LC 575 refurb options?

[ClassicMacintosh]

Greetings all.

Coming from a tough failure at getting a 5500 PCI working ( https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/pm-5400-5500-damage-compatibility.45300/ , will have a new board eventually), I've got an LC 575 that hasn't been plundered for the board, hoping to have more success with this one with the community's help. It didn't boot last time tried.









Planning on a recap of the board and a clean up, then attempting to boot it without touching the AB. Is this sensible?

Also a few questions for this machine:

Should it be plundered for the Mystic upgrade? Are there other boards which can be slotted in?
Noticed it doesn't have a heatsink. Does it need one?
Should I retrobrite it, or leave it yellowed? The plastic is very brittle.


Also - Is there a Mac OS utility to make a full ISO of a/parts of a hard drive? Have ZIP disks available so would be able to image it and save the contents, if working.


Any other comments and suggestions for the repair are welcome, enjoyed the last journey, as unsuccessful as it was.

 

[Phipli]

Noticed it doesn't have a heatsink. Does it need one?

Lots of 040s didn't have heatsinks, especially 68LC040s, which tend to run cooler. I'd add one if you overclock, otherwise there isn't any need really.

 

[Scott Baret]

I'd say the logic board recap is your first step. If you're not good after that, recap the AB. I've heard they fail sometimes on the 5xx, but I've mostly heard about issues with the AB on the somewhat related Color Classic.

 

[joshc]

You need to recap the logicboard first. This area in particular needs soaking with vinegar followed up by a scrub all around the sound chip (the chip in the middle of these 4 capacitors) using soapy water. Then rinse the area thoroughly with 99% isopropyl alcohol.

The Mac won't boot properly if there's any issues with the sound chip.

 

[ClassicMacintosh]

Thanks @Phipli @Scott Baret @joshc !

Will begin with a vinegar soak, recap & test of the LB, without any additional measures, and post updates here. Cheers

 

[ClassicMacintosh]

Well, thankfully, this appeared to be a success:



Removed all the gunk, recapped the board, cleaned the AB & tube. No issues with picture or anything.

It appears to have a lot of software on it. So much so, that of the 12 MB available, there are only 4.5 MB free.

Blurriness is my ancient camera & poor skills, apologies.

The hard drive makes a pretty loud scraping sound, in addition to the regular "chattering". I'd love to make a bootable copy of it to an external drive.

 

[Phipli]

It appears to have a lot of software on it. So much so, that of the 12 MB available, there are only 4.5 MB free.

Go to the apple menu, control panels, Memory... Then turn on 32 bit addressing and restart. Then you'll have more RAM available.

(Probably - if not, it's full of junk )

 

[ClassicMacintosh]

Sadly, nothing seems to make any difference! Most of the RAM is always occupied.

Copied all of the files onto ZIP disks - will copying them back after a reinstall result in any issues?

Also, snapped a couple of the tabs on the fan whilst trying to get at the rust. Guess taking the front off for Retrobrite is out of the question?

Are there any cool upgrades to do to this one?

 

[Phipli]

Sadly, nothing seems to make any difference! Most of the RAM is always occupied.

Sounds like the System Folder is full of extensions. Restart while holding Shift and it will boot with a minimum set, the System should only use about 2MB or less then. Just to see.

Copied all of the files onto ZIP disks - will copying them back after a reinstall result in any issues?

Make sure you have copied the system folder. In most instances, no, it won't cause issues, but some software registration / enabling uses invisible files, or even modifying blocks on the hard disk. The latter is unusual (I only have seen it with audio software), but if you format a disk, you lose the authorisation on the machine in that instance).

You don't have to reinstall, we could just tidy it up?

Also, snapped a couple of the tabs on the fan whilst trying to get at the rust. Guess taking the front off for Retrobrite is out of the question?

I don't retro rite my machines, same way I don't dye my hair. They're 30 years old.

Are there any cool upgrades to do to this one?

I'll leave someone else to answer that other than saying a bit more RAM. Aim for something around 32MB for this, that's absolutely loads. 12MB is a bit limiting and you'll struggle to play games like Escape Velocity with so little.

 

[68kPlus]

Love reading these threads, restoration is a beautiful thing.

 

[joshc]

Glad an LB recap was all that was needed, that's great.

Guess taking the front off for Retrobrite is out of the question?

It's up to you but depending on the method used, you can badly bleach the case and end up with a worse finish than before. Like Phipli, I don't retrobright my machines.

Agree that 32MB RAM is a good amount to aim for, easy to upgrade on these.

Personally I'd do a fresh install if you have a way of doing it (a CD install is probably the easiest on these), then you can be sure all the rubbish is gone. If a lot of software was installed you might miss removing things if doing a manual clean-up of the existing install.

 

[cheesestraws]

Good stuff! Nice to see one of these working and basically intact. They have a habit of self-destructing in transit, so this is a rare thing...

 

[ClassicMacintosh]

Above: it cleaned up pretty nicely, no Retrobrite - plastic was so brittle.

@Phipli @joshc Will aim for 32mb then. Have tried to tidy it up, but it's so incredibly bloated. The menu bar contains so much stuff, and there are programs that trigger all sorts of things in the background when working. Feels like modern Windows, so a reinstall is likely. Problem is, the CD drive doesn't appear to mount on the desktop. It looks plugged in, but nothing comes up. The AppleCD extension is active. Dead drive?

@cheesestraws @68kPlus thanks, it's been a fun journey. It appears to be basically as it was from the early '2000s. It's strange to see, because most of the time these are empty shells, with the board having been plundered. I bought a couple back in the day and they've just been sitting, awaiting the above, along with a long line of Macs that were unattainable for me, 30 years ago - the other one looks worse for wear. Was hoping to play Myst & Marathon on one of them.


There are, however, a few quirks that perhaps I've forgotten in ~20 years & not sure how to overcome:

-When copying .sit files to a FAT formatted ZIP disk from Windows, the files end up with the truncated name (~), all in caps, and with a "PC" icon. Opening them in stuffit doesn't appear to work, it gives a number of error messages about it not being an archive. This makes it impossible to upgrade to stuffit 4.x or 5.x (currently on Stuffit Lite).

-Moving files from ZIP disk to desktop, creates a folder in the ZIP disk (like a second desktop) and doesn't appear to copy to the desktop on the MAC HD. Is there a workaround?

-There appear to be a number of programs running in the background that can't be seen. Checking the extensions folder doesn't immediately reveal them. One of them plays screen savers (which hard crash / bomb the computer after screensaver change). Another one makes ominous sounds from the speaker and is pretty creepy.

 

[Phipli]

Problem is, the CD drive doesn't appear to mount on the desktop. It looks plugged in, but nothing comes up. The AppleCD extension is active. Dead drive?

Doing this often fixes drives :

Cleaning the Lens in a ’90s Apple CD Drive

Cleaning the Lens in a ’90s Apple CD Drive 90s CD-ROM drives frequently struggle to read CDRs (home written discs). Sometimes this can be helped by using another brand of disc or writing the …

stuffandnonsense.elephantandchicken.co.uk

Moving files from ZIP disk to desktop, creates a folder in the ZIP disk (like a second desktop) and doesn't appear to copy to the desktop on the MAC HD. Is there a workaround?

Copy them to the hard disk icon, or hold down option while dragging and dropping on the desktop - the latter forces a copy and does so to the boot disk.

One of them plays screen savers

Probably in the System Folder>Control Panels folder. Look for "After Dark", or "Dark Side" or... Erm others. Photograph the control panels window and I'll tell you what to move out of the folder to somewhere else.

 

[ClassicMacintosh]

Great, that did the trick. Reads discs perfectly now. Broke another tab (front panel) and had to epoxy it. Also a tab inside the CD (which was a Matsushita). Did the same clean to the floppy heads too. Used the CD drive to move a copy of Stuffit 5.5 to the disk, and archives are now able to be unstuffed! Was also able to move a newer copy of ZIP tools, to format the disks for Mac. However, can't seem to find the option to change format to HFS.

Regarding the control panels - removed after dark, and it runs better now. Unfortunately there are 98 items in this folder so a photo wouldn't capture a third of them. I think a reinstall will have to be on the cards.

Unfortunately, copying the System folder to a ZIP disk appears to hard freeze the Mac. Not sure if it can be fully backed up? -edit- the ZIP drive stops copying about 1/3 of the way through any large copy.


-edit 2- something strange is going on with the system. After the above happens, the machine refuses to display anything on the screen. The hard drive and fans spin up, however the display is blank. I was able to fix it the first time by removing the ZIP drive from the SCSI port. However, the second time, after initiating a copy, then it freezing, then turning off and removing the ZIP, it no longer displays anything on the screen.

 

[ClassicMacintosh]

Well, taking it apart and checking the motherboard again revealed some weirdness:



It looks like a lot of the chips are "leaking". Perhaps capacitor juice that was trapped under, and not released during the first clean?

Will try again.

 

[AwkwardPotato]

I'm more inclined to suspect the board wasn't rinsed thoroughly enough after being soaked in vinegar.

 

[ClassicMacintosh]

I'm more inclined to suspect the board wasn't rinsed thoroughly enough after being soaked in vinegar.

Perhaps I wasn't thorough enough. Another thing that I failed to mention was the audio stopped working when previously running.

 

[ClassicMacintosh]

The board has now been cleaned a second time (with soapy water), washed off & dried. It boots & appears to be working fine, including copying. Installed Mac OS 7.6.1 and it now only uses 3,900 KB.

However, the sound is still out. I triple-cleaned & reflowed all of the legs on the chip, but it made no difference. Looking around, it seems common for these to die from capacitor juice? There was a post on another forum saying that C1 should be connected to L2, and C1 and L1 should be connected. Using the multimeter, I checked which parts of these two caps were connected to where, and drew it in paint (anything not drawn, is not connected - took readings from both sides of each cap, and to both sides of the L1, L2 and D1) - however can't find any schematics to work out what is supposed to be connected, and whether it'd make a difference?



-Edit- forgot to add that sound works just fine through the headphone jack at the front, so perhaps all the above is pointless. Couldn't find where the internal speaker is connected.

 

[joshc]

The board has now been cleaned a second time (with soapy water), washed off & dried.

Try to not do this - water contains contaminants that when left dried will leave unwanted residues on the board. It should be rinsed with 99% isopropyl alcohol and left to dry after a soapy water wash, as the isopropyl alcohol will displace the water.