Recent Acquisitions, Centris 650

[ilitch64]

Hello all it’s been a long while since I posted!

I recently picked up a Centris 650 for too good of a price. (Under $100) the computer was in unknown condition, but came with a monitor.


After opening it up and panicking due to seeing some rust on the bottom I was pleasantly surprised to see that the battery hadn’t bombed!


I cleaned up the Mac the best I could and noticed not a single trace had corroded thanks to the build quality of using all tantalum caps!

It’s a bit yellowed however it cleaned up rather nice. Still have some more to go though.


Even though the old HDD works rather well, I decided to pop in a ZuluSCSI and install something real nice onto it! The original drive has been backed up and I plan to sort through it later, it seems to have a bunch of old College student work on it from a NYC college. I’ll properly dispose of it once I am done looking for any software that may not be archived. Don’t want any personal data to get out.

As for the monitor, I didn’t snap a picture but the Blue gun is overdriven and the geometry is out.

I have gone ahead and ordered the parts, here is the diagram of the capacitors in case anyone has one of these 14” Mac Color Displays! It was fun finding out it’s a Triniton! Looks to me like low hours too!


I’ll update here if I discover anything interesting with the machine and once I have it ready to go on my desk!

I have been looking for a Quadra for some time! I still really want a Q700 to match the IIci I have or a Q900/950 as the 900 series my school had was awesome and I really loved that machine as a kid, but now I own a proper Quadra to satiate that fix. To top my reentry to Mac restoring after my hiatus for various Unix Workstations, I have Three Mac IIs coming to me in a couple weeks. Hopefully they aren’t as bad as the last one I dealt with corrosion wise!
-Ian L.

 

[joshc]

Congrats. The 650 is one of my favourite Macs. Quite a few of us here have overclocked ours to run at 40MHz or faster, with a full 040. Mine feels speedy even with OS 8.

 

[Phipli]

Yup. 650 is the most capable 68k Mac in my opinion. But the UK 68kmla seem to be very into our 650s.

 

[ilitch64]

Deciding to update here instead of making a whole new thread!
Since it is more acquisitions I hope that its welcomed

I went to VCF East, more specifically I volunteered there! I'll go into detail soon regarding what I got there, but first! I have an update on that monitor, the cap damage wasn't extensive, however it was bad enough that I needed to run a new trace. which was in the HV section and now I have arcing! I need to take care of that now, the Quadra is going great though. Next on the bench is Three Mac IIs I got at consignment at VCF East. I looked over the Cheese Yellowed one I have affectionately started to call the "Colby Jac Mac" Inside is a IIx board that has been recapped, but some gremlins were awaiting inside, the other two were straight IIs andone was basically stripped for parts. I am not mad though, it was 20 bucks and you get what you pay for.



Two Traces I found were bad so I swiftly replaced them, still looking for more bad traces, but I haven't found any yet. There is some corrosion between the Nubus and the memory. They will go bad one day, but I will deal with that when it comes to it.



I am yet to power it on, the new battery holders are already on order and I need to run to the store for some new CR2032s I thought I had some, but apparently I am out. Curses to the Apple Engineer that designed the battery powered jump start. Soft power always on voltages just weren't common in the mid 1980s yet I guess.



Oh also upon removing the board, i noticed something awful. That cheese coloured Mac II is more of a cracked jack mac, the entire half of the IO shield is rusted. It doesnt look salvagable. I stuck a spare parts board in the case, until I can decide what I plan to do with it.



I had also gotten this Mac SE for $20 at the consignment which was marked as "Missing RAM, HDD, and broken Floppy" when I threw some memory into it I kept getting errors, I'll be honest I was tired at the show and working on this on sunday night in the "Afterparty" When I got home though I was looking over the board and noticed the jumper for the Memory size select was set for 256KB SIMMs and I was also using 4MB SIMMs from a Sun. So of course it wouldn't work..


One quick jumper removal, and a floppy emu and she was booting fine.
I added my last WiFi BlueSCSI to it and now I am gonna try running a BBS off it. I'll get details regarding that as soon as I can, but I have the Mac IIx to get working first! The fan is REALLY noisy, I cant run it for more than 5 minutes without getting a buzzing headache. Thats next on the list.


Despite that it is still a work in progress. I am excited to have a Mac SE again, I had gotten rid of all my compact macs since I was moving and I figured one would be easy to come across again. I really do love these little machines. They have a certain charm to them and they are very simple to repair.

Oh and that Image writer on the top of stack, I need an ink ribbon and a Apple Serial cable to use it. If anyone near Philly on the Jersey side has a spare, it would save the hassle of spending more money on the jungle site.

Thanks to everyone who came out for VCF East and to everyone who's interested in my ramblings.
Hope to see some of you at VCF Midwest!

 

[alectrona2988]

*screams in jealousy, especially with the mac IIs*
i actually did find a centris 650 in the ruins of a burnt down electronics store but it was unfortunately beyond all repairs, the only surviving part is a 25mhz full 68040.
nice finds, by the way. someday i should go to VCF but i've got way more things to worry about right now.

 

[killvore]

Congratulations! And thank you so much for the capacitor replacement guide for the M1212 monitor - I have one that's really dim and has a brownish tint to the output, so once I get some soldering confidence I will have a go at replacing mine.

The Centris/Quadra 650 is a great machine, and the case is one of my favorites from that era. You can also stick the logic board in a Quadra 700 case if you want a small tower and don't mind the loss of the internal CD-ROM!

 

[cheesestraws]

i actually did find a centris 650 in the ruins of a burnt down electronics store but it was unfortunately beyond all repairs

this feels like a metaphor, not something that should happen in real life. good stuff.

 

[ilitch64]

Congratulations! And thank you so much for the capacitor replacement guide for the M1212 monitor - I have one that's really dim and has a brownish tint to the output, so once I get some soldering confidence I will have a go at replacing mine.

Thanks! Just keep in mind the ELNA branded caps in the High Voltage section like to leak and corrode the traces underneath the board! Make sure you don’t have arcing like I do!!


I have great news! The IIx is now working! I fixed those traces got the batteries in place, and got some great output!

Had to use my portrait though. Every other video card on my LCD looks like this. I thought I had a video memory issue at first because even the portrait looked like it on the Toby that came with the machine, my radius card, and my Memplus video cards, which both worked fine in my IIci last I checked? I’m starting to think it’s a scaling issue or the 15 pin adapter had issues.

Has anyone seen this blockiness before on their video output?

 

[alectrona2988]

this feels like a metaphor, not something that should happen in real life. good stuff.

no seriously, it happened... several years ago a strip mall that had an electronics store caught fire and when they started tearing it down i quickly came to the rescue of anything that i deemed salvageable

 

[cheesestraws]

no seriously, it happened

I wasn't accusing you of making it up, it just feels like it ought to be fiction .

 

[alectrona2988]

I wasn't accusing you of making it up, it just feels like it ought to be fiction .

oh yeah i'm shocked it happened, not something that would ever happen again. i wish that particular machine was in better condition, though.

 

[killvore]

Woaaa you wouldn't happen to have any experience or advice for recappng a Portrait Display by any chance? I am licky enough to have two, and one of them is pretty dim and out of focus

 

[ilitch64]

Woaaa you wouldn't happen to have any experience or advice for recappng a Portrait Display by any chance? I am licky enough to have two, and one of them is pretty dim and out of focus

I actually haven’t recapped mine. I probably should it definitely needs other work like the cracked bezel. It’s not too hard though when I do it I guess I’ll make a cap guide again.