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My experience with a 128K years ago is that it was difficult to find *anything* that will run on it, much less frivolous things like a screensaver. There is really zero room to run anything but the application you are currently using, I agree, just turn down the brightness knob or shut down the...

I ripped up a pad or two on most cap jobs until I set aside the soldering iron and started cutting the caps off with dikes, haven't had any problems since. Enough heat to melt the solder also softens the adhesive holding the pads, so if you happen to put any force on the cap before the solder on...

I still remember drooling over a 1GB 5.25" SCSI drive back in the day, thinking how great it would be to have such a massive drive. All the space I could ever need. :) They ran about 1200 bucks at the time, plus a few hundred for a (PC) SCSI card.

While it's not the end-all, be-all test, I've found ESR to be a very reliable way of testing electrolytic capacitors, especially in switching power supply applications where they are high failure items. ESR becomes critical at higher frequencies and at least 95% of the bad electrolytic caps I've...

The Mac II had a 5.25" half-height drive. The full height 5.25" drives are around 3.5" tall, I still have a Maxtor 1GB SCSI full height, it sounds like a 747 taking off. You could make a bracket out of some angle stock, or just see if the threaded mounting holes on the bottom of the drive...

It wouldn't be too hard to replicate certain parts, like hinges and whatnot, but trying to make something like a display bezel or molded case part would be a nightmare. Most machining done these days is subtractive, as in you start with a billet of material big enough to contain the entire part...

It's one of those things that just sits there until something written to take advantage of it is used. I wonder if there is a list of floating point intensive 68k apps? It wasn't until the first-person 3D games took off on the PC that FPU performance became important for the typical home user...

There are electrolytic capacitors in the power supply and those are prone to failure. Especially the ones in the output filters.

There are several options. You could find someone to send you some 800k system disks, or you could find another old Mac that has a 1.44MB floppy drive and use that to copy the files from the PC disks to 800k Mac disks. You could also use something like a Zip drive that you can copy files to from...

ADT Pro rocks. Keep in mind that most of those CF cards work as prodos volumes while most of the classic games are floppy booters and need either a real floppy drive or something that emulates one.

Apple was very adamant about not having fans, it wasn't until the Mac II and SE that any Apple computers had a fan. I think it was a Steve Jobs obsession. Blown fuse is almost always a shorted chopper transistor. Nearly all switchmode power supplies have the same basic layout...

The garbled startup chime suggests a problem with the ROM. You might try installing a ROM SIMM, enabling it with the jumper that was mentioned.

Well that's something I haven't seen yet, but if the yoke is squished the neck of the tube is probably busted. If you loosen the screw clamp, the yoke should more or less slip off and you can inspect things.

Well if you ever reach someone there, let me know. I wouldn't mind getting a couple of those 5" Samtron CGA monitors but I suspect I'm about a decade late to the party. I kept meaning to try calling but I'm usually at work during business hours.

That's really not that big of a deal. You just find the nearest point the lifted pad connected to and solder a jumper wire to the capacitor stuck on the remaining pad. I've had a few cases where the leaking cap dissolved the pad to the point that there was nothing left.

It's just a good idea to discharge it manually, whether it has a bleeder or not. Always assume a wire is live just as you always assume a gun is loaded. It's so easy to discharge it that there's really no reason not to.

Look at the little glass sealing pip in the center of the circle of pins on the neck, it's probably broken off. The sealing pip is a real weak spot and the reason larger CRTs usually have a plastic cap to protect it. When disposing of dead CRTs, it's commonly advisable to break off the pip...

I was looking at that place a while back for something else. I noticed though that the site hasn't been updated since 2001 and the email inquiry I sent them never got a response. Has anyone tried giving them a call? I would be shocked if they still have any of that stuff, but I wouldn't mind...

That's awesome. If the uC has 5V tolerant IO pins, you may be able to get away without using the level shifters. 3.3V is well above the "high" threshold for 5V TTL so most of the time a 3.3V LVTTL line will drive a 5V TTL input without any issues.

90s camcorders were notorious for that. Open the tape door and take a whiff, if it smells like fish, the thing is pretty much a write-off. Those things had an obscene number of SMT electrolytic capacitors in them. and they were a nightmare to work on. Particularly the compact VHSC and 8mm type.