Yet another SE/30 Restoration Project

[Oliver_A]

So, my Macintosh SE/30 arrived yesterday.



Ain't she a beauty?

BUT..................!



Yep, as expected, the battery wreaked havoc on the PCB.

And so the journey of restoring this, otherwise beautiful machine, begins.

Interestingly, this SE/30 also had a third party graphics card installed:



"Formac ProGraph"

Has 128K of VRAM, 45MHz oscillator, standard TMS34061 graphics controller. Probably a high resolution monochrome card. Did not find any information online about this, yet. The card seems to have been made in 1989, so relatively close to the release of the SE/30.

But we'll come back to this later once I get this machine to boot again.

So what's next?

• Ordered Bolle's replacement PCB (thanks @Bolle for your great work!)
• Yesterday night, ordered one huge batch of components from mouser
• Started to source the standard components (SCC, SCSI, VIA, etc...) which are still available NOS
• The corrosion seems not to have affected any Apple specific custom chips - so I will desolder them, put sockets on the new board where there are any apple specific custom chips, and see how far I can get here
• Testing of the power supply

I'm also trying to salvage specific things, like the 68030 CPU, the Video Rom and the original PALs, in case they still work. If not, I'm going to replace them with Bolle's GAL recreations. The 68882FPU is too much corroded - trying to get a genuine 16MHz Motorola part.

 

[Boctor]

Good call on the FPU, that was right where my eyes went... After staring at the off-axis resistor pack with its legs eaten off. I'm a relative newcomer to this level of rework, but the Reloaded board is surprisingly manageable in terms of complexity, so for you it should be a piece of cake.

Reading build logs and seeing what people wished they'd done differently (i.e. "I should have installed UH7 before any other component in the middle!") helped me a lot, personally. I have never seen an SE/30 board, not even a later revision one with a soldered CPU and no /NUBUS bodge, where the PAL DIPs for the built-in video were all directly soldered like that.

 

[Callan]

I'm also trying to salvage specific things, like the 68030 CPU, the Video Rom and the original PALs, in case they still work. If not, I'm going to replace them with Bolle's GAL recreations. The 68882FPU is too much corroded - trying to get a genuine 16MHz Motorola part.

Thats a pretty good looking donor board. I'd bet you can save everything on it (even the fpu). I'd replace the 258's and the 161's just for peace of mind. A new rom socket, a processor socket, new caps, and Bob's your uncle!
The caveat being... it's a lot easier to use new parts since the main time hog is recovery and prep of the used parts. Plus you know the new parts work (most of the time - may fake chip makers burn in the hell of molten silicon).

 

[ObeyDaleks]

If building a reloaded board, be aware that the traditional replacement RAM slots from PE connectors have shot up in price and are now $40 each! Used to be like $6.

So take care desoldering the existing ones.