exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

In preparation for the capacitors arriving I've desoldered all the ones in the LCII's power supply.

Although all the Nichicon caps were only very slightly leaky the Elena branded ones were mega-crusty and had obviously been leaking for a very long time. Two had managed to corrode the solder on one of their leads to the point where the corrosion had gone through the hole any out to the solder side of the PCB!

Anyway, all cleaned up now, so I'll be able to solder the new caps on tomorrow.

Unfortunately, whilst trying to diagnose why the TI-59 printer and docking unit stopped working last night I misplugged the IDC connector onto the board, misaligned by one set of pins. Stupidly the connector has both the DC data connections and at one end the connections to the transformer! A large resistor and what I think is a very early design of tantalum capacitor went foom! Goodness knows what else it fried. Thankfully I hadn't connected the TI-58 to the unit. I wasn't THAT stupid.

PSU caps replaced and we have a happy Mac LCII


I'll do a full motherboard recap once the 10uF capacitors arrive.

Gotta love the LC form factor 😁

@stephen_usher that Mac looks to be in really nice condition.

You'll be able to open your own retro museum at this rate of acquisition. I'm not sure even @rubber_jonnie can keep up :lol:

PhilC wrote: 16 Mar 2022 08:24 @stephen_usher that Mac looks to be in really nice condition.

You'll be able to open your own retro museum at this rate of acquisition. I'm not sure even @rubber_jonnie can keep up :lol:

I know right, I'm just not getting the bulk deals!!

PhilC wrote: 16 Mar 2022 08:24 @stephen_usher that Mac looks to be in really nice condition.

You'll be able to open your own retro museum at this rate of acquisition. I'm not sure even @rubber_jonnie can keep up :lol:

Hehe. People just keep giving me stuff as I have a reputation now.

I am giving some of it away! (The TI 99/4A should be being collected on Saturday. I'll have to find time to transport the microprocessor training kit to the Centre for the History of Computing in Cambridge.)

rubber_jonnie wrote: 16 Mar 2022 09:01 I know right, I'm just not getting the bulk deals!!

Awwwww. :-)

I've decided to upgrade the LCII to the max.

The motherboard has the holes for a PLCC-68 socket (filled with solder currently) so it's easy to fit a socket and throw a 68882 FPU in there, so I have those on order. The socket should arrive today, so when the 10uF capacitors arrive I can recap the board and install the socket.

I've also ordered a 512K VRAM module and two 4MB 30 pin SIMMs.

That will take it to the maximum supported configuration.

stephen_usher wrote: 17 Mar 2022 09:16 I've decided to upgrade the LCII to the max.

The motherboard has the holes for a PLCC-68 socket (filled with solder currently) so it's easy to fit a socket and throw a 68882 FPU in there, so I have those on order. The socket should arrive today, so when the 10uF capacitors arrive I can recap the board and install the socket.

I've also ordered a 512K VRAM module and two 4MB 30 pin SIMMs.

That will take it to the maximum supported configuration.

Should be a sweet little machine when that is all done :)

Yeah, according to Speedometer it's slightly slower than the SE/30, significantly so for video, as it's 68030 on a 16 bit bus. However, it's colour and with a VGA adapter (and the 512K VRAM) will able to run without a CRT monitor either directly to my LCD TV or through the OSSC, so more convenient.