Back in December I wrote a blog post about trying to make one working Apple IIe out of four parts machines. The project hit a snag when none of the parts machines I had acquired had drive controller cards. For the past three months I’ve had a table out in my garage that looks like this:
While digging around in a “junk drawer” upstairs over the weekend, I found the missing piece: a drive controller.
That’s kind of how I work; a project that’s been dormant for months will suddenly leap to life. It’s the offspring of too many projects and a short attention span.
With the newly found card in hand I headed out to the garage Saturday night. I ended up using the case from one computer, the guts from a second, and the keyboard from a third. Once I got everything reassembled I inserted the drive controller card, attached two untested floppy drives I’ve been hanging on to for ten years, inserted an old floppy into one of the drives, flipped the power switch and stood back to see what would happen. Moments later, this happened:
She could use a little cleaning but, yup, she works. I already have a working Apple IIe up in my computer room so I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to do with this one yet, but having one working one is always better than having three parts machines tying up garage real estate. On to the next project!
Any spare machines I have, I keep cleaned up and boxed up and they become the “OVGE machines.” There’s an OVGE Odyssey2, an OVGE 2600 and an OVGE PS1. It’s kind of a holdover from that period of my life when I entertained the notion that I was going to have a bunch of consoles hooked up full-time in my room. ;-)