Stress testing an SE/30?

[Daniël]

I recently finally got around to recapping my SE/30. It wasn't a pretty job, but I got it to at least audibly boot again. Of course, I didn't get any video, so I went ahead and ordered a 74LS166 chip and swapped it. While my swap job wasn't very pretty either, and it took a few tries resoldering the pins, I can at least say that my SE/30 seems to reliably work now

But I want to make sure everything went right, and therefore would like to find software to specifically stress test the graphics to ensure I don't get any weird artifacting. That way I can ensure my chip swap went well. Does anyone know of good software or games to achieve this?

 

[beachycove]

I think Apple Personal Diagnostics can be set to loop, in which case you could run it for an hour or two. There are some basic graphics tests there, along with logic board tests, etc. You can select which tests to run.

Alternatively, for b&w Graphics, Dark Castle will run a demo happily for hours. I once had it running as a hallowe’en display. I seem to recall that Lode Runner will run a demo, but can’t say for how long.

 

[Paralel]

If you're going to have the system run for a long time without interaction, just remember to turn the brightness all the way down so you don't run down the life on your CRT for no reason.

 

[Daniël]

Alright, I've let the SE/30 do about 50 consecutive logic board tests with APD as per beachycove's suggestion (with brightness set all the way down, of course), which do check the VRAM and flicker the screen each test, and all still seemed well after that. I am quite happy that I managed to pull off this repair, especially as I stuffed the SE/30 away for a while when recapping went wrong. Despite doing some... well... interesting fixes to solve it (ever seen a through hole axial cap hang off two wires? Had to do that, because for the life of me I couldn't get the through holes clean), it's now running stable. This is by far my favorite Mac, simply because it's the most powerful Compact Mac, so I'm going to have some fun with it

Maybe some day I'll get a different logic board for it, take my time to really do a proper, clean recap job, and find another use for the more yankily fixed board. I have some ideas

 

[just.in.time]

My main SE/30 fails the apple diagnostics video RAM check, but runs fine otherwise with no symptoms. I wouldn’t worry too much if something does come back with failures.

 

[Daniël]

My main SE/30 fails the apple diagnostics video RAM check, but runs fine otherwise with no symptoms. I wouldn’t worry too much if something does come back with failures.

Mine passed that test about 50 times, so I think it should be more than fine then

 

[just.in.time]

@Daniël Oosterhuis very cool, your system is probably in good shape then  

 

[johnklos]

A good way to stress test a system is to compile. You could install NetBSD and compile a few things from pkgsrc such as perl, Apache, php 7.2, MySQL 5.6 and so on.

Compiling is a good test because it requires everything to work aside from video memory - one bit wrong from disk or memory, and the compile will most likely fail.