More europlus Census Info!

Hold the presses! OK, so this is too late to count towards my Retrochallenge entry, given that October is so well and truly over, but I have a little bit of extra info for my europlus census…

This is an object lesson in revisiting assumptions, or at least periodically checking on things you were told when your knowledge base meant you took that information on face value.

I was gifted a motherboard at WOzFest ][, and was told at that time is was an Apple ][ motherboard, not a Apple ][ plus/europlus motherboard. I was intending on using it to replace a clone motherboard in a lidless case I had and trying to get a pre-plus system going.

Some time was spent at WOzFest /// trying to get it running without success – but we didn’t have the time and resources on the night for this project. It ended up being a “some day” project and the board has been shuffled around the Man Cave while I’ve been doing other things, and without any close attention paid to it.

Fast forward to last night and while chatting in the Man Cave with Jon from Manila Gear about troubleshooting my a2heaven VGA Scaler Card, we got to talking about motherboard revisions and layout. The board was out so I looked at it to see how different an Apple ][ board was to the various europlus boards…

…and noticed the (not so) minor fact that it’s another RFI europlus motherboard date stamped 1882! If I’d even just looked at the date stamp previously I would have realised this wasn’t a pre-plus motherboard.

Given it’s case-less, that means I have more spare europlus parts than I thought, but we can never have too many of those as our systems age, can we?

So I need to make a minor addition to my europlus census as follows:

Serial numberDate CodeCPUNotes
IA2S2-669150no date code65C02wrong (apple ][plus) lid
IA2S2-667843518265C02no speaker or joystick socket
IA2S2-700105418265C02
IA2S2-67133081186502
IA2S2-61449482376502previously no label
IA2S2-65367781316502
IA2S2-67643381096502no PSU
18826502bare board

As previously mentioned, the mix of serial number vs motherboard vs PSU will change once I’ve gotten six boards working (for the six complete europlus cases I now have) – having eight europlus motherboards will make the task of getting six working that much easier. And I still have a clone motherboard or two for chips as well.

So I’m hoping I now pay a little bit of extra attention to my collection as I sort it, in case there are any other gems in there.

Let me know in the Comments below if you’ve ever “discovered” something hiding in plain sight in your collection you wish you had noticed earlier.