Apple IIc
First Draft: January 19, 2025

Manufacturer: Apple
Revision: A2S4100
ROM Version: 4
Released: September 1986
Date Acquired: July 7 2024

One day, while doing a whole load of nothing at home, a friend messaged me. He wanted to know if I wanted to come check out some old computers from the home of a collector that was being cleaned up. It was all of twenty minutes away from me so I said why not? I came home from the trip with two things: A DEC Rainbow 100+ and an Apple IIc. I'm sure you can tell which this is about by looking at the title.

The computer wasn't in the best condition. Water was leaking on the box holding it due to being stored in a functional-but-shoddy extension of the home. Mice lived inside said box as well. I couldn't see anything like rust on the outside of the system but there was definitely some cleaning to be done.

Cleaning didn't actually take too long once I got to it. The system broke down without issue, some soap and water got 95% of all the outside gunk off. The internals looked mostly fine, some ports needed a little scrub but there wasn't any permanant tarnishing. I was expecting to have to break apart all the Alps switches to clean them, a process I hate, but I lucked out and all of the things worked after just mashing the "dead" ones for a few minutes. The shell was a little yellow but aren't they all at this point?

While the system was open, I installed a Mockingboard 4c. If you don't know what it does, the board is an interposer which makes the Apple think that it has a sound card adding two AY-3-8910s in Slot 4. The install isn't all too hard, it does require a little soldering and hot glue (you have to tap a line from the volume control hybrid IC and install new speakers) but it's nothing that anyone with a little confidence couldn't do in an afternoon.

The system has been getting lots of regular use from me! It's a quite small system which I can fit just about anywhere, it's great for making disks using ADTPro (as my Apple II+ has an unsupported serial card, a CCS 7710), and I've been playing a fair bit of games like Attack of the PETSCII Robots and Ultima using it to hear the additional audio. Whenever conventions come around I'll be bringing it with me, it saw a ton of love with people beating The Oregon Trail on it multiple times at Cleveland Gaming Classic '24. I'd say that's a much better fate than rotting in a box of rain and mouse poop.