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New to Me IIci - Various Issues

jmacz

Well-known member
Picked up a IIci a few weeks ago which was having boot consistency issues as well as a few other problems. Using this thread to document some of the work I've done to it, figure out what was in it when it came to me, and journal a few ongoing issues I'm having with it.

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The above photo is after clean up. It wasn't in too bad of a shape but I had to take out a bunch of scratches, marks, sticker residue, the usual. A lot of the work done matches what I did on my Quadra 700 in my other thread. Work includes:
  • PSU (GE) was having some issues (even when transplanted into my Quadra 700) so took it apart and did a stealth ATX conversion on it.
  • MeowToast CR2032 pram battery replacement.
  • Recapped the board using the capacitor kit from Console 5.
  • The unit came to me with 8MB of memory. It's now at 20MB.
  • Replaced the motor gear on the floppy drive and thoroughly cleaned and relubricated it.
  • 80MB quantum drive was still working but replaced it anyway with a ZuluSCSI 1.1.
Decision to Recap

I made the decision to recap the motherboard based on the following issues:
  • Some of the ICs near the capacitors were exhibiting some corrosion. There was green corrosion gunk on some of the IC pins. Not a lot. But there was some, all on the side of the chips facing the caps. The rest of the board had shiny pins.
  • Startup chime was not playing.
  • Audio was super feint - you can barely hear it.
  • Power delivery was inconsistent - sometimes the IIci booted, other times it flickered on but quickly powered off. Sometimes it would work only when I held down the power button on the back of the unit.
All of the above seemed to be symptoms of capacitor issues so I replaced all of them. Was pretty easy. Also cleaned up the corrosion using isopropyl alcohol. Tested connectivity on all the pins which checked out and looked good. Also checked all the traces in the area around the impacted ICs and the caps, and they all visually looked good as well as continuity checked out via a multimeter.

GE Power Supply and Monitor Power Passthrough Port

My Quadra 700 had an Astec power supply. This IIci came with the GE unit. Unlike the Quadra 700 where I just direct wired the monitor power port to the main power port, for this conversion I wanted to keep the monitor power port only active when the IIci is on. I should have taken the time to do this on my Quadra 700 as it was really straightforward.

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The above is a picture of the stock GE power supply opened up. The monitor passthrough power port has a relay attached to it. It enables/disables the power based on a 12V pin (it's the two wires inside the heat tubing in the upper part of the picture). One of the wires is ground, the other is the 12V line. It connects to the 12V pin in the 10 pin power supply connector which goes to the motherboard. Basically the soft power circuit from the motherboard triggers the power supply to turn on. Once on, the 12V pin is hot. This then goes to the relay enabling the power to the monitor port. Works great.

E-Machines ColorPage XL 8bit Accelerated Video Card

The IIci came with an E-Machines ColorPage XL 8bit accelerated video card. Looked very clean, almost new. I couldn't find any information about this specific card online anywhere, just a few mentions in archived MacWorld articles. @Phipli provided a link to the 3.5.5 driver package on Macintosh Garden which worked with this card. It drives 640x480 at 8bit only. I haven't tried with a higher resolution monitor so not sure what resolutions it supports right now. If anyone has more information on this card I would totally appreciate it.

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I initially thought the card and/or driver was causing my IIci to crash/lockup. I was getting all sorts of issues. Even downgraded from System 7.5.5 which is what I had installed on it to System 7.1 (as the E-machines driver apparently has some compatibility issues with System 7.5 and above). But it looks like the card/driver might be fine as I think the crashing issue might be something else (discussed further below).

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As you can see, the card identifies itself as a Color Page XL (part number 030-01330) with ROM version 1.200. Looks like it's from 1991.

National Instruments NB-GPIB Card

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Also got one of these with the IIci. Looks like it's an IEEE 488 interface board for reading sensor data? The original hard disk had the software and drivers for it. The card seems to be detected although I don't have anything to test it with. As you can see, the card looks super clean. Not sure what to do with it nor what it's worth.

3-Com EtherLink/NB Card

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Also got one of these. Not sure if it works or not. I don't have the adapter needed to try it with my ethernet network. I guess I have to hunt one down on eBay. Drivers were included on the hard disk but again, no idea whether it works although the card was super clean.

DayStar FastCache Card

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So this was in the cache slot in the IIci. Not sure how it compares to Apple's cache cards. But I think something is wrong with this card (see below).

Stability Issues

Post recap, I started noticing stability issues with the IIci. I did not play with the unit enough before recap so quite possible it was already there before the recap. There were so many other problems (as described earlier) before the recap so no way I would have noticed it anyway.

Stability issues I'm seeing:
  • Random hangs from time to time.
  • Random system errors (differing error codes).
  • Random finder errors (differing error codes).
  • Video artifacts around text (in menus, in text when I open SimpleText, etc).
I originally thought it was the E-Machines card as it did not seem to happen with the onboard video. But the following day, I experienced the crashes with the E-Machines card out of the machine, so ruled that out. Given I saw it a lot more when copying files, I thought it might be the ZuluSCSI so put a known working unit in from my Quadra 700 and that didn't help. Then given the video artifacts, I thought perhaps it's the memory since the onboard video uses the system memory. Swapped out all the SIMMs with known good ones, still the problem was there.

Then I removed the DayStar FastCache card. Problem looks to have gone away. I've been playing with the machine for a few hours now with the card out and I can't reproduce the issue anymore. I've put the original memory back in, put the E-machines video card back in, the original ZuluSCSI back in, and still, I cannot reproduce the issue anymore whereas previously, I would hit the issue within 5 minutes of boot.

So it looks like something's wrong with this DayStar FastCache. I'm going to have to research this card some more and figure out what could be wrong (haven't searched yet). I do see two caps on this cache board so I'll have to check those.
 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
I haven't tried with a higher resolution monitor so not sure what resolutions it supports right now. If anyone has more information on this card I would totally appreciate it.

I think this might be a card where you set the resolution through the little twiddly switch in the top left of the card, but I'm not totally sure.
 

joshc

Well-known member
Not sure about Daystar cache cards but the Apple ones are notorious for being troublesome usually caused by bad RAM on the cache card itself.
 

jmacz

Well-known member
Thanks @joshc. Will have to continue debugging to see what's going on. Didn't have an issue after pulling the card for all of yesterday. Last night however I put the FastCache back in, this time with the FastCache 2.2 control panel installed, got one lockup on boot when running alongside onboard video but then couldn't reproduce after that. Then running alongside the e-machines video card, I couldn't reproduce at all. Was playing games, running hardware tests, running DayStar benchmarking tests, (ie. more stressful things to cpu/memory) and still no crash. Going to be tough to narrow down the cause.
 

jmacz

Well-known member
RE: E-Machines ColorPage XL Card

Finally found something. There's a short reference to this card in an old University of Michigan computing newsletter. Looks like there were two versions of this card produced, the ColorPage/XL8 (which is the one I have) and the ColorPage/XL24. They both work up to 832x624 resolution with the difference being 8bit color vs 24bit color support. They were released alongside E-Machines' ColorPage E16 16" monitor in the summer of 1991.

Screenshot 2023-04-23 at 8.43.48 AM.png

Given I really don't see much else online about this card, I'm guessing they didn't sell that many of them?
 

Phipli

Well-known member
RE: E-Machines ColorPage XL Card

Finally found something. There's a short reference to this card in an old University of Michigan computing newsletter. Looks like there were two versions of this card produced, the ColorPage/XL8 (which is the one I have) and the ColorPage/XL24. They both work up to 832x624 resolution with the difference being 8bit color vs 24bit color support. They were released alongside E-Machines' ColorPage E16 16" monitor in the summer of 1991.

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Given I really don't see much else online about this card, I'm guessing they didn't sell that many of them?
I suspect the 24bit version might be the same, but with extra VRAM plugged into those two empty connectors?
 

jmacz

Well-known member
So it's been a little while. Played with numerous different configurations and have narrowed it down to some type of interaction between the DayStar FastCache and the ZuluSCSI RP2040 board. Not quite sure what it is. But if I pair up the FastCache with a ZuluSCSI 1.1 or a Quantum hard disk, no crashes and completely stable. Or if I take the FastCache out and put in the ZuluSCSI RP2040, again, no crashes and completely stable. But with both of these together in the system, I get a random crash every once in a while (around 7-10 reboots). The crash manifests itself in many different ways (random application error while launching a program, during boot I get an error and it freezes, etc).

I've also had an issue with this particular ZuluSCSI RP2040 - I can't run it inside my Quadra 700 as it will cause random errors every so often. So it sounds like perhaps something is wrong with my RP2040 but as I mentioned, if I run it without the FastCache, it's rock solid in this IIci.

Not sure what to do at this point. The FastCache card itself seems ok. Oh well.
 

jmacz

Well-known member
As expected, a lot of this debugging is a hit or miss. I had thought there was some interaction issue between the DayStar FastCache and my ZuluSCSI but that wasn't it at all. Something was clearly wrong with the DayStar FastCache after a lot more testing over time. Again, the symptom was a random crash once every 10 reboots or so.

@joshc ended up being right when he mentioned other cache cards had issues with bad memory.

I found a supply of IDT7188-S25P chips which the DayStar FastCache uses, and it was fairly cheap ($1.50 each). So I picked up 8 of them and replaced the ones on the board. It's been over a week and not a single crash. Working great. Finally solved this one.
 

jmacz

Well-known member
3-Com EtherLink/NB Card

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Also got one of these. Not sure if it works or not.

Finally tested this 3-COM EtherLink/NB card and it works great. No drivers needed. I have System 7.1.1 running on my IIci and I just needed to install MacTCP 2.06. The system automatically detected the card. I picked up the following CentreCOM MX20T AUI transceiver on eBay:

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Some of the sellers ask crazy prices ($40-$80). But if you're patient enough, you can get a deal. I got mine for $15. I missed out on some even lower than that. I think I saw a $10 one at one point. The transceiver itself is too thick to directly attach it to the card so I bought a straight male to female DB15 cable.

It's connected to my gigabit internal home network. The switch that it's talking to is a Netgear 5-port gigabit switch. Heard some were having problems with 10mbit on their gigabit network but I'm having no issues.

I did not try DHCP. I manually configured the IP address and it worked immediately. Now I have even more options to transfer files onto the IIci:
  • 10Mbit connection to an internal-only FTP server running on a Synology (which hosts my Mac software archive).
  • AppleTalk connection to my Quadra which has a shared drive.
  • Iomega Zip drive.
  • Pull the SD card from the ZuluSCSI, pop it into my modern Mac and use hfsutils to copy files onto the drive images.
Of these, ethernet is the most convenient. Followed by the Zip drive for larger files.
 
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