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Apple 1 Manuals in high quality!

Apple 1 Manuals in high quality!

By Armin of Retroplace

For sale here!

Of course, you know about the Apple-1 computer. There have been replicas around for quite some time ,there are also reprints of the original manuals available. Most of them are just printed out copies on cheap laser printer paper, so Armin made a version on my own using a proper print job on high quality laminated paper and with binding to have it done properly.

But although the results really do look amazing, the quality is limited due to the fact that they are done using scans which are kinda okay but far from being perfect.

And then Armin did what a man has to do: In some painstaking, incredible painstaking weeks of work, Armin totally recreated the “Apple-1 Operation Manual” (incl. the schematics!) and the “Preliminary Basic User Manual” from scratch using the scans as the blue print. To understand this in full: This is a proper typeset job (Adobe Indesign) that is super “true” to the original.

1. Armin researched the typefaces that had been used in the original (including one that resembles the IBM “Electric” Typewriter that had been used for the main copy of one of the manuals – that was incredible hard to find)
2. Every single characters has been manually placed, so its position on the page resembles its original location down to the fraction of an inch

Have a look at this video (time-lapse) to see this process in action:

And here are pictures of the finished products, for sale here or on ebay.
Operation manual. Basic Manual, Cassette Manual, Advertising page.

PS: All of those recreations are 100 percent legal! This is due to US law: Material published before 1977 that does not feature a copyright notice is public domain under US law (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_States ). All manuals have been published in 1976 and none of them features a copyright notice.

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Unilab Three Chips clone

Stephen Crozier made a clone of the Unilab Three Chips main board.

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Das EMUF Sonderheft 2

Thanks to Mathias Ohlerich for the scan of the Sonderheft 2

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Now three!Just-for-Fun Fabio Defabis MBCs: Z80-MBC2, V20-MBC, 68K-MBC

All well described on hackaday:
Z80-MBC2
V20-MBC
68K-MBC

I bought these assembled from Giovanni Pirozzi. Excellent products and service!

MOS KIM-1 Reproduction documents added

Dave Williams, who designed and builds the MOS KIM-1 Reproductions, sent me three worthwhile documents:
– Schematic
– Board Layout
– Bill of Materials

You can find those on the MOS MOS KIM-1 Reproduction page.

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Decapped 6530-004 TIM photo’s by Frank Wolf

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Replacement of some old prom by a GAL, Application to a Thaler MPS-65 board

Didier form aida.org was approached by his friend Erik about a malfunctioning MPS-65.

By studying the material on this page and doing measurements on the board it was decided the PROM on the board was malfunctioning.

So Didier designed a GAL replacement for the PROM and the board came back to life!

Here the story how the design looks like.

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Convert to Papertape V2.2

On the Utilities page I have two programs to convert to MOS Technology papertape format: KIMpaper, a command line utility, and ConvertHexFormat, a GUI app.

All in Freepascal/Lazarus source format, and tested on Linux (Raspberry PI OS) and Windows 10 64 bit. So the programs will run everywhere Lazarus is available (MS DOS, WIndows, Linux Mac OS).

KIMPAPER  is written at the time the Micro-KIM appeared. CLI utility.  Supports Binary to/from Papertape.  Still runs fine on all platforms supported by Freepascal (Windows, MS DOS, Linux etc) after a recompilation, source available.

ConvertHexFormat is a more recent GUI utilitilty with many more 8 bit hex formats as input and output.

There were some bugs of course in older versions. V2 added the ability for multipart hex formats, records having a non-consecutive load address. That seems to wok fine since V2.1
In 2.2 a bug in MOS Papertape format for bigger files is fixed, the end-of-file record (record type 00, total line count) had a bug in the checksum calculation. KIMPAPER is and was correct in the calculation.
But in ConvertHexFormat it was wrong (as it still  is in the well known srec utility in the Unix world!).

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PC utilities updated

The PC utilities page has seen an update of th4 Conversion hex formats utility.

Programs to manipulate the binary and hex formatted files of interest for SBC owners. Intel hex, MOS papertape, Motorola S-record, binary, hex conversion fort eh 8 bit world.
Runs on Windows, Linux, Mac due to Lazarus and Freepascal. Source included.