Hey everyone! I'm finally playing around with the Applied Engineering "Mac SE II Accelerator" (aka TransWarp TW1340) board I bought here a couple years ago, and having some "interesting" results. Here's a quick summary:
Any idea what could be wrong? The CPU and clock crystal look a little 'crusty' but I assumed that was 40-year-old dried solder flux from the factory, and there don't appear to be any capacitors on the TransWarp card itself.
I have another functional SE I'm going to pop the TransWarp into just to see if the behavior changes at all, but assuming it doesn't... what's a good next step?
- I installed it into a known-good SE
- I've had zero luck finding a copy of the TransWarp manual so I just had to figure out how to get it all installed via trial-and-error since the card + motherboard are too thick to slide back into place normally!
- It booted right up with the TransWarp installed
- Both System 6.0.8 and System 7.0.1 ran fine but both reported 4MB of RAM (the amount installed onto the SE motherboard), and didn't see whatever amount of RAM is in the TransWarp slots
- I did a little digging and eventually found the TransWarp Control Panel, which recognized the board and allowed me to enable the various options
- I ran some random benchmark apps and they all reported the system as running between 3X and 5X faster than a "stock" Mac SE
- The socketed FPU was also recognized and functional
- The system seemed pretty stable other than StuffIt Expander and a few other apps crashing with "Unimplemented Trap" errors
- After using it for a couple hours, the system froze during a Norton Utilities scan of the drive (a BlueSCSI on the internal SCSI bus).
- Interestingly, the system locked up so hard that even pressing the Reset switch did nothing
- After the freeze noted above, the system will only give a checkerboard pattern when powered on with the TransWarp installed
- The Mac SE works fine with the TransWarp removed
- I re-seated the TransWarp (no change), removed the RAM from the TransWarp (no change), gave it a careful cleaning with a soft toothbrush (no change)
Any idea what could be wrong? The CPU and clock crystal look a little 'crusty' but I assumed that was 40-year-old dried solder flux from the factory, and there don't appear to be any capacitors on the TransWarp card itself.
I have another functional SE I'm going to pop the TransWarp into just to see if the behavior changes at all, but assuming it doesn't... what's a good next step?
