Outbound (Laptop) Exploration Thread

The story so far:

The Outbound Laptop was an early Mac-compatible laptop, roughly contemporaneous with the Macintosh Portable, but smaller and lighter. Apple couldn't stop them making computers but would not permit them to distribute Mac ROMs. So they functioned with a ROM transplant; you provided ROMs from an SE or a Plus and this brought your Laptop to life. Unfortunately, this left you with the husk of the SE or Plus, ROM-less. Which was an expensive thing to waste.

So instead of just being a laptop, Outbound also made the Laptop dockable, by plugging it into your old SE or Plus. Or, to look at it another way, the laptop could also act as an accelerator-in-a-box, providing a faster CPU, a second screen, and more storage options to your SE. And then you could pick up your accelerator and take it with you as a laptop. Like a cross between a PowerBook Duo and a Radius Rocket.

You could also plug other peripherals into your laptop through this docking port; there were floppy drive and SCSI options. I believe that was it.

The docking kit is, these days, basically unobtainable except if one is wildly lucky. The computers with the docking boards in got separated from the laptops, looked just like non-working machines, were thrown away. If it walks like rubbish and quacks like rubbish, it is likely to get thrown away. Such is life—one cannot keep everything.

I have merely been unreasonably lucky and have the docking card for the SE winging its way to me, but no cable harness for it. So since I know there are other people around who are interested in this machine and who have other peripherals, I thought we could have a chat about stuff in here and about the docking port and protocol, whatever it turns out to be.

[cinematic wibbly effect]

@trag tells me that the SCSI and floppy adapters both have a 85C30 as the first thing after the docking connector thing. @trag, (or @ScutBoy, I can't remember if you have these), if you have a moment would you mind poking one of these with a multimeter and seeing what pins on the 85C30 connect to what pins on the connector? (Also 5 V and ground if time permits). Not looking for a full pinout, don't worry - and not urgent of course, but I think a good first step here would be working out vaguely how the laptop knows whether to talk serial or whateverthehellitis over the docking port, because the docking card does not include an 85C30.

The docking card has arrived with me, and it does look like there's only one chip that isn't discrete logic. This bodes well for working out what's going on here...

cheesestraws said:

The docking card has arrived with me, and it does look like there's only one chip that isn't discrete logic. This bodes well for working out what's going on here...

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Great news. With any luck the pinout to the cable is a straight, Pin 1 to pin 1 kind of arrangement.

I read up a bit and see I still need to poke at a SCSI adapter or external floppy. I've been banging my head against other things and now my back gave out. Doing good to get to the computer for a few minutes today. Sigh. I really must exercise more regularly.

trag said:

I've been banging my head against other things and now my back gave out

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Oh no, I'm sorry to hear that. It's miserable always. Hope you feel better soon.

I've looked at the chips on the card and most of them appear to be tristate flipflops. There appear to be 82 distinct flipflops, if I've done my maths right, controlled by a Samsung PLD and a few inverters.

So I'm still thinking this is essentially latched-multiplexing the PDS slot, rather than doing anything more complicated.

I finally got my hands on an Outbound Laptop here in Australia. It starts up to the disk icon but that is it. It sounds like there is a Hard drive spinning up inside it but haven’t been game to open it yet. It came with the external floppy drive and SCSI adapter plus a cable for each. The external floppy drive makes a continuous whirring noise when a disk is inserted but it doesn’t boot either. I want to try the SCSI with an external SCSI Apple HD20 drive I have wanted to male sure that this box labelled 500-SCSI is actually a standard scsi port as found on a Mac Plus. If I can successfully boot the laptop I will them work on getting the floppy drive working and maybe the internal hard drive (if it has one). Any info would be helpful.

CTB said:

I want to try the SCSI with an external SCSI Apple HD20 drive I have wanted to male sure that this box labelled 500-SCSI is actually a standard scsi port as found on a Mac Plus

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I believe it is, yes.

If you feel comfortable doing so and have the time, would you mind popping the top off the SCSI adapter you have there and taking a photo of its circuit board? I don't have one and I'd like to have a look at what's going on

cheesestraws said:

I believe it is, yes.

If you feel comfortable doing so and have the time, would you mind popping the top off the SCSI adapter you have there and taking a photo of its circuit board? I don't have one and I'd like to have a look at what's going on

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I had to do a bit of very gentle bending as the shielding covering the board needed a little deforming. Here are the photos. I will report back on how I go getting it to work.

The whirring noise from the floppy means the belt inside is broken. Very common on these Citizen drives. I replaced the belt on mine and it worked briefly, but now seems bound up somehow - disks don’t spin.

Any idea where I get a replacement belt?

CTB said:

Here are the photos.

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Thankyou very much! That's very useful and interesting. @trag — you were asking about the Logic Devices 85C30? Perhaps one was under your nose all the time .

CTB said:

Any idea where I get a replacement belt?

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I got a couple off eBay last year. I can't remember the measurements off the top of my head, I'll see if I can find the bit of paper I wrote them down on (I'm organised...) The same places that sell belts for tape players will likely be able to sell you one. Unfortunately my floppy drive now spins and makes reading noises but still won't actually read any floppies. Bugger.

@trag I of course mean 53C80. Why did Apple have to use two parts with such infuriatingly similar numbers?

Right. That SCSI module looks like it's a very similar architecture to the PDS card, but for only 8 bits. There are two 8-way flipflop chips and an 8-way line driver at the bottom, which I assume are data and address buses, and some more flipflops up the side for, presumably, some kind of status stuff. And that's really about it, except for the chip with the sticker on it, whatever that may be.

Thank goodness for Outbound and their fondness for off-the-shelf logic and ALL THE FLIPFLOPS EVERYWHERE.

That's good, because what I suspect it means is that the laptop just multiplexes its bus in a rather dumb way down the connector, that there isn't much handshaking or anything going on there.

I've stuck a WTB in the trading forum in case anyone has a spare in a cupboard . This looks like it might be a good first thing to look at before the PDS card, if I can find one...

@cheesestraws I would swear there was also an 85c30 on my SCSI adapter. Also, a little square PLCC GAL. I know that was in there. It appears there was more than one revision.

It's been long enough back, that I'm willing to believe I misremembered the 85C30. Maybe it's only in the external floppy adapter and I got confused. But I have notes about the GALs, because I removed one from each device and sent them to a fellow who said he could read them, and he mailed them back saying he couldn't do anything. This was close to 20 years ago.

I suspect the protection bits are set adn they'll have to be logic-wrestled. But unless the one in the photo has a GAL or PAL in a different package, it doesn't appear to have one at all.

Huh. I checked my parts list for Outbound adapters and the 85C30 isn't mentioned on the SCSI adapter. So maybe I hullicinated that. However, neither the SCSI adapter, nor the floppy board mention the programmable logic. I know they were there. I have the chips in an envelope. Hmmmmm.

I'm going to have to dig some stuff out.

utsource has plenty of the Logic brand 53C80. They're less than $2 if memory serves.

https://www.utsource.net/itm/p/11998118.html

I was going to order about 20 of them until I got fed up with utsource's bait and switch business model.

CTB said:

Any idea where I get a replacement belt?

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I bought an assortment set of belts off eBay and experimented until I found one that was "close enough". It was pretty inexpensive.

trag said:

But unless the one in the photo has a GAL or PAL in a different package, it doesn't appear to have one at all.

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I was assuming that was the little square chip with the printed label. That does look perhaps like a v. 2 design; it's certainly very different from the PDS card, which is all through-hole.

Okay, dug mine partially disassembled units out of hte project drawer. Left is the SCSI adapter. To the right of the 53C80 you can see pads for the 20 pin PLCC PAL/GAL I removed.

Top right is an internal floppy adapter. Bottom right is an external floppy adapter. These are different revisions, but it looks like the same board can be internal or external depending on which connector they install. Actually the top right/internal version doesn't have a position for hte external connector (early revision?) but the bottom right external adapter has an empty position for the internal adapter.

On the external floppy adapter, under the DX-10 connector (external cable) the third chip position from the left is empty where I remember a PLD.

Interesting. There doesn't seem to be a PLD anywhere on the internal version. That bears examination. Perhaps it can be dispensed with.

cheesestraws said:

I was assuming that was the little square chip with the printed label. That does look perhaps like a v. 2 design; it's certainly very different from the PDS card, which is all through-hole.

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Yes. I looked with morning eyes before my post two back. I didn't see that it was a PLCC chip under hte label. For some reason it looked like some kind of SOIC. Maybe I was projecting all the surrounding chips under the label.

An interesting question to my mind is whether the floppy mechanism itself is modified in any way, or whether it is just a standard PC laptop floppy drive from Citizen.

If the latter, I have a collection of never used Citizen W1D floppy drives that can be used. Of course, the belts could have died just sitting there.

The floppy mechanism from Outbound that I have has at least one rework wire on its circuit board, but that could be from Citizen, not a modification by Outbound. Or it could be a modification by Outbound.

This is what mine drive looks like so it is hard to see if anything was modified on the actual drive mechanism.

I finally got my Outbound Laptop to boot via the SCSI adapter connected to a scsi2sd SD drive. Do these screenshots mean I have Macintosh SE ROM's with 4MB of RAM and 4MB of silicon drive? No disk utility software will see the internal Hard Drive, I am assume I have a Hard Disk given the blanking plate.

CTB said:

Do these screenshots mean I have Macintosh SE ROM's with 4MB of RAM and 4MB of silicon drive?

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Looks like it!

CTB said:

No disk utility software will see the internal Hard Drive, I am assume I have a Hard Disk given the blanking plate.

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You'll probably need to use the proper Outbound software, it's IDE.