Finally, working RAM. And color!

[blindowl]

Finally I got RAM bank 2 working on my SE/30. Lesson learned: replace ALL F258s, not just those that look damaged.

And maybe more exciting, we now have 256 colors. I was happy to discover that the Mac had a Radius Color card installed when I bought it. Unfortunately, the card turned out to have too little VRAM to display more than 4 shades of gray. So I bought a number of NOS ZIP VRAM and put in the card, and now: 8-bit color!

So finally I can play those old Sierra AGI games in color! Those games were my favorites when I was a kid and had a Mac Classic. Of course I wanted to play them in color, and I was so disappointed when it later (on my Performa 460) turned out that they can only be played on old Macintosh II models (pre the 32 bit clean ROM). Or an SE/30 (with the dirty ROM) + a color card. And here we are!

(For some reason Kings Quest I and Space Quest I still only works in B/W. But the rest works fine in 16 color)

 

[krishnadraws]

Congratulations! Glad you were able to get your Mac SE/30 fully operational!

 

[just.in.time]

Congratulations! Side question, on some 32-bit 68030 Macs below a certain OS (below 7.6 maybe?) can't you set the Mac to 24-bit addressing from the memory control panel? Not sure if that workaround would work for your games, but if it did it could open up support to the CC, LC 520/550, some PBs, etc.

 

[blindowl]

Congratulations! Side question, on some 32-bit 68030 Macs below a certain OS (below 7.6 maybe?) can't you set the Mac to 24-bit addressing from the memory control panel? Not sure if that workaround would work for your games, but if it did it could open up support to the CC, LC 520/550, some PBs, etc.

Thanks! About the games, the issue is that they were never updated to work with 32-bit QuickDraw. And 32-bit QD was built-in ROM, post the SE/30 and IIcx(?) models. So I don't think it can be bypassed. At least that is how I have understood the problem. There are a couple of old threads that discuss it in more detail.

 

[just.in.time]

@blindowl Ah okay, that makes sense. I thought it was a memory addressing problem of 24 vs 32 bit. But yeah, if it’s at the QuickDraw level then that would be pretty hard to work around.