tanaquil
Well-known member
Thank you Uniserver! My baby SE/30 is now up and running with a freshly cleaned and recapped board, perfect sound, 68 MB of RAM and Ethernet.
The short version: everything works great, and I can't wait to play more with it. Next item in the budget is a SCSI2SD to replace the (working) 40 MB hard drive.
The long version (or, why this took me six hours yesterday):
The SE/30 was working when I pulled it from the basement (miracles!), but after going through all the pain of taking it apart to remove the old battery and check the board, I could see it had leaky caps, and I wanted to have a nice clean re-capped board before I went through the pain of reassembly. (Little did I know that I would end up taking it apart and reassembling it at least a dozen times.)
I sent it off to Uniserver, who did a ton of work not only recapping the board but tracking down the source of a bad startup chime that I hadn't even noticed (that saga is elsewhere on the boards). The board came back in beautiful shape, but I had to wait to put it all together until I could save up a little money for the extra RAM and ethernet I wanted to add.
I watched ebay for a while to see if a SE/30 ethernet card would come up, but the only ones I saw were going for hundreds of dollars (someone is trying to sell one right now for about $420, yeesh, good luck with that). Eventually, I realized that I actually had the card I wanted (the one that consists of two cards with a small cable running between them), installed in my working IIsi. I use the ethernet on that machine all the time to transfer files, though, so I had to find a replacement card for the IIsi.
Compared to the SE/30, finding ethernet for the IIsi is easy, because there's much more room to work inside the case of a IIsi. I ended up getting a riser card (+ FPU, bonus!) in a sort of metal cage, and a nubus ethernet card to plug into it. Fits nicely in the IIsi and works like a charm, and now I have an FPU in the IIsi to boot. That part of the project went quickly.
Next was installing the new RAM from OWC (4 X 16) into the SE/30. Many people on that site and on these boards had reported having no problem getting that RAM to work in an SE/30, so I thought it would work, but I kept getting a sad mac chime. In the end the only configuration that worked (after many, many reassemblies) was putting the original 4 x 1mb RAM in bank A and putting the new, larger RAM in bank B. Weird, but hey, whatever works. Once I finally got a working configuration, I wasn't about to try any other variations. Anyone else had luck with just installing 4 x 16 in bank A and nothing in bank B? That was the first thing I tried, but it never worked for me.
Meanwhile, I was diagnosing all this with no video, because even after I started getting a happy startup chime, I couldn't see anything on the screen. I could hear the hard drive starting up and see the little hard drive indicator light on the front of the machine, and floppy disks seemed to make happy reading sounds when I inserted them and/or started up with them, but the video was black. Turning the brightness knob didn't help.
I must have uninstalled and reinstalled every card and cable a dozen times, trying to find a combination that might cause the video screen to light up - nothing.
Knowing Uniserver, I was sure the problem had to be with my analog board and not chips on the circuit board, but the video was working when I originally pulled the motherboard, and I couldn't figure out what I had done to break it.
I tried putting the SE/30 board in my spare SE, and sure enough, the screen lit up and the computer started normally (well, with a floppy, the hard disk in my spare SE doesn't work). So I was just contemplating the horror of having to completely swap out the analog board, CRT and power supply in my SE/30, when I noticed that the thingy that connects to the yoke of the CRT (technical term? it looks like a square of cardboard with wires) looked different on my SE than it did on the SE/30. The one on the SE/30 was loose and wiggled around.
When I pushed it on tight, everything started up and worked perfectly. Six hours of work because I somehow knocked a square of cardboard loose and didn't know enough to plug it back in!
(I'm amazed I never broke the neck of the yoke. There was so much tugging and swearing. I hate the cable that runs from the analog board and plugs into the motherboard SO MUCH, who invented that little clamp on the side, it's a torture device.)
While I had the cover off and the unit working, I adjusted all the video controls except the width. I don't have a proper TV tuner tool, and none of the makeshift tools I was using instead would turn that stubborn width coil reliably. Can anyone recommend a brand/make of tool that works well with the width adjustment? I'm looking at several different ones on Amazon. Right now the screen looks ok, but it's definitely too wide.
So anyway! Any applications recommended to really show off the speed/power of the SE/30? I have System 7.1 on it now, and the control panel/extension that allows you to turn 32 bit addressing on, so all the RAM is showing up. I used to have a Classic 4/40 (still hanging out somewhere in the basement), and I'm curious to see how the machines compare.
The short version: everything works great, and I can't wait to play more with it. Next item in the budget is a SCSI2SD to replace the (working) 40 MB hard drive.
The long version (or, why this took me six hours yesterday):
The SE/30 was working when I pulled it from the basement (miracles!), but after going through all the pain of taking it apart to remove the old battery and check the board, I could see it had leaky caps, and I wanted to have a nice clean re-capped board before I went through the pain of reassembly. (Little did I know that I would end up taking it apart and reassembling it at least a dozen times.)
I sent it off to Uniserver, who did a ton of work not only recapping the board but tracking down the source of a bad startup chime that I hadn't even noticed (that saga is elsewhere on the boards). The board came back in beautiful shape, but I had to wait to put it all together until I could save up a little money for the extra RAM and ethernet I wanted to add.
I watched ebay for a while to see if a SE/30 ethernet card would come up, but the only ones I saw were going for hundreds of dollars (someone is trying to sell one right now for about $420, yeesh, good luck with that). Eventually, I realized that I actually had the card I wanted (the one that consists of two cards with a small cable running between them), installed in my working IIsi. I use the ethernet on that machine all the time to transfer files, though, so I had to find a replacement card for the IIsi.
Compared to the SE/30, finding ethernet for the IIsi is easy, because there's much more room to work inside the case of a IIsi. I ended up getting a riser card (+ FPU, bonus!) in a sort of metal cage, and a nubus ethernet card to plug into it. Fits nicely in the IIsi and works like a charm, and now I have an FPU in the IIsi to boot. That part of the project went quickly.
Next was installing the new RAM from OWC (4 X 16) into the SE/30. Many people on that site and on these boards had reported having no problem getting that RAM to work in an SE/30, so I thought it would work, but I kept getting a sad mac chime. In the end the only configuration that worked (after many, many reassemblies) was putting the original 4 x 1mb RAM in bank A and putting the new, larger RAM in bank B. Weird, but hey, whatever works. Once I finally got a working configuration, I wasn't about to try any other variations. Anyone else had luck with just installing 4 x 16 in bank A and nothing in bank B? That was the first thing I tried, but it never worked for me.
Meanwhile, I was diagnosing all this with no video, because even after I started getting a happy startup chime, I couldn't see anything on the screen. I could hear the hard drive starting up and see the little hard drive indicator light on the front of the machine, and floppy disks seemed to make happy reading sounds when I inserted them and/or started up with them, but the video was black. Turning the brightness knob didn't help.
I must have uninstalled and reinstalled every card and cable a dozen times, trying to find a combination that might cause the video screen to light up - nothing.
Knowing Uniserver, I was sure the problem had to be with my analog board and not chips on the circuit board, but the video was working when I originally pulled the motherboard, and I couldn't figure out what I had done to break it.
I tried putting the SE/30 board in my spare SE, and sure enough, the screen lit up and the computer started normally (well, with a floppy, the hard disk in my spare SE doesn't work). So I was just contemplating the horror of having to completely swap out the analog board, CRT and power supply in my SE/30, when I noticed that the thingy that connects to the yoke of the CRT (technical term? it looks like a square of cardboard with wires) looked different on my SE than it did on the SE/30. The one on the SE/30 was loose and wiggled around.
When I pushed it on tight, everything started up and worked perfectly. Six hours of work because I somehow knocked a square of cardboard loose and didn't know enough to plug it back in!
(I'm amazed I never broke the neck of the yoke. There was so much tugging and swearing. I hate the cable that runs from the analog board and plugs into the motherboard SO MUCH, who invented that little clamp on the side, it's a torture device.)
While I had the cover off and the unit working, I adjusted all the video controls except the width. I don't have a proper TV tuner tool, and none of the makeshift tools I was using instead would turn that stubborn width coil reliably. Can anyone recommend a brand/make of tool that works well with the width adjustment? I'm looking at several different ones on Amazon. Right now the screen looks ok, but it's definitely too wide.
So anyway! Any applications recommended to really show off the speed/power of the SE/30? I have System 7.1 on it now, and the control panel/extension that allows you to turn 32 bit addressing on, so all the RAM is showing up. I used to have a Classic 4/40 (still hanging out somewhere in the basement), and I'm curious to see how the machines compare.
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