Apache Thunder
Well-known member
A week or so ago, I bought a Macintosh SE (SuperDrive) from eBay. The seller sold it to me for $60 + 17.68 shipping. Which given the price this and other compac Macs were selling for looked like a decent deal. Though it did not come with any additional accesories. It did however have a Asente Network card installed. Neato. Not sure if I will end up using it. I need to buy a transciever for it if I want to put it on my Eithernet network.
I had originally wanted to get an SE/30. But people are charging an arm and a leg for even the broken ones. I'd have to sell a kidney or something to buy one.
So I guess I had to settle on the Macintosh SE. I used to own a Macintosh Plus and a Macintosh Classic when I was a kid. But of coarse I fiddled around them them too much and eventually broke the little glass nub off the end of the CRT tube. Don't ask how I managed to do that. That was almost 20 years ago and of coarse I no longer own either of them. I think I threw them out or left them behind when I moved. Which of coarse I now regret. I thought about re-acquiring a Macintosh Classic on eBay and did try to get one that had a keyboard and mouse in an auction. But that auction quickly escalated to a price range beyond what I could afford. So here I am with a Macintosh SE. Which compared to the Classic...I'm happy I ended up with this instead. It's basically the same as the Classic only better because it has the PDS slot and wasn't gimped. The classic is a gimped SE and the Classic II was a gimped SE/30. Built inferior so the original retail price was lower. I guess Apple sold them as budget models or something.
Anyways I finally got it in the mail a few days ago. Yesterday I finally got my hands on the needed torx bit to open her up. I had a screwdriver with a changable bit, but of coarse it's not long enough for the two screws in the handle. I tried using an extender. It could have reached, but it's too fat so when it gets halfway down there it will jam. So I went to Ace Hardware and found a 2 inch long T15 torx bit to put onto that extender instead of the much shorter one I had. Solved that problem.
Photos:
(I don't have an original ADB keyboard cable, so for now I'm just using a S-Video cable. )
I still have the keyboard from when I used to own the Macintosh Classic. I even had a Performa all ine one. But I think I fried the SCSI controller trying to daisy chain a second drive or something. I'm not sure what happened. I certainly didn't know anything about SCSI at the time. I think the second drive I tried to use wasn't terminated properly. I think I had tried to use my Macintosh Classic Harddrive inplace of the CD-ROM drive to transfer files or something. Two harddrives on the same chain definitely means I'd have to have changed termination/IDs on one of the drives. But I didn't know any better at the time. The annoying thing was the Performa had a caddy based CD drive and I didn't have the stupid caddies, so I couldn't use it. It was a long time ago though. I was one of those kids who took things apart to see how they worked. So inevitably I ended up braking things in some way. I guess in the long run this helped me learn how to build and repair things. I'm self taught when it comes to fixing PCs and stuff and that was basically how I learned it. By constantly messing PCs up when I was younger and finding ways of fixing those mistakes.
The rest are high res so I will post them as links to make it easier to scroll through.
MacSE_Rear.jpg
(This photo was taken by the seller of the Mac and not me. This appears to have a AAUI connector and a BNC connector. There's a switch as well. What setting should that switch be on if I want to use a Ethernet transciever on the AAUI port?)
MacSE_Screen1.jpg
MacSE_Screen2.jpg
(I have no mouse, so I can't check the About this Mac menu. But after inspecting the RAM modules, I know for sure I have 4MB)
Some of the components after I dissassembled it:
MacSE_Motherboard.jpg
MacSE_Motherboard1.jpg
MacSE_Motherboard2.jpg
MacSE_Motherboard3.jpg
MacSE_AsentePDS.jpg
(Note that I had moved the RAM select jumper when I took the above photos. It was originally on the setting for 4MB ram. I moved it back to the correct position afterwords)
Of coarse I've learned my lesson from when I last worked on one of these as a kid, so no more messing with the CRT stuff. There's no need to, I already know what all that does, so why fiddling with something that isn't broken.
I have a few questions though. Currently I'm waiting on getting a hard-drive for this as it didn't come with one. Interestingly who ever owned this last (or perhaps the seller himself) removed the hard-drive but left the baggy with the screws just hanging around loose inside the mac. The bag had a ziplock seal on it, so there was little risk of the screws coming out. But still, this was sloppy on the part of whoever last dissassembled it. That little baggy could have caused me problems if it got nudged into the wrong place during shipping. But luckily it didn't and I spotted it after I got the back off the Mac.
So my first concern is the capaciters. I've hard these old compact macs are starting to show their age and have seen many with leaking/failing capacitors. Thus the reason I had dissassembled to take a closer look. The above photos show that it has a fine layer of dust all over, but otherwise I'm not seeing any obvious issues. The capacitors look fine. The macintosh boots up and works normally from what I can tell. I won't really know 100% for sure until I get a hard-drive installed. The SCSI controller could be dead for all I know. But I don't want to jinx myself. I will just assume that it does. I will find out in about a week or 2 when my hard-drive arrives. I will certainly post an update on that when I get it installed. Although I can't do anything interesting with this Mac until October as I don't have a mouse. I can't do much on these old Macs without a mouse.
I didn't examine the analog board. The screen seems stable and nothing odd going on. The screen width/height is correct as well. (I've noticed some on eBay where they were adjusted to fill the screen. That don't look right to me and I'm glad mine doesn't have that issue. )
If this Macintosh is prone to capacitor issues I would like to know how long I got before it becomes a problem. But for now it seems to be in good condition and is behaving correctly as far as I can tell.
So right now I'm spending this time planning on what I'm going to do to get stuff transferred to it once it has a hard-drive. But I want to do so in a way that won't cost me a ton of money in hard-ware to achieve. Currently I have two options. I can try and get AppleTalk and such working since this Mac happens to have an Asente network card installed. But I don't have a transceiver (this perticular card only has a BNC and AAUI connector I believe), so I will need to get one before I can use it on an Ethernet network which is what everything else in my house is using. My router and my main PC are right next to the Mac, so routing a cable to it will be easy if I end up getting the transciever.
I have already setup Basilisk in a virtual machine (as I use a 64 bit host os and can't use the 32 bit Basilisk LAN drivers for AppleTalk compatibility) and setup a environment where I could in theory get AppleTalk going and share stuff to transfer things to this Mac once I have a hard-drive in it and the needed transceiver. But I don't want to buy the tranciever and this not pan out. I am using VMWare Workstation as my Virtual PC software so assuming it's not doing any funny business with how it's connecting the guest OS to the network, I could get networking going. But I've never networked old Macintoshes before and it may not get the best speeds.
Then comes my next idea. This one I'm leaning more towards. Either way I'm spending at least $10 or so. With the network method I have to buy a tranciever. But this method I have to buy an old ISA SCSI controller which I've found a few in the $10 price range roughly. This is the ISA card I'm interested in getting:
scsicard.jpg
For now I won't post links to the ebay listing for it nor the one for the Mac I bought as I don't know if I'm allowed to post them here. (that and I don't want anyone buying that ISA card before I do. But it's not a big deal I found quite a few others close in price to that one).
My main concern with this method is getting the drivers. I have an old PC with ISA slots and have installed Windows 98 on it. (this machine is a Compac Presario 4508 which could only go to 48MB of ram. So nothing fancy like Windows XP. It did have USB ports though. )
BIOS appears to have an option in the boot menu to boot from an ISA card, so I'm guessing it should get along with an SCSI controller card just fine.
So with this method what would be the best way to transfer data to my Macintosh hard-drive? Can Basilisk connect to the hard-drive directly? I already setup networking with this old PC and my Windows 7 machine can see it fine. So I can send over stuff from my main PC to the old pc and then use Basilisk to then transfer stuff to the hard-drive before throwing it into the Macintosh SE.
But if that doesn't work out, can HFVExplorer see SCSI devices? As for drivers what is the best card on eBay to look for? Most of the cards I've found on eBay (that don't cost an arm and a leg) don't appear to come with drivers, so I will have to go on a google adventure to find them. Not looking forward to that.
If I don't end up using the Asente card, I may end up selling it. I would like to replace it with an accelerator. But I haven't seen any on eBay lately. There is a SE motherboard with one already installed, but they are charging $100+ for it which seems a bit insane.
For now there's no harm leaving it installed. I don't have the original cover for the expansion port, so no sense in leaving a gaping hole back there.
All the old Mac stuff are getting scalped at some insane prices. The little programmers switch thing placed on the side (mine appears to be missing that part) is selling for $33+. There are a few fore $9, but they appear to be for the Classic/Classic 2 and I don't think they would mount to the chassis correctly.
I also noticed my motherboard is missing the plastic cover for the PRAM battery holder. The one I found on eBay is asking for $10 or more....which seems expensive for what amounts to a small piece of plastic. I may just tape the battery down with electrical tape and call it a day. Not paying that much for a battery clip.
The battery didn't pop loose in shipping so it's not like I have to duct tape it down or anything.
I will replace the PRAM battery though. The one currently installed looks original to the machine and that thing could die anyday (or worse, it could pop and leak everywhere which is guranteed to kill the logic board. Definitely don't want to risk that. ). (I have not yet checked if it's holding Date and Time info correctly. I'm wainting on till I have a mouse before I can do. But it doesn't matter since I'm replacing the battery regardless)
I'll definitely be taking good care of this thing unlike the two previous machines I had. These are only getting rarer and more expensive as time passes. I have a fondness for the old Macintosh computers as the school I went to as a kid had a Performa all in one (I forgot what the exact model was) and a few Apple IIe's. I remember computer class was all Macintosh LCs. At least the ones in the Jr. High I went to did. Sadly those days didn't last long. After I moved to my current town I found that all the schools here used PCs. Such a bummer. I loved the Macs and preferred them over the old PCs. Though the PCs in my spanish clas had floppy drives with an self eject mechanism. To this day I still haven't found out what kind of drives those were. Appearently the floppy controller on normal PCs didn't really support self ejecting floppy drives. I think the PCs were NEC branded machines. Would like to know what drives those were. I could even eject the floppy by right clicking it's icon in My Computer and clicking eject like I could with CDs. Such a rare thing for a PC and bsides those PCs in that one class, I only ever thought Macs had drives that could do that.
I'm not much of Apple fan now a days though. The new macintosh (or iMacs as they now like to call them) are all intel machines and are now just glorified PCs in a pretty shell with a premium price attached. The OS is really it's only defining feature and I'm just left dissapointed in that. I miss the days when owning a Macintosh meant owning something that was actually physically different then a PC. Macintoshes used to be in their whole own world. But now apple just builds expensive PCs with Mac OS X which I never really got into.
I'll post more about this Mac as I start to acquire more things for it.
I had originally wanted to get an SE/30. But people are charging an arm and a leg for even the broken ones. I'd have to sell a kidney or something to buy one.
So I guess I had to settle on the Macintosh SE. I used to own a Macintosh Plus and a Macintosh Classic when I was a kid. But of coarse I fiddled around them them too much and eventually broke the little glass nub off the end of the CRT tube. Don't ask how I managed to do that. That was almost 20 years ago and of coarse I no longer own either of them. I think I threw them out or left them behind when I moved. Which of coarse I now regret. I thought about re-acquiring a Macintosh Classic on eBay and did try to get one that had a keyboard and mouse in an auction. But that auction quickly escalated to a price range beyond what I could afford. So here I am with a Macintosh SE. Which compared to the Classic...I'm happy I ended up with this instead. It's basically the same as the Classic only better because it has the PDS slot and wasn't gimped. The classic is a gimped SE and the Classic II was a gimped SE/30. Built inferior so the original retail price was lower. I guess Apple sold them as budget models or something.
Anyways I finally got it in the mail a few days ago. Yesterday I finally got my hands on the needed torx bit to open her up. I had a screwdriver with a changable bit, but of coarse it's not long enough for the two screws in the handle. I tried using an extender. It could have reached, but it's too fat so when it gets halfway down there it will jam. So I went to Ace Hardware and found a 2 inch long T15 torx bit to put onto that extender instead of the much shorter one I had. Solved that problem.
Photos:
(I don't have an original ADB keyboard cable, so for now I'm just using a S-Video cable. )
I still have the keyboard from when I used to own the Macintosh Classic. I even had a Performa all ine one. But I think I fried the SCSI controller trying to daisy chain a second drive or something. I'm not sure what happened. I certainly didn't know anything about SCSI at the time. I think the second drive I tried to use wasn't terminated properly. I think I had tried to use my Macintosh Classic Harddrive inplace of the CD-ROM drive to transfer files or something. Two harddrives on the same chain definitely means I'd have to have changed termination/IDs on one of the drives. But I didn't know any better at the time. The annoying thing was the Performa had a caddy based CD drive and I didn't have the stupid caddies, so I couldn't use it. It was a long time ago though. I was one of those kids who took things apart to see how they worked. So inevitably I ended up braking things in some way. I guess in the long run this helped me learn how to build and repair things. I'm self taught when it comes to fixing PCs and stuff and that was basically how I learned it. By constantly messing PCs up when I was younger and finding ways of fixing those mistakes.
The rest are high res so I will post them as links to make it easier to scroll through.
MacSE_Rear.jpg
(This photo was taken by the seller of the Mac and not me. This appears to have a AAUI connector and a BNC connector. There's a switch as well. What setting should that switch be on if I want to use a Ethernet transciever on the AAUI port?)
MacSE_Screen1.jpg
MacSE_Screen2.jpg
(I have no mouse, so I can't check the About this Mac menu. But after inspecting the RAM modules, I know for sure I have 4MB)
Some of the components after I dissassembled it:
MacSE_Motherboard.jpg
MacSE_Motherboard1.jpg
MacSE_Motherboard2.jpg
MacSE_Motherboard3.jpg
MacSE_AsentePDS.jpg
(Note that I had moved the RAM select jumper when I took the above photos. It was originally on the setting for 4MB ram. I moved it back to the correct position afterwords)
Of coarse I've learned my lesson from when I last worked on one of these as a kid, so no more messing with the CRT stuff. There's no need to, I already know what all that does, so why fiddling with something that isn't broken.
I have a few questions though. Currently I'm waiting on getting a hard-drive for this as it didn't come with one. Interestingly who ever owned this last (or perhaps the seller himself) removed the hard-drive but left the baggy with the screws just hanging around loose inside the mac. The bag had a ziplock seal on it, so there was little risk of the screws coming out. But still, this was sloppy on the part of whoever last dissassembled it. That little baggy could have caused me problems if it got nudged into the wrong place during shipping. But luckily it didn't and I spotted it after I got the back off the Mac.
So my first concern is the capaciters. I've hard these old compact macs are starting to show their age and have seen many with leaking/failing capacitors. Thus the reason I had dissassembled to take a closer look. The above photos show that it has a fine layer of dust all over, but otherwise I'm not seeing any obvious issues. The capacitors look fine. The macintosh boots up and works normally from what I can tell. I won't really know 100% for sure until I get a hard-drive installed. The SCSI controller could be dead for all I know. But I don't want to jinx myself. I will just assume that it does. I will find out in about a week or 2 when my hard-drive arrives. I will certainly post an update on that when I get it installed. Although I can't do anything interesting with this Mac until October as I don't have a mouse. I can't do much on these old Macs without a mouse.
I didn't examine the analog board. The screen seems stable and nothing odd going on. The screen width/height is correct as well. (I've noticed some on eBay where they were adjusted to fill the screen. That don't look right to me and I'm glad mine doesn't have that issue. )
If this Macintosh is prone to capacitor issues I would like to know how long I got before it becomes a problem. But for now it seems to be in good condition and is behaving correctly as far as I can tell.
So right now I'm spending this time planning on what I'm going to do to get stuff transferred to it once it has a hard-drive. But I want to do so in a way that won't cost me a ton of money in hard-ware to achieve. Currently I have two options. I can try and get AppleTalk and such working since this Mac happens to have an Asente network card installed. But I don't have a transceiver (this perticular card only has a BNC and AAUI connector I believe), so I will need to get one before I can use it on an Ethernet network which is what everything else in my house is using. My router and my main PC are right next to the Mac, so routing a cable to it will be easy if I end up getting the transciever.
I have already setup Basilisk in a virtual machine (as I use a 64 bit host os and can't use the 32 bit Basilisk LAN drivers for AppleTalk compatibility) and setup a environment where I could in theory get AppleTalk going and share stuff to transfer things to this Mac once I have a hard-drive in it and the needed transceiver. But I don't want to buy the tranciever and this not pan out. I am using VMWare Workstation as my Virtual PC software so assuming it's not doing any funny business with how it's connecting the guest OS to the network, I could get networking going. But I've never networked old Macintoshes before and it may not get the best speeds.
Then comes my next idea. This one I'm leaning more towards. Either way I'm spending at least $10 or so. With the network method I have to buy a tranciever. But this method I have to buy an old ISA SCSI controller which I've found a few in the $10 price range roughly. This is the ISA card I'm interested in getting:
scsicard.jpg
For now I won't post links to the ebay listing for it nor the one for the Mac I bought as I don't know if I'm allowed to post them here. (that and I don't want anyone buying that ISA card before I do. But it's not a big deal I found quite a few others close in price to that one).
My main concern with this method is getting the drivers. I have an old PC with ISA slots and have installed Windows 98 on it. (this machine is a Compac Presario 4508 which could only go to 48MB of ram. So nothing fancy like Windows XP. It did have USB ports though. )
BIOS appears to have an option in the boot menu to boot from an ISA card, so I'm guessing it should get along with an SCSI controller card just fine.
So with this method what would be the best way to transfer data to my Macintosh hard-drive? Can Basilisk connect to the hard-drive directly? I already setup networking with this old PC and my Windows 7 machine can see it fine. So I can send over stuff from my main PC to the old pc and then use Basilisk to then transfer stuff to the hard-drive before throwing it into the Macintosh SE.
But if that doesn't work out, can HFVExplorer see SCSI devices? As for drivers what is the best card on eBay to look for? Most of the cards I've found on eBay (that don't cost an arm and a leg) don't appear to come with drivers, so I will have to go on a google adventure to find them. Not looking forward to that.
If I don't end up using the Asente card, I may end up selling it. I would like to replace it with an accelerator. But I haven't seen any on eBay lately. There is a SE motherboard with one already installed, but they are charging $100+ for it which seems a bit insane.
For now there's no harm leaving it installed. I don't have the original cover for the expansion port, so no sense in leaving a gaping hole back there.
All the old Mac stuff are getting scalped at some insane prices. The little programmers switch thing placed on the side (mine appears to be missing that part) is selling for $33+. There are a few fore $9, but they appear to be for the Classic/Classic 2 and I don't think they would mount to the chassis correctly.
I also noticed my motherboard is missing the plastic cover for the PRAM battery holder. The one I found on eBay is asking for $10 or more....which seems expensive for what amounts to a small piece of plastic. I may just tape the battery down with electrical tape and call it a day. Not paying that much for a battery clip.
The battery didn't pop loose in shipping so it's not like I have to duct tape it down or anything.
I will replace the PRAM battery though. The one currently installed looks original to the machine and that thing could die anyday (or worse, it could pop and leak everywhere which is guranteed to kill the logic board. Definitely don't want to risk that. ). (I have not yet checked if it's holding Date and Time info correctly. I'm wainting on till I have a mouse before I can do. But it doesn't matter since I'm replacing the battery regardless)
I'll definitely be taking good care of this thing unlike the two previous machines I had. These are only getting rarer and more expensive as time passes. I have a fondness for the old Macintosh computers as the school I went to as a kid had a Performa all in one (I forgot what the exact model was) and a few Apple IIe's. I remember computer class was all Macintosh LCs. At least the ones in the Jr. High I went to did. Sadly those days didn't last long. After I moved to my current town I found that all the schools here used PCs. Such a bummer. I loved the Macs and preferred them over the old PCs. Though the PCs in my spanish clas had floppy drives with an self eject mechanism. To this day I still haven't found out what kind of drives those were. Appearently the floppy controller on normal PCs didn't really support self ejecting floppy drives. I think the PCs were NEC branded machines. Would like to know what drives those were. I could even eject the floppy by right clicking it's icon in My Computer and clicking eject like I could with CDs. Such a rare thing for a PC and bsides those PCs in that one class, I only ever thought Macs had drives that could do that.
I'm not much of Apple fan now a days though. The new macintosh (or iMacs as they now like to call them) are all intel machines and are now just glorified PCs in a pretty shell with a premium price attached. The OS is really it's only defining feature and I'm just left dissapointed in that. I miss the days when owning a Macintosh meant owning something that was actually physically different then a PC. Macintoshes used to be in their whole own world. But now apple just builds expensive PCs with Mac OS X which I never really got into.
I'll post more about this Mac as I start to acquire more things for it.
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