Here it is - plastic cased IIe with early ish motherboard, a bit yellow but in generally good shape and an aftermarket floppy drive:
The Thinkpad perched on top is acting as a tape drive, which lets me download stuff from Apple II Disk Server Online and write it to floppy disk over the cassette port. You'll notice the case is open, because about an hour after it arrived it locked up then this happened:
Prodding, reseating and swearing at it made no change. The PSU then started making arcing noises and a burning smell (the RIFA caps had already been replaced) so I took it out and elegantly rigged up an ATX one which made no difference:
It looked very RAM related from what I could see (there are built in diagnostics but it wouldn't get that far) so I ordered some more off eBay and generally messed about with it to no avail in the interim. When the RAM arrived I swapped it around to find that one of my originals and two of the replacements were bad, and ended up with a working machine, still running off the ATX PSU as I hadn't figured out what was wrong with the original yet:
Karateka despite being clearly rubbish and ludicrously unfair is very addictive.
I messed about with it some more and noticed that the colours looked off - black was blue or red depending on screen mode, so I fiddled with the colour signal pots on the motherboard which corrected it. Unfortunately the following day everything remained in black and white and nothing brought the colour back.
At this point, from arriving in working order, I had used the machine for about 2 hours and had experienced:
- Failed RAM
- Failed PSU
- Failed something else related to colour