Apple IIe - International Versions

International Versions

The Apple IIe keyboard differed depending on what region of the world it was sold in. Sometimes the differences were very minor, such as extra local language characters and symbols printed on certain keycaps (e.g. French accented characters on Canadian IIe such as "á", "é", "ç", etc., or the British Pound "£" symbol on the UK IIe) while other times the layout and shape of keys greatly differed (e.g. European IIe). In order to access the local character set and keyboard layout, a user-accessible switch is found on the underside of the keyboard — flipping it will instantly switch the video output and keyboard input from the US character set to the local set. To support this, special double capacity video and keyboard ROMs are used; in early motherboards they had to reside on a tiny circuit card that plugged into the socket. In some countries these localized IIe's also support 50 Hz PAL video instead of the standard 60 Hz NTSC video and the different 220/240 volt power of that region. An equivalent of the "PAL color card" for the earlier Apple II europlus model was integrated into the motherboard of these IIes, so that color graphics are available without the addition of a slot card.

Another difference with the European IIe, is the Auxiliary slot physically moved in location so it is in line and in front of slot-3, preventing both slots from being used simultaneously for full-sized cards. A few third-party cards are affected by this: some European cards plug into both slots simultaneously and are thus unusable on American IIes, and some American cards that do not fit into the case of European IIes because the European location of the Auxiliary slot leaves less room for them.