Vintage Apple

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A place to discuss and share anything related to vintage Apple computers and products (Pre-Intel).

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Is there where we can talk about Apple II C+? (lemmy.one)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/vintage_apple

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Hi Everyone.

I am a user of an Apple IIC+! yay! I use mine mostly for Applesoft Basic programming.

Is this a place for those of us who rock Jurassic Apples?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We got one secondhand from my uncle when I was a kid. Between defaulting to 4 MHz and having a 3.5 inch drive built in, the thing made almost no sense. I had been using IIe and IIgs systems in school. Having to hit Esc at the right time while rebooting (so you'd see "Normal" on the screen and boot into 1 MHz mode) was super annoying but necessary to play any of the games we had at all. You absolutely also need an external 5.25 inch drive to use it, which kind of goes against its attempt at a compact form factor.

The regular IIc made a lot more sense.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

What did hitting ESC do and when is the 'right time' to hit it? I was not aware of this added feature. My IIC+ only has its internal 3.5, an external 3.5, and a floppy emulator. I have not yet been able to emulate 3.5" floppies on the emulator, so it is standing in for the double 5.25 drive I also have. I got the emulator mainly to allow me to sneaker-net 5.25 floppy images to my PC/Linux machine to share.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you want to play any games at all on a IIc+, you have to hit Open Apple-Ctrl-Reset-Esc to change the CPU speed to 1 MHz, or the game will run four times faster than it should. The timing of the Esc key is tricky, but if you did it right, it will say "Normal" near the top of the screen.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks. I have not downloaded any games just yet, well one - Taipan. played it a little.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah the IIc+ was a neat idea, but they really should have defaulted to 1 MHz rather than 4 MHz. The Apple II doesn't have a system timer, so games rely on counting CPU cycles.

Other than that, I like that the IIc and IIc+ have all the devices built in, like the 80 column card, language card, printer/modem, joystick, and mouse, along with a full 128 KB of RAM. Don't have to mess with cards on those.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Oh that gave me a flashback, I owned one. My first computer while the rest of the people I know had "Commodores, Ataris , Sinclairs" .

I was the unicorn among in the gang. My parents paid an arm and a leg for it.

Some years later I traded it in for my first 128k Mac. I made a Fat Mac out of it by soldering 16 x 64k RAM chips for 1mb. Stacked 4 times for 4mb with seperate row select wires.

From my first money then I bought an Mac SE/30 and a thermo printer.

Good times.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Oh, yeah! I bought myself a C64 back in the day. A little later I could afford a 1641 floppy drive. I also went on to Macintosh and then to Windows 3.5 and so on. I kinda wish I could get back the TeleVideo X86 machine I got while working there.