There are two issues at the root of any such project. First, what support does the hardware have for color, or what modifications will be needed to display color, and second and more importantly, does the version of QuickDraw stored in the machine's ROMs support color.
In the case of the SE, the ROMs contain plain old original QuickDraw, but a little known fact is that original QuickDraw actually has support built in for eight colors. For example, using Excel, an SE and an IWII with a 4-color ribbon, you can print colored cells in your spreadsheet. There is some method in Excel for specifying the color of cells, even though you won't see the colors on the screen.
So, I think, in theory, one might be able to build hardware that makes use of those eight supported colors in early QuickDraw and get 3-bit color (eight colors) out of the Classic, SE and Plus. The external boxes which produced color displays may have made use of this feature of early Quickdraw.
In the case of the SE/30 the work is relatively easy because it is just a IIcx with the NuBus slots sawed off, and the equivalent of a PDS/NuBus video card added to the logic board. The video card is monochrome (1 bit) but it does have its very own VRAM chips and such. More importantly, the SE/30 has full Color QuickDraw support in ROM. So to display gray scale or color, one merely needs to interface hardware which reports its support for colors or grayscale to the Display Manager (IIRC) and then does all the fancy work as a frame buffer and analog video output.
Has anyone put an LCD display into an SE/30 and built and interface for it yet? I mean with the SE/30 logic board still in place. I'm not interested in Mac Minis in an SE/30 case.