jmacz journey

[demik]

Nice, enjoy the build. Hope you secured at least one controller ! Digging the 128k as well. Was that keyboard repainted ?

 

[jmacz]

Nice, enjoy the build. Hope you secured at least one controller ! Digging the 128k as well. Was that keyboard repainted ?

I've got two controllers (I had two of those apple design keyboards).

On the Plus, yeah, looks like a few owners back in its history, the owner painted the keyboard and an external hard drive a matte black. I am going to try and get it off carefully and then refinish it to a platinum color.

 

[demik]

Nice ! You should be set then.

Not the worst colour I've seen. Keep us up to date with the results

 

[jmacz]

Nice ! You should be set then.

Not the worst colour I've seen. Keep us up to date with the results

Yeah, matte black is cool, but in this particular case, the person sprayed it on and didn't really finish? so it's got partial spray on parts of it (like you can still see the original underneath in spots because it isn't an even coat). It's like they misted the spray on it and left it in a half black, half beige state

 

[jmacz]

If the first one goes ok, I think I'm only going to make one more... so I'll have 4 boards remaining if anyone's interested.

1 of the 4 has been spoken for. These would be at what I paid, no markup. But I'm going to try building one first to make sure nothing got jacked up in the order from JLCPCB.

 

[MicroCoreLabs]

Picked up a Macintosh Plus with some additional peripherals from @MicroCoreLabs today (nice meeting you!). One of the last two remaining 68K Macs on my list from my childhood. Only one remaining is the 512K which I am in discussions about.

View attachment 66249

The Plus works and is in good condition, just needs some clean up. Should be fun to work on after my current other projects.

Nice to meet you too!

 

[jmacz]

Picked up a Macintosh Plus with some additional peripherals from @MicroCoreLabs today (nice meeting you!). One of the last two remaining 68K Macs on my list from my childhood. Only one remaining is the 512K which I am in discussions about.

View attachment 66249

The Plus works and is in good condition, just needs some clean up. Should be fun to work on after my current other projects.

Opened up the Plus and it's in pretty good shape.

Things I have noticed so far:

• Does not have RIFAs in it.
• Battery holder has some corrosion that will need to be cleaned out.
• Missing rear battery door.
• Missing 4 of the 5 case screws.
• Two of the rear ports have rust on them.
• Internal metal bracket on the motherboard has rust on it.
• Main logic board is pretty dirty.
• BUT the analog board is surprisingly clean - it looks like someone cleaned it.
• Analog caps look great, no obvious leaking from underneath, no bulging, etc.
• Still need to pull out the floppy drive and inspect it (but it does work as is and ejects so it will just be maintenance work if anything).

Some pictures.



You can see the rust above on the bracket and ports. R8 has already been clipped. It has 2.5MB of memory - I have spare 1MB 30pin modules that should work in this Plus. I'm going to remove the bracket and clean the rust off. For the rusted ports, will try to clean it in place - it's only on the exterior shields.



No RIFAs. I'm going to leave the caps alone.



Corrosion in the battery compartment. Will have to clean this out and then find a new door or 3d print one (looks like multiple models exist on Thingiverse).

 

[jmacz]

Still trying to find some time to work on the Plus, but in the meantime, took delivery on this unit a week ago from a forum member in exchange for some re-capping work:



It's a 512K. The motherboard seems to have at least two mods on it.. one looks to be a brainstorm memory upgrade (I think?) and the second seems to be a SuperMac SCSI module. There's a third mini board near the CPU but not sure if it's part of the other two mods. The board is really dirty so cleaning it first before taking another look.

The case is pretty badly damaged:



It's going to take some work to fix that.

 

[bigmessowires]

Are you planning to remove those upgrades and revert to a stock 512K config? With the upgrades it's essentially a Mac Plus, which you already have, no?

 

[jmacz]

Are you planning to remove those upgrades and revert to a stock 512K config? With the upgrades it's essentially a Mac Plus, which you already have, no?

Yeah, it's essentially a Plus. But no, I think I'm going to leave the upgrades in place. I'm assuming there aren't many units that had this upgrade done so going to keep it as is as something unique in my collection. Will try to see if I can restore the case though as a challenge.

The Plus I got does work so that means I have the Plus which I wanted. I'm still looking for a stock 512K but it's taking time only because I'm being picky - want something that is cheap because it requires work, and not in a hurry to find one as my todo list is getting very very long:

• Finish up the Quadra 800 (USPS lost the MO drive I had in shipment from China... argh)
• Finish putting the Plus back together
• Restore this modded 512K
• Build the Design68 Keyboard
• Restore some old keyboards (especially one that's been painted black) for the Plus/512K
• Refinish a HD20 that was painted black
• Clean and potentially fix three external floppy drives I recently got (a 400K, an early 800K, and a newer 800K)
• Design and print a replacement front button cover for a 17" Apple Multiscan
• Build a new custom charger for my PowerBook 540c (need to fix the battery charging side of the PSU)
• Rebuild a stock charger for my PowerBook 540c (recapping and fix)
• Build a second battery for my PowerBook 540c
• Try to fix a cheap boost converter I got from China that's overheating possibly due to counterfeit components
• Diagnose my 75Hz 1024x768 resolution issue on my SuperMac Spectrum 24 PDQ when using ROM v1.27
• Diagnose why my Fujitsu MO drive can't read/write 2.3GB disks when it works fine with 230MB and 640MB disks
• Get some time to finally work on a 68K game I've been thinking of writing

 

[3lectr1cPPC]

Ah yes, “just got a Quadra 700, don’t need anything more than that”
Wasn’t that you?

 

[CC_333]

Ouch! Compact plastics other than the Classics and Color Classic are generally pretty durable, so someone must have done something terrible to that one!

I still (!) have some bits and pieces from the Compact Mac Haul from SF back in August 2014, including, I believe, several complete 512k/512ke cases, if you'd be interested. Since I'm semi-local to you I think, we can hopefully avoid the onerous shipping charges that normally inflict transactions such as this.

c

 

[jmacz]

Ah yes, “just got a Quadra 700, don’t need anything more than that”
Wasn’t that you?

LOL ... still your fault I have a bunch of PowerBooks!

 

[jmacz]

Ouch! Compact plastics other than the Classics and Color Classic are generally pretty durable, so someone must have done something terrible to that one!

I still (!) have some bits and pieces from the Compact Mac Haul from SF back in August 2014, including, I believe, several complete 512k/512ke cases, if you'd be interested. Since I'm semi-local to you I think, we can hopefully avoid the onerous shipping charges that normally inflict transactions such as this.

c

Ooh, I appreciate the note. Let me try to fix this one up first but if I give up, will send you a message.

 

[jmacz]

The modified 512K board after cleaning.

The SCSI module in the center is SuperMac branded... the marking is to the right of the SCSI connector and not visible in the photo. Also obviously has two SuperMac branded chips on it as well.

The board on the left is Brainstorm branded and says M2MDP 2 and 2/4 meg module. There's another yellow board wrapping around the CPU.

 

[jmacz]

Found another board that has the exact same mods that was on sale in the UK. Not much details to go with the picture.



Found this picture of a board that only has a Brainstorm memory upgrade which suggests the yellow board surrounding the CPU is part of the memory upgrade:



And one other picture online with just the Brainstorm memory upgrade:

 

[jmacz]

Hmm... the bug bit me again and couldn't help myself. Picked up an SE on eBay (SuperDrive version) for $80 shipped. Impulse pickup just to get the SE motherboard with the SuperDrive support and extra parts for my other SE. The description said it didn't work, powers up but shows a display with stripes across the screen.

I just got it today and as described, it powers up, screen comes on, but no chime, and horizontal stripes across the screen.

Decided to open it up to see how bad the damage was. First thing, no hard drive, that's ok. But the motherboard had something attached to it making it harder to take out...



Hmm... Applied Engineering Mac SE II Accelerator. 68030 on board as well as memory.

Will need to spend some time looking up more info on this board. Also not sure what's supposed to go into the brown socket (FPU?) or the black socket in the upper right corner.

But something wrong with either this accelerator or the motherboard as there's no chime and the weird display. There was a battery in it but it looked fine; I took it out though. No obvious damage on the board. Will have to debug further when I have some time. Other more urgent projects I need to finish first.

My todo list just keeps growing instead of shrinking ... jeez.

 

[3lectr1cPPC]

What a lucky find! I hope for your sake that it’s an easy fix

 

[jmacz]

What a lucky find! I hope for your sake that it’s an easy fix

Yup, definitely lucky.

Looks like the lower socket is for the FPU/68882.

 

[3lectr1cPPC]

That would be my guess as well.