volts per div. The card you see hanging off of the PCB is a card that I built for address line display (the red leds) and correct +5v regulated power at the J3 connector. The card also has a reset button that can be used when no keyboard is attached. The little green LED is lit, we are good to go.

Chip Select Jumper Configuration

W might normally be connected to E so that memory bank W is available for the Cassette Interface Adapter (e.g. to load BASIC from tape into bank W). I have a different configuration: W=>1 and S=>E, so that I can use my BASIC firmware card instead of loading from tape.

Note that S, T and R are "user selectable" chip selects, of 4k each. In my configuration, S is used as the chip select for the BASIC firmware card.

A1-Mimeo Assembly, day 2 (less stuffing the chips)

A1-Mimeo DIP sockets completed by 2:30 AM

All DIP sockets soldered on the Mimeo-1. This weekend I'll try and finish up the rest of the components.

Datanetics Keyboard Disassembled

Last weekend, on the same morning that I filled in the Mimeo-1 vias, I took apart the Datanetics Keyboard. I have many images of the process which I will post later. For now, here are 2 images.

Building the Apple-1 Mimeo - filling in the Vias

White Stickers

Have you ever noticed that some of the original Apple-1 units have a small white sticker on the back? I have never seen a number greater than 82. Recall that 200 units were manufactured.

Yesterday I asked Steve Wozniak if these stickers represent the serial number of each board. Unfortunately, Woz does not remember.

So I sent an email to Steve Jobs today asking him... he responded from his iPhone and said:

"It was not put on by us."

Steve

So what is the true meaning of these little white stickers?

Apple-1 Registry

Mike Willegal is putting together a registry of existing (allegedly), Apple-1 originals. If you have any information on any of the units Mike has documented, or know of any other Apple-1 boards not listed, please contact Mike, or post a comment here.

Apple-1 Registry

Wendell Sander's Apple-1 Website

I've been meaning to post this link provided by Wendell Sander -- it is a work in progress. There are source files for Apple-1 programs, and other info, so check it out.

Apple-1 Notes

Apple-1 BASIC Firmware Card... it works.

See the video of the card up and running Hello World!

I used a 512k EPROM because it's all I had on hand. BASIC is only 4k so you can use a much smaller chip if you'd like. (I have some 8k chips ordered...) I programmed the AT27C040 EPROM using a "Top2004" programmer.

Note that on the Apple-1, I have jumpered "S" to "E" (CSE) so that when E000R is entered, BASIC will run.

I finally sat down and started to debug my Apple-1 BASIC firmware card. I had never played with the Pom1 emulator, so I downloaded the C source code and after about an hour I had it running in xCode. The image below, shows the emulator running the same BASIC ROM file that I had burned into my EPROM chip. You can see, it does not show the ">" prompt as it should.

This is the apple1basic.bin file, which I downloaded many months ago from www.pagetable.com. This is the same output I was seeing with my BASIC firmware card. (At this point, you must do a reset, as BASIC fails to load).

I then loaded the "basic.rom" file that is included with Pom1 and it loaded BASIC without any problem. Clearly something wasn't right here... so I did a cmp/diff on the two files, and as it turns out, 2 bytes are incorrect in the apple1basic.bin file downloaded from www.pagetable.com.

see below, where hilited - (decimal 976 and hex 03D0):

The above 2 images show the hex and decimal locations of the 2 incorrect bytes found in apple1basic.bin

In addition to the ROM file differences, I found I had my wires crossed.... the above image shows the incorrect wiring on address lines A8, A9 and A11.

After moving these address lines to their correct locations, and burning the EPROM with the new working BASIC ROM file, you can see that I was able to load and run the BASIC "Hello World!" program.

UPDATE: September 22, 2010 - Here is a link to the Basic Disassembly

Download the files, and view with a text editor.