Recent content by error1

Were you able to zap pram without removing the card first? On mine it doesn't respond to cmd-opt-p-r once the card is enabled but I can take the card out, zap pram and then I can insert the card again and it will keep booting in 68k mode until I toggle the ppc card back on. It sounds like...

Oh that's interesting! Should it be able to use the onboard memory at least? I only have 4 additional 1MB simms to put in it at the moment, but I have some 16MB pcb simm kits to build. I tried a different set of 1MB sticks but it made no difference. Here's the front and back, it's a slightly...

Unfortunately no, I've left that machine alone for now. At some point I'll experiment with the power supply in case it's not delivering the power required for the ppc card and try some different sticks of RAM. I'm curious if early boot and reading the new rom is handled by the ppc or the 68k...

Yeah I've been repasting the heatsink each time, the paste gets squished pretty thin so I think the heatsink is making good contact. Thanks for pointing out the hook, I don't think that has been fully seated every time. I don't see any corrosion on the PDS slot and the card inserts fully, but I...

I've had a Power Mac Upgrade Card in my stash of expansion cards for a long time with no computer to test it in, but I recently grabbed a Quadra 700 which should be compatible. The Quadra works fine and passes all the MacTest Pro logic board tests, and will also boot with the upgrade card...

Now that PWM controlled fans are so common, how cool would it be to build on that idea and have a fully software controlled fan as a menubar extension on classic macs :D   there's a library...

What kind of issues? It would be nice to know some of the symptoms, I have trouble with sata/ide drive corruption on mine unless i run it off a slow scsi2sd drive. It will often just lock up doing heavy IO from the cdrom drive too, it's been really frustrating. Did you just recap the small smd...

I wonder how hard it would be to take it further and automatically turn the screen off and on based on the video signal, switching the sweep voltage off if there's not a single bright pixel detected in 20 seconds or something. DIY DPMS :)

I'd say a typical single cpu tower computer usually draws somewhere around 100W when idling and 150-200W when working hard, the trick would be how to implement a working thermostat so you have a feature complete space heater... Maybe hook a digital thermometer to a serial port and write a simple...

Thanks everyone for sharing your repair experiences, it was an awesome help to finally get my SE/30 recapped and fixed. I was stumped by the black vertical lines but after inspecting the corrosion damage around the old caps under a microscope and thinking that maybe there's something I'm not...

I still think the dishwasher is a worthwhile final Hail Mary after hosing down a board with contact cleaner, manually scrubbing with IPA and vinegar didn't work, it's revived a lot of boards for me. No lead poisoning yet but I do run a bunch of machine cleaning cycles afterwards to get the worst...

For what it's worth I'm not using any SCSI device at all in my beige g3. It boots from a 120gb ssd (partitioned as 4g,4g,50g,60g) through a SATA-IDE bridge and the CDROM is an IDE cdrw model I grabbed from an old G4 tower. You should be able to install a wide range of old generic IDE cdroms i...

It was a complete nightmare to remove the pins from my new ATX supply to rewire the plug, even with the right pin removal tools from ebay it took at least an hour just to learn a working method to release the pins.  If i had to do it again I would much rather buy an extension cable like in the...

I had all sorts of trouble getting my Beige G3 to install and boot MacOS from SSD until I replaced the 40 wire cable with a newer 80 wire one. You might have to modify the new cable too since the mac doesn't have the key pin removed from the IDE pin header on the motherboard. The beige g3 tower...

On a lot of the mac boards I've recapped there's a tiny dot of glue under each of the caps, probably to stop them from moving around during production before going into the reflow oven. I've had some accidents with ripped pads trying to lift them off with hot tweezers, but now I've bought a hot...