My first Apple IIgs hardware fix

So when I was a kid, my dad bought an Apple IIgs for Christmas of 1986 and I loved that thing and used it until I finally gave up around 1993 and moved to a MS-DOS 486.

I still have this original machine and it's a ROM 01 machine which means it may have more game compatibility.  Apple also released a ROM 03 version which is newer, has more memory, but may not play every game that the ROM 01 could.  I decided to purchase a ROM 03 a year or so ago so that if my siblings ever came and demanded the ROM 01 family machine back, I'd still have a IIgs that I could call my own :)

Well, the ROM 03 IIgs came and I left it in a box for many months.  Finally, last Father's Day, I opened it and tried to show my kids some games.  That's when I discovered that it had a sound problem!

Fast forward to a week ago.  An accelerator board and a power supply replacement that I paid for literally 7 months ago finally showed up and I was eager to install it in my ROM 03.  But I decided that I really wanted to fix the sound problem before messing with the accelerator.

So I did some basic troubleshooting and this stuff was happening:

My first attempt to fix the problem was to simply de-solder the sound chip and socket it.

I've done this sort of thing several times on arcade PCBs so not only was I familiar with how to do it, but I already had a de-soldering gun along with several 40 pin sockets so I didn't have to wait for any parts to arrive.

Unfortunately, it did not fix my problem.

I wanted to replace the sound chip, but didn't want to destroy a working Apple IIgs.  Fortunately, someone was selling a "battery acid destroyed" IIgs motherboard on ebay, so I got it for fairly cheap.

The acid damage was really bad but it looked like the sound chip was still okay, so I desoldered it.

I plugged the replacement sound chip into my ROM 03 IIgs ...

and fired up the self-test...

Wow!  Despite thinking that replacing the sound chip would likely fix the problem, I was still a bit giddy to see that it actually worked! :)

I fired up a game to test the sound ...

and everything sounds great!

I'm one happy camper.

Now... to install that accelerator board... :)