General Stuff(tm)

[rubber_jonnie]

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.

I love the LCII form factor, they are so nice. I must dig out my Performa 6200 actually as though it's running, it is in need of a little TLC.

[JezC]

I like this old Mac h/w (up to & including some of the PPC era)...but have never seen one at an affordable (for me) price...

Plus I already have waay too many projects to complete, so best not to add in too many others!

[rubber_jonnie]

I like this old Mac h/w (up to & including some of the PPC era)...but have never seen one at an affordable (for me) price...

Plus I already have waay too many projects to complete, so best not to add in too many others!

This probably won't help ;)

IMG_20220317_113811.jpg

It's a 17" Powerbook G4 I got for £40 for parts a couple of years back. Turned out the problem was that the person who'd last tried to fix it had reassembled the top cover to logic board ribbon cable incorrectly and thus it wouldn't power on.

Worked as soon as I realised what was going on. The cheap ones are out there, you can find them, I believe in you :)

[stephen_usher]

It looks like the 10uF capacitors were shipped from RS's European warehouse, so the "next day delivery" is only as far as the UK customs, then it can be a week or more. The sunny uplands of Brexit!

[JezC]

It's a 17" Powerbook G4 I got for £40 for parts a couple of years back. Turned out the problem was that the person who'd last tried to fix it had reassembled the top cover to logic board ribbon cable incorrectly and thus it wouldn't power on.

Worked as soon as I realised what was going on. The cheap ones are out there, you can find them, I believe in you :)

Maybe...for those who already know what they are doing... ;)

I suspect that I'd buy a real lemon & end up spending far more than it originally cost to get it to a working state... :roll:

Anyway, if someone decides they really do have too many Macs I'll make an offer to re-home one to make sure it's well cared for!

Not that I'm expecting that to happen anytime in the next decade or so... :(

[derkom]

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

That will take it to the maximum supported configuration.

I remember when I was young, a friend's dad had a Mac LC (don't know if it was a II), and he had extra SIMMs for it sitting in his desk drawer. At the time, these cost a small fortune, and I asked why he wasn't using them, and he said it isn't worth it because of how long the LC takes to initialise the RAM when powering on. Not believing him, I stuck them in, and sure enough it took eons before it would boot.

I wonder if you'll experience something similar, or if there was maybe just something wrong with his RAM or his LC.

[stephen_usher]

If you can bear waiting for a Windows 10 machine to boot from a spinning rust drive then waiting for the Mac to do its memory test is a minor inconvenience. :-)

[stephen_usher]

This afternoon I finally got back to trying to get the Sun 3/80 working using a GAL to replicate the serial chip read/write control lines.

IMG_2634.jpg

Unfortunately given that my only diagnostic at the moment is an old (and hence not very bright) LED the sunshine is making things impossible, so I'm going to have to wait until sunset.

[Steve]

I like this old Mac h/w (up to & including some of the PPC era)...but have never seen one at an affordable (for me) price...

Plus I already have waay too many projects to complete, so best not to add in too many others!

I've been burned a bit by dabbling in the vintage mac-land and I can just tell you that in my opinion, the post-jobs/pre-jobs Apple when they were churning out 68k machines is not a good era for manufacturing reliability, they were famous for their "pay no more than % over cost" I can't remember the mantra, someone else will... and then they sold their machines for massive mark-up value. So what to expect from that era? The poorest quality plastics you will EVER come across, literally 'handle it and it will snap' plastics. Not just one model, no... the entire product line over a long period.

On top of that, everything about the Macs from that era was terrible. The OS was a joke, especially when it got to system 8 with all the clobbered-together updates on top of ancient technology that once was very good. Their hardware was terrible for any kind of multimedia, barely any games ever were released on the platform mainly due to the lack of hardware graphics / sound support. the DOS game exports like Lucasarts adventures, FPS games like Doom or Duke etc, were terrible, slow and buggy.

When jobs came back, their industrial engineering was massively improved as we all know. I'd say the PPC era is a 'nice' place for Vintage mac appreciation. They adopted a brilliant Unix based OS that we all know and love, the rest is history. I personally have an awesome G4 Cube and a 17'' 1.67Ghz PPC Powerbook, both fully maxxed-out and serviced.

Anyways... all just my opinion :)

[derkom]

When jobs came back, their industrial engineering was massively improved as we all know. ... They adopted a brilliant Unix based OS that we all know and love, the rest is history.

There's a reason that some people say NeXT acquired Apple, not the other way around. ;)