exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

I have a RetroHQ SD card adapter for my Lynx, they are really excellent devices and the price is acceptable.

It's a shame I couldn't have taken the Jag off your hands, but I'm sure it'll be a star turn at the Elite meet 🙂

rubber_jonnie wrote: 22 Apr 2023 12:04 I have a RetroHQ SD card adapter for my Lynx, they are really excellent devices and the price is acceptable.

It's a shame I couldn't have taken the Jag off your hands, but I'm sure it'll be a star turn at the Elite meet 🙂

:)

Getting back to the retro stuff today...

I have two Mac SE/30s which I've recapped, one of which can't see the SCSI interface and I've left it for ages without looking at it, until today.

I've found one connection between the SCSI chip and the GLUE, so I'm trying to trace the traces. It's not helped by it being a four layer board!

Well, that's one trace fixed.


Still isn't seeing the hard drive, but then again I can't guarantee that the hard drive is actually working. I'll have to make up a bootable Zip disk.

And... it was drive issues...


We have working SCSI! :-)

Woke up early this morning and couldn't get back to sleep so took some more time on the SE/30.

I stripped down the floppy drive. No wonder it wasn't working well. The original lubricant isn't even glue any more, it's hard cheese. IPA wouldn't shift it. Cotton buds just rubbed the top. I had to go in with a screwdriver and prise it off the steel! Anyway, that's working properly now.

Then I took a look at the hard drive. It's a Sony unit. Very old school. It's got a magnet underneath to lock the heads and on the drive motor flywheel another magnet with a sensor to allow the electronics to measure the speed. Lubed the main spindle but it still won't format. Still, I have a spare SD2SCSI v5.1 I can use.

Nice to see another Apple Classic form factor machine coming back to life.

:girldance:

BTW have you tried the BOMARC schematics, they seem to be about the best available for this age of machine, it's what I used for my Classic.

There are proper schematics for the SE/30 thankfully. The Bomarc ones are well known to have mistakes in them and they use a strange set of symbols, especially for the power (+5V, -12V, +12V and ground), which can be confusing.

stephen_usher wrote: 25 Apr 2023 10:22 There are proper schematics for the SE/30 thankfully. The Bomarc ones are well known to have mistakes in them and they use a strange set of symbols, especially for the power (+5V, -12V, +12V and ground), which can be confusing.

Yes, I did find some oddities in the BOMARC ones, so good that you have decent SE/30 ones. Luckily they were good enough for my classic.

The SE/30 is back together and I've given it a wipe over.


It's slightly yellow but that's fine. I won't bother with retrobrightening this one.

The bad hard drive has been replaced with an SD2SCSI.

The machine has only got 2MB of RAM now (was just 1MB) so can only run System 6. At some point I need to get more 1MB or 4MB 30 pin SIMMs.