Iesca
Well-known member
I recently acquired an LC III that originally came from my old high school's music dept. I remember using them in high school initially, only to have them replaced with PCs at some point. The LCs sat around for years before they were given to a friend of mine who does work for the town. He kept one for himself, sent one to The 8-bit Guy (!), and he gave the third to me!
It runs perfectly hooked up to my external VGA monitor. The internal battery was dead of course, but hadn't leaked at all. Floppy drive reads perfectly after cleaning the heads. And it came with a 16MB RAM module. It is the 25MHz 69030 processor.
I've since upgraded it to a 32MB RAM module and also installed a 256KB VRAM module (there are 512KB modules out there but my understanding is the LC III only takes the 256, although I have seem a reference to it taking the 512, so who knows). A 68882 FPU coprocessor is on its way (these are super cheap???). I wasn't paying attention initially but it looks like it's the 25MHz version. A new PRAM battery is also on its way. With regards to the VRAM, it does give the machine access to thousands of colors, but I don't seem to have access to the promised increase in resolution...
The main issue with the LC is that it has stopped booting from the hard drive. It has an 80 MB Quantum drive, and it appears to suffer from the issue whereby the read head arm gets stuck on an old rubber bumper, but if you give the head a nudge at boot it will whisk into action and behave normally, until shutdown that is.
What I'd really like is a good accelerator card, though I know those are going to be hard to come by, particularly any that uses the 32-bit PDS slot. Ethernet cards seem to be easy to come by though, so I can at least do that. There's of course also the Apple IIe card but people are charging crazy money for those, even though there really should be a billion of them, seeing as how they (and the LCs in general) were produced for the education market. Oh well...
The caps will probably need to be replaced. A couple of them in particular look bulged/deformed.
It runs perfectly hooked up to my external VGA monitor. The internal battery was dead of course, but hadn't leaked at all. Floppy drive reads perfectly after cleaning the heads. And it came with a 16MB RAM module. It is the 25MHz 69030 processor.
I've since upgraded it to a 32MB RAM module and also installed a 256KB VRAM module (there are 512KB modules out there but my understanding is the LC III only takes the 256, although I have seem a reference to it taking the 512, so who knows). A 68882 FPU coprocessor is on its way (these are super cheap???). I wasn't paying attention initially but it looks like it's the 25MHz version. A new PRAM battery is also on its way. With regards to the VRAM, it does give the machine access to thousands of colors, but I don't seem to have access to the promised increase in resolution...
The main issue with the LC is that it has stopped booting from the hard drive. It has an 80 MB Quantum drive, and it appears to suffer from the issue whereby the read head arm gets stuck on an old rubber bumper, but if you give the head a nudge at boot it will whisk into action and behave normally, until shutdown that is.
What I'd really like is a good accelerator card, though I know those are going to be hard to come by, particularly any that uses the 32-bit PDS slot. Ethernet cards seem to be easy to come by though, so I can at least do that. There's of course also the Apple IIe card but people are charging crazy money for those, even though there really should be a billion of them, seeing as how they (and the LCs in general) were produced for the education market. Oh well...
The caps will probably need to be replaced. A couple of them in particular look bulged/deformed.
