Mac LC & Total Systems Enterprise

[Bolle]

I scored this LC from eBay for 25€ the other day.

The pictures of the auction showed it had an accelerator of some kind. The seller stated he could not test the unit so actual condition was unknown.

Today the nicely packed up LC arrived at my place.

It has the case with support for two floppy drives but comes with an 80MB HDD instead of the second floppy. Yellowing is not too bad on the case. It is just a little bit dirty and has yet to be cleaned:



It has one of the earlier fan+speaker bridge thingies inside without the actual plugs on the motherboard but uses the contact springs on the plastic bridge to connect speaker and fan to the board.

Never had seen one of those yet in person. All my other LCs seem to have later logicboards with separate pin header plugs for speaker and fan.

The logicboard is dated 1990 and also has one of those big guys installed:



I was already in process of snapping of the old caps that had started to leak pretty badly already. The board was still working though to begin with.

How would I go about replacing the 2200uF cap. Use a big 2200uF one again or put in the regular 47uF instead?

Anyways the reason for getting that one in the first place was the accelerator that came with it.

It is a Total Systems Enterprise featuring a 030 and a 68882 FPU:

View attachment 11529



The card is running at 32MHz as it seems when put into a LC.

The 030 and 68882 are spec'd for 50MHz though, so I guess it will run up to 50MHz when put in an LC III or something with a 25MHz base clock.

Also notice the pre production part number on the 68030.

The machine came equipped with some sort of third party power supply which must have been part of the CPU upgrade back then. It has a little bit more beef on the 5V rail than the stock LC power supplies.



The upgraded PSU would work just fine but give me funny smells after running a few minutes so I swapped it for a stock LC PSU I had in the spare parts drawer. The accelerator was still working stable so I guess I will keep it that way.

 

[bibilit]

Nice find, worth the money for the PSU and Accelerator alone.

 

[LazarusNine]

Very nice find there. I've never stumbled across an LC accelerator card, though I've never been on the lookout for one. Sure beats the stock 16MHz 020. Too bad the RAM limit is stuck at 10MB, but that's a limitation I dealt with for years when our family used an LC as our primary machine.

In response to your question about the 2200uF cap...it is a bit mind-boggling why that's there instead of the 47uF SMD. It's almost like someone just stuck that on, as they were out of 47s! That said, maybe it was added later due to the accelerator card? My inclination would be to swap it for whatever typically goes there (47uF?) and see how the machine functions. If it's dicey, consider another 2200uF.

 

[Bolle]

The 2200uF was in there from the factory on some of the earlier boards. I have seen that on pictures a few times before.

Right now the accelerator is running in my already recapped LC board that has the 47uF in that spot and everything is working well.

The older board has some visible differences in layout compared to my later 1992 LC board so this makes me think if the 2200uF (or at least something bigger than 47uF) might be needed in that spot. I guess I am just going to try as soon as I came around giving the board its final cleaning and recapping later on.

 

[bibilit]

Yes this capacitor was found on early boards.

Does the accelerator needs a driver or is just plug and play ?

Huge difference in performance i guess 

 

[Bolle]

There was an INIT for the accelerator installed on the HDD that came in the LC.

It seems to be pretty similar to gemstart and its variants for the compact Mac accelerators. This one will give me the little Mac putting on his sunglasses while getting ready to race across the extension loading screen

The control panel gives you the following options:



Also notice how it is running at twice the frequency of the LCs base clock.

Without the INIT loaded it will only report the 16MHz 020 but the 68882 seems to be working no matter if the INIT did load or not.

Speed difference is noticeable but still feels a little bit sluggish - probably due to the slow 16MHz RAM.

 

[olePigeon]

Does that accelerator come with more RAM, or is that just cache?  The Sonnet Presto Plus bypasses the 10MB limit somehow, adding an additional 32MBs for a total of 48MBs of RAM.

Also, a SCSI SSD with a much faster seek time would improve performance.  I've been meaning to try it on my LC with RAM & Speed Doubler, coupled with the SCSI SSD.  See how it handles the virtual memory.

 

[Bolle]

This one does not come with any kind of RAM on board, only some extra cache for the 030 I would guess.

 

[just.in.time]

If you can, you should upload the control panel and extension to the garden if it isn't already there.

 

[Scott Squires]

Yes, please upload that software. I do not see it on macgarden or vintageapple driver museum mirror... and those hard drives are all on their last legs.

 

[Bolle]

I already saved a copy of it to my own archive. That is usually the first thing I do when I am getting new Macs before even trying if the machine works at all... get out the HDD, connect it to my Sawtooth with SCSI card and make a block copy of the whole drive just to be sure. Not going to trust those old drives even for a minute.

I will get around to uploading it to the garden sometime soon. I have some other stuff that is not on there as well but did not yet come around to making an account and putting it up.

 

[Bolle]

So I put that driver up on the garden.

I also came around to wash the board and put on new caps.

Looking all nice and shiny now:



A 47uF cap seems to work just fine in place of that 2200uF beast.

I also went ahead and removed, cleaned and resoldered all ICs that had signs of corrosion on their legs. That was probably not necessary but it looks so nice and shiny now. }

 

[Scott Squires]

That is usually the first thing I do when I am getting new Macs before even trying if the machine works at all... get out the HDD, connect it to my Sawtooth with SCSI card and make a block copy of the whole drive just to be sure. Not going to trust those old drives even for a minute.

That's definitely the way to go. I do the same thing.

What did you do to clean the corrosion off the pins? I've found vinegar works ok for some light corrosion but it hasn't worked for me for more than very slight buildup. I didn't remove the chips though! Haha. The last board I recapped I activated some flux with the hot air and it was more effective at cleaning things up. It was difficult/impossible to keep the air from blowing it all over the place though (like underneath the chips where it's hard to clean out, and I don't like leaving flux on boards).