One of the staples of my mid-life crisis set is my beloved Apple IIgs, a computer I purchased second hand from a guy in town when I was 13 years old. In a recent livestream, I pulled the IIgs off its perch to replace its power supply and get it back into working condition.
Unfortunately my Apple IIgs had a minor incident occur back in 2016 when I was shooting a retrospective video about the GS. The RIFA cap on the computer’s power supply failed (a very common issue) and let out the magic smoke. It made for a fun holiday Yule Log video on my extra’s channel!
Thankfully there are some great resources out there to rectify these power supply problems and get the old hardware working again. I opted to send mine into Reactive Micro and take advantage of their power supply rebuild service. I quickly received my power supply back with new, modern guts that should keep this old computer working for decades to come.
The Apple IIgs looked and behaved like a Mac but was a late 80’s upgrade to the Apple II line with enhanced graphics and sound. In addition to running its own enhanced 16 bit software it also was fully backwards compatible with the 8 bit software for the earlier Apple II models.
I pushed the IIgs to the limit when I was 13 with all sorts of upgrades like adding a telephone-based modem to host a BBS, and even installing an emulator board to turn it into an IBM-XT compatible PC!
But I still wanted to do more to upgrade my IIgs back in the day. For the entire duration of it being my “daily driver,” it lacked a hard disk drive and I had to run software off of its 3.5″ and 5.25″ floppy disk drives.
It also only had a single megabyte of RAM. While that was more than enough for the older Apple II software, the more advanced GS applications that ran in the Mac-like GS/OS operating system needed more memory. I was completely locked out of the last and greatest GS/OS System 6.0 release in 1992 as I needed 1.25MB of RAM vs. the single meg on mine.
Back in 2007 I pulled the IIgs out of my Mom’s basement and embarked on a project to bring it up to the level I always wanted it to be at while also archiving all of my floppy disks.
I managed to find an upgraded Transwarp GS accelerator board for a great price on Ebay that brought the machine up to a whopping 12 mhz from its original 2.8mhz. I also added a 4 megabyte RAM upgrade board.
Around this time hobbyists began developing some amazing new hardware for the Apple II. I picked up the “CFFA 3000” that emulates a IIgs hard drive on Compact Flash cards & USB drives along with the “Uthernet II” ethernet card that connected my IIgs to my local network and the Internet!
If you have an old IIgs kicking around, you’ll find Reactive Micro to be a great source for upgrade hardware. If you’re looking for software check out “What is the Apple IIgs,” an awesome archive of most of the software available for the IIgs. They also have some pre-compiled hard disk images on the home page that will boot up in emulators along with the real hardware.