Apple II Plus HELP!

[kynrek]

A friend gave me an apple II Plus! it boots but the keyboard dosen't seem to work. the Control, Escape and Reset buttons seem to work but none of the others seem to have any effect. Any troubleshooting ideas?

[Dhalamar]

Get a baseball bat and smash it repeatedly. Make sure to record it on Youtube.

Other than that, from my COMPLETE lack of knowledge, unless you're good with electronics ... it'll probably cost you more than you would pay for it generically to fix it. But like I said, that's from my TOTAL lack of knowledge on the matter. It'd obviously be cheaper if you know what you're doing with a reliable schematic or whatever. But from my point of view (I have physical problems that prevents me from soldering and working with even something as simple as jumpers), if you have to rely on other people it's probably going to cost you out the ass.

[chalksalad]

A friend gave me an apple II Plus! it boots but the keyboard dosen't seem to work.

It boots to what? Do you have system disk? a game?

[chalksalad]

It boots to what? Do you have system disk? a game?

I'm going to go ahead and answer my own question. I'm guessing that you just start up the system and you get a black screen with APPLE ][ written on top. And nothing seems to work.
What you should know is that the Apple II doesn't come with DOS in ROM. You have to load it from a disk. However it comes with BASIC in ROM. To get to BASIC you need to press CTRL+RESET and presto you get a command line. Now all you have is access to BASIC, nothing more, just BASIC, no DOS. That means no LOAD and no SAVE!
Not much you can do there but at least your system works.

[kynrek]

Sorry for the delay I didn't realize anyone responded. I got about 100 different disks with it and I have booted multiple programs and still no keyboard input will work besides reset.

Apple II Keyboard Repair Info:
I ended up getting in touch with a nice guy named Mike Willegal at http://willegal.net/ with some experience and he pointed me towards a pdf scan of a book called understanding your apple ii http://alfter.us/files/uaii.pdf (keyboard encoder and other schematics are in there for the apple ii) We have narrowed the problem down to a couple components in the keyboard encoder board. I ordered them up and will keep you all posted. I appreciate all of your responses.

[kynrek]

The chip that I purchased on ebay did not work it was showing the wrong characters for the buttons like a ? when I pressed any of the numbers etc. I guess it has to be specifically programmed for the computer you are trying to use it on.

Vince Briel makes a product called the super encoder. It's a new production encoder for the Apple ii/ii+ you can use the original keyboard and/or ps/2 keyboard so I couldn't pass it up! it's at http://www.brielcomputers.com/ I exchanged some emails with him and it sounds like it will do the trick! He's a super nice guy.

[tcv]

Heh. That guy has some cool stuff, like an Altair 8080 disk controller.

[kynrek]

Yeah he made a replica of the apple I. I saw him in a documentary called welcome to macintosh. He has ales personally met Steve Wozniak who signed some of his replica I boards at kansasfest a while back.