Lucky Apple II find
Found an Apple II at Value Village yesterday. They sometimes have that sort of stuff- very rarely- but usually have absurd (IMO) $200-$300 prices. Looked at the price tag expecting something ridiculous as they usually do, and was surprised to see it was $25. Needless to say, I bought it.
It had no Apple II Logo, so I suspected it was a clone from the start, but the shape was unmistakable. The lack of logo might be why it was priced low as whoever priced it may simply not have realized what it was. It had two Apple II Joysticks attached through the back, which was a nice bonus.
When I got it home and popped it open- interestingly the cover is held on with Velcro, (no idea if it would have come like that originally) It has a Microsoft branded Language Card/RAM Card and a off-brand Disk Controller card installed. It was, indeed, a clone; the "Golden II". Confirmed not only by the board obviously not being Apple branded but also because it says "Golden II" for the boot screen. The text on the ROM chips suggest Formosa Microcomputer.
That said, It does seem to have a few issues. Perhaps not unexpected for something over 40 years old now.
My first issue was that I couldn't get it to sync correctly to a TV and got a vertical and horizontally rolling image Enough to make out the "GOLDEN II" boot text but hardly usable. Eventually I tried a HDMI adapter on a more modern display, and was able to get a stable, but grayscale and very ugly, image for testing. I suspected initially it was a PAL/NTSC issue, but am not entirely sure.
I could get into BASIC as one would expect. However, I found that inevitably the machine freezes and gets a bit of random garbage on the screen, usually within a few minutes so I couldn't really type in any programs more than a few lines. RAM was my first suspect but even removing the RAM card and then dropping to the first bank, the issues remained; even swapping all the first bank with one of the other banks had the same issue. Eventually I had forgotten to turn it off when returning to my PC for more research, and the display blanked out and the PSU started to make a unsettling click sound after a few minutes. After leaving it unplugged for a while, it was able to power up as before, but clearly it was failing so I decided this was a good time to actually confirm voltages (which I ought to have done at the start, I suppose). I discovered the output was wildly unstable (5V was usually 4.5V but sometimes dropped to 3V. I was able to confirm that the voltage drop was related to the screen corruption since as soon as I saw it drop the system froze and got screen garbage. I guess the voltage gets too low to keep the RAM refreshed and it corrupts.
I've ordered a Pico PSU/Apple II Adapter Kit. This clone does use a different power connector from the Apple II, so I'll have to try to salvage the old connector housing. The actual pins seem to be the same though, just arranged differently. My hope is that a good PSU will also fix the issue with it not giving a good video signal.
[Exterior Photo](https://i.imgur.com/3qIvvJa.jpg)
[The internals](https://i.imgur.com/oyQJniW.jpg)
(RAM Card ribbon is disconnected here from when I was testing RAM through swapping; just have it installed for storage so I don't have to go looking for it later)