Over the years I have acquired two extra power supplies for my Apple //c, so I thought I would sell one on eBay.
The thing is, I wanted some way to test them first. I can’t in good conscience sell one that isn’t going to hold up. The problem for me is, on a technological level, I don’t know anything about electricity. I expect there is some way to test them with a meter or something but, that is beyond me.
I figured the simplest way for me to test them was to use them on the Apple //c for a period of time. Thinking about it though, just turning it on is not going to stress the power supply very much. What would happen if I accessed the diskette drive or drives? The Apple //c supplies the power for each of its diskette drives.
I thought it shouldn’t take much of a program to just keep periodically accessing the diskette drives. I could whip up something in AppleSoft in no time. Okay, so with my Apple //c I have 4 diskette drives; the internal 5 1/4″ and an external 5 1/4″, plus two external 3 1/2″ . My first thought was I could ask the user to put ProDOS diskettes into each drive and then ask ProDOS what was online. I could then cycle through each diskette drive and access it over and over for a given period of time.
I knew you could ask ProDOS what was online, but forgot you had to go though machine language calls to do it. At this point it became simpler to just plan on there being a diskette in each drive and cycle through the four diskette drives using slot and drive designations.
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