Just acquired a Macintosh SE. Some questions I have...

[Apache Thunder]

Ok came too late to edit so sorry about the double post. Finally got my System 7 sound to work on the SE. Turns out the SE was being picky. It has to be 8-bit 22khz Mono and I had to copy over a "alis" resource from an existing system sound using ResEdit. (though I'm not sure if that was actually needed or not, but did so anyways since I noticed the ones QuickTime made didn't have it).

I'm not sure if it had to be mono or not, but just did it based on the other sounds System 7.1.1 came with. Initially I was generating 16-bit wave files and that's a no no for an SE apparently.

After that my SE played the sound perfectly.

QuickTime Movie Player does indeed accept wave files. So just grab a wave file and give it "WAVE" file type and "TVOD" as the creator and it will see the wave file correctly.

 

[Apache Thunder]

Noticed this from a recent eBay listing of a Macintosh SE:



It appears to have a "wallpaper" set. However "Desktop Patterns" is the only Control Panel I know that can place graphics on the background (beyond basic patterns from the General Settings control panel) and it won't work on an SE (I tried. That and it can really only do tiling of small images. Nothing like the single large image being displayed on that photo)

But appearently there is other ways of doing this as that SE has a graphic in the background. Perhaps a special application, extension, or control panel can do this. It would be cool to have a background for my desktop. Any ideas on what was used on that SE to do that? (The seller doesn't appear to be aware of how either as he has no keyboard/mouse and can't do anything but boot it up)

All I can easily tell is that this SE is a SuperDrive like mine, but has two floppies instead of a hard-drive and floppy. The OS appears to be MacOS 7+ as the Finder Help icon is visible on the top right corner.

There is however an extra arrow icon beside the Apple Menu and that appears to be something added by a third party app. Can't be too complicated all that fits on a single floppy.

EDIT: Another interesting bit is that he appears to have a unit with 2 floppies and a hard-drive. I just noticed he only has one floppy inserted and there's two drive icons on the desktop. That and the floppy he inserted was for a "Crash and Burn" game which I doubt would be a bootable disk. He didn't mention having any external devices.

It's got that clock control panel added and I can already tell it probably still has the original PRAM battery as one with a missing/dead battery will always boot up showing Friday. I forget the exact time and date it resets to, but that date is always on a Friday.

 

[joethezombie]

For system 6/7 there is DeskPicture.  I used to have a link, can't find it at the moment...

 

[Apache Thunder]

Thanks! I ended up finding it on some site called MacGUI. There was two versions I found. One was an extension. Didn't really get that to work. But the second one went with the same name but with "v4.02" specified as it's version. Seems to be a seperate program from the other one I found. This one was a Control Panel (only available as shareware it seems. So I have to put up with a nag dialog box once a month on bootup. I suppose this is more then acceptable. I've seen other shareware have much worse nag screen policies and what not, so I won't complain. ).

It seems to take up 200k of ram though. But for the moment I still have 2.4MB of free ram so for now not an issue. (It does have an option of loading the image from disk instead of ram, so the picture I set only takes up 1K of additional ram).

I will try and find a more suitable wallpaper for it as I just used my avatar as a test.

Also this did not result in the addition of an arror icon near the Apple Menu, so somethine else is adding that in that photo from the seller. Not really something I'm interested in though just noting that the arrow seems to be something else unrelated to the wallpaper program.

 

[Tiptoeturtle]

In the original picture of your Mac SE you have a good picture of the ball lightning produced in it, does the Mac happen to come from Area 51 ?

You may already know there is a hidden picture of the Mac SE development team in the SE ROM, and there is some way of activating (displaying) that picture during startup.

Vis-a-vis the 200K, a well-behaved application should let you configure the amount of RAM that individual application is allowed to use. You might be able to set it down to 128K or 64K ? I do not know (remember) what the lower limit is.

D