A Little Bit Country, A Little Bit Rock-n-Roll

The gutted Apple II+ (foreground) and Apple IIe (background).

I salvaged our family's old Apple II+ and Apple IIe out of storage a couple weeks ago. It had been dormant for many years, so I decided to clean it up and see if I couldn't get it running. Todd Harrison over at ToddFun.com has a couple videos showing how to tear apart, clean and get an old Apple computer on the up-and-up. For the most part I followed his advice.

Keys drying on a paper towel.

After pulling out all of the electronic parts, I used a Chlorox spray bleach to clean the case of the Apples. For the electronic parts, compressed air to blow out dust and then careful use of rubbing alcohol and Q-tips to clean things up further. I took off all of the keys from the keyboard and individually washed them in the sink (a dishwasher would have been faster, but alas we need to remodel the kitchen before we get one of those).

After a couple days, I reassembled the Apples and tried them out. The Apple II+ needs a new power supply. They seem reasonably priced (and more importantly available) on eBay, so I may order one up in the future. The Apple IIe booted right up with its nostalgic beep and after the pre-requisite ctrl-reset I got to the prompt.
Because the Apple OS booted from the disks, I thought I would be out of luck for awhile on playing some old games, etc. since I have only recently cleaned out and sprayed the disk drives cases, but I need to get a 5 1/4" disk cleaner to thoroughly clean the drives themselves. Then I stumbled upon this ingenious idea over at Panic Blog. The guys at Panic Blog were asked to run an old program via a cassette recorder on their office Apple IIe (yes...we used to save data on cassette tapes). Only problem was they didn't have a cassette recorder. What they did have was an iPad. They ran the program, essentially an audio file, on their iPad through their Apple IIe. Like I said....ingenious!

iPad hooked up to an Apple IIe

After a quick Google search it turns out that someone has posted most of the old Apple programs as audio files in an online repository. (Note: For those of you without an Apple II you can play the games on a virtual machine. So, without further ado, I hooked up my iPad to the Apple IIe with a 1/8" male-male minijack cable. At the prompt on the Apple II type LOAD. Then, after pumping up the volume on my iPad I clicked on the Spy Hunter hi-fi audio. Bam....I was playing Spy Hunter.

Spy Hunter!