Howdy! So I have this old Lisa 2/5....

[MOS8_030]

Hello!

So I have this old Sun Remarketing Lisa 2/5 with a 400K floppy that I've had for about 20 years.

It's got a 5 meg Profile drive that it boots from that's been rebuilt at least one time in its past.

I don't think the Profile PS or HD are original to the case.

It's got a Sun20 hard drive kit. The hard drive powers up but I can't get the system to boot from it. (My fantasy is it just needs reformatting... right?)

As is typical, the KB has a lot of bad keys and the floppy drive tries and sometimes succeeds to read a disk, but mostly fails.

It's just been sitting around for most of that time doing nothing.

Recently I decided it was time to do something with it.

I hooked it up and turned it on and frankly was amazed when it powered up for the time since ~2001.

However after about five minutes the Profile drive began leaking magic smoke.

So I quickly shut it down and took a look inside.

Long story short, the PS for the Profile had leaky caps and burned up one of the choke coils.

So for about $15 worth of parts I recapped the Profile power supply and it lives once again!

Anyway, I thought you'll might enjoy a few photos of the Lisa.

I also have another unique mac I pulled out of storage. Surprise! It has PS issues as well. I'll make a post with some additional photos later.

 

[mactjaap]

Fantastic. A Lisa with a working HD is rare. So if you would be able to get it alive that would be great. 

 

[SuperSVGA]

Looks like a Macintosh XL/Lisa 2 converted to Macintosh XL. It might not be a proper conversion just based on how the display looks, but I could be wrong.

 

[KnobsNSwitches]

Very cool. Thanks for the pics.

 

[MOS8_030]

As far as I can tell this is a Lisa 2/5 that was upgraded by Sun Remarketing, at least according to the Sun Rem "Do it yourself" guide.

Although it appears to have been worked on since then since the Sun20 HD seems to have been bypassed with the Profile drive at some point.

That's part of the reason I'm here, I'd like to nail down exactly what I have.

Interesting you mention the screen, when I had it open I noticed that it looks like it has/had a screen kit upgrade but it's' not hooked up or is incomplete.

This is the only Lisa I've ever seen in person so I'm not sure what the screen or other hardware is supposed to look like!

I believe it's got the 3A/8A ROMs. I need to check the serial number.

As I mentioned, I'm having trouble getting the floppy to read reliably.

I cleaned it up so it loads and ejects smoothly but it says "disk unreable" for most of the disks I've tried.

I'm going to try another floppy drive this weekend, that's part of the reason I pulled out my other old unique Mac.

I'm kinda pissed at myself. I used to have a big pile of old mac stuff for spares but about five years ago I went through it and got rid a bunch stuff.

I'm just sure I had a 400K floppy I discarded.

Anyway, here's a couple more photos.

 

[gilles]

your iorom seems to have a label on it, maybe it was modified for a 800Kb floppy... but you have a 400k drive it seems. what are the rom numbers when your lisa is booting?

 

[MOS8_030]

your iorom seems to have a label on it, maybe it was modified for a 800Kb floppy... but you have a 400k drive it seems. what are the rom numbers when your lisa is booting?

The ROM is 3A/8A (Sun Rem 341-8003) and it has the "Lisa Lite" card with 400K floppy. The system also has the 1.8A PS.

I think the floppy drive is just bad. (The felt pad is not missing.) I have another 400K drive in another 512K I have.

No, wait, doing more googling I see that ROM may be the 800K floppy ROM. Can someone confirm that?

If so, that would track with my suspicion that the I/O has been replaced and this system is a mish-mash of parts.

I had the system on again yesterday and the screen started flickering and shrinking down to a vertical line then it came back after it warmed up a bit.

That jogged my memory a bit, I remember it doing that back when I got it. (I haven't checked the caps on the PS yet, I guess really should.... duh.)

I need to open it back up and check the screen hardware, I think the screen kit is missing some parts or isn't connected properly for some reason.

Honestly, the thing is so fragile I'm hesitant to monkey with it too extensively.

When I got this Lisa back in the late 90's there wasn't a lot of information available about it so I didn't mess with it much before I put it away until recently.

I'm glad to see there's a lot more documentation and resources (folks here!) that I can access now.

Here's a couple of images of the stickers on the Profile drive. I guess it was surplussed  from General Dynamics at some time.

The HD in the Profile had a small sticker on it with a '96 date on it, which tells me someone worked on it that late.

 

[gilles]

with this io rom I think you should have a 800k floppy.

you can try to put a 800k mechanism (but you need to check first the floppy cable, it may have been modified for a 800kb drive, also check the lisalight board as the modification can be here also).

or you can put a new original 400Kb rom for the 2/5 (on a 2732 eprom).

with a 3A cpu rom (part of the screen modification kit) you will only run macworks XL or plus.

 

[MOS8_030]

Thanks for your feedback.

The 400K floppy drive in the system and and Lisa Lite board look original to me.

It's possible that someone changed the I/O board and didn't know the system needed an 800K floppy drive with that ROM.

I'm not interested in changing the OS or ROMs on this system but it would be nice if I could get the floppy working working without too much effort.

 

[MOS8_030]

Oh, I forgot to ask, does the presence of the 341-8003 ROM on the I/O board mean the system has to have an 800K floppy drive?

The CPU board has 341-0346-A and 341-0347-A ROMs and a 341-0348A ROM, indicating a screen kit upgrade.

Although the yoke coil is not connected. I wonder why? I'm almost afraid to find out....

Also, I'm bit confused about the power supply.

This is how mine is labeled.

I assume it's probably a replacement installed by Sun Rem but it's got a really low serial number and early date.

I want to replace some of the caps in it. Has anyone made a cap list for this PS?

Thx,

 

[gilles]

There was a capacitor list somewhere (values and digikey reference) but I cannot find it anymore.

You can find some parts on lisalist I think https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/lisalist/capacitor$20list$20lisa|sort:date/lisalist/mwROKHVSnL0/qoW4zNRk6jgJ

I'm not 100% sure that a 800k iorom works with 400k drive but this version of iorom is needed for Macworks plus.

Your screen kit transformer is not plugged in, that may explain why your image is small (as SuperSVGA said). You will have to adjust potentiometers after it is plugged

If you want to use your lisa as a slow macintosh plus, the best option is to install a 800kb floppy, if you want to play with lisa OS you will need to change CPU rom and video prom

 

[MOS8_030]

Thanks for that link.

I think I'm going to replace the caps on the analog board before I plug in the screen kit transformer.

Maybe after I stabilize the power I'll revisit the floppy drive. A working floppy might help me diagnose the problem with the Sun20 hard drive.

I'm not planning on trying to run any OS other than what's on there now.

 

[SuperSVGA]

That is an interesting power supply. Looks like a DataPower 1.8A PSU just based on the model but it doesn't have Apple's P/N stamped on it. Maybe an early one?

 

[stepleton]

Consider also checking or even replacing the trimpots on the video board. They are known to go bad occasionally.

It's interesting that the yoke coil has been unplugged. Obviously you've still got the 3A CPU ROMs, but what about the video state ROM that gilles mentioned? Since this controls some crucial display timing, I would be a little bit surprised if the screen-mod state ROM were still in place---how would it work without the yoke coil installed?---but I haven't really had any opportunity to experiment with a screen-modded Lisa and don't really know how all of these parts work together.

There might be some marking on your video state ROM that would say one way or another. It's the chip on the CPU board at location C6. In this image, it has the part label 341-0229-A, which I assume is the original Apple part. I don't think it will help you fix your Lisa to investigate this, but it might be interesting on its own.

 

[gilles]

cpu rom 3a needs video rom of the screen kit to display properly. A lisa can start with a rom mismatch but displays dots at (not really) random places instead of images. 

 

[MOS8_030]

Video ROM.

TI stopped making chips in El Salvador in 1985.  Wonder why.....

Scary looking power supply. You can see one of the big ones is bulging.

Actually looks pretty good compared the Profile PS. It was a leaky mess.

New caps are on the way, as well as some for the video board.

 

[MOS8_030]

So I replaced a few caps on the PS and on the video board, reconnected the screen coil, and put everything back together.

I stated up the Lisa and thankfully it still worked...

However the screen was still wiggy & jumpy. After a few minutes I guess it warmed up a bit so it settled down some.

I twiddled with the pots on the video card for a bit then measured the 5V at the card. The 5V was a bit low and jumping around a bit.

But before I tweaked the PS I thought I'd pull the power to the Sun20 hard drive. After all it's just sitting there spinning, pulling power, and doing nothing.

Fired the Lisa back up and hey, the image is much more stable! I checked 5V at the card again and it's back in spec so I'll just leave the PS alone.

And here's the result of everything.

Now the question is do I spend the money and/or time to rebuild the keyboard.

 

[gilles]

fixing the keyboard takes time but it does not always take much money.

But you have to find the good material

My rebuild is here (in french but with photos):

http://www.silicium.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=25619&hilit=lisa&start=60

for just a quick test you can directly type on the keyboard PCB... it works (and it's a good method to learn blind typing)

 

[MOS8_030]

Colorful solution! I've been looking at the various ways to replace the foam pads.

What I'm wondering is if you could use just use the correct thickness conductive/capacitive foam and skip the foil/mylar layer altogether.