Macintosh IIci + Portrait Display and card

[captaineos]

Hello team 68KMLA

Today I focused on my Macintosh IIci with Portrait display which I bought a few weeks ago. It came with 38mb of RAM, original 160mb SCSI IBM hard drive, IIci Cache card, portrait display card and the worlds longest Nubus Ethernet card.  System 7.6 is installed and comes with Photoshop 2.5, Final Cut 4, Macromedia director, Claris and Word 4.0.  The plastics have yellowed a bit on the IIci, with the display being slightly darker in yellow. 
 

Now the mission was to acclimate myself to this beautiful compact machine and install a new PRAM battery.  With the service guide on screen, I removed the power supply then hard drive + floppy module.  Happy to find no battery installed with signs of corrosion.  With a brand new battery installed, I fired it up.  No chime, no picture but hard drive activity.  I used headphones to listen for the chime and it was there - so why no picture?  I verified it wasn't the monitor by testing it earlier on a Quadra 800 and it was a beautiful picture.

The massive ethernet card was removed and I moved the Apple Portrait Display card down to another slot to see if that helped.  Nope.  Trying again with the last slot and nothing.  So I connected the display to the built in port and it booted! 

Still no chime - must be capacitors.  Sure enough after close inspection with a torch and magnifying class I can see a few that have tiny bits of brown corrosion around certain capacitors compared to others which just have some silver/solder.

Anyway I wonder why this portrait display card doesn't want to put out anything?!  A visual inspection shows no flaws.

With the portrait display directly connected, I could still choose 16 greys and use the computer just fine.  It did seem a bit slow considering the specs so I'd suspect it's using the internal memory for VRAM which is less desired that using the dedicated card. 

The full page display is gorgeous though - such a nice white to it and edge to edge sharpness which surprised me given the age.  It has a small fan in it too.

Photos are uploaded here: https://plus.google.com/photos/118338589625749894332/albums/6087029219878182881

Enjoy the photos and I hope you did something retro Mac today

 

[Macdrone]

On the Mac II video cards I had to replace all the axial capacitors to get them working.

 

[Elfen]

When capacitors fail they can fail open or shorted, in most cases they fail open - not allowing electricity to flow where it is needed.

I think I made a post long ago of even if you recapped and repaired a board, that it would still fail if the video and other cards needs recapping too. The caps on these cards are just as old as those on the mother board, and they would fail just as equally. And on some video cards I have seen, they have the same 47µf @ 16V caps that fails on most motherboards.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

It looks to me like the previous owner must have been Driving the Portrait from the MoBo video. The card you've got looks to be the Rev.1 High Resolution Display Video Card. Even my Rev. 2 ©1988/89 Card is incompatible with the Portrait Display:

http://home.earthlink.net/~gamba2/vid-mon-matrix.html

Give the VidCard a try with a supported Monitor from that list. A good MultiSync CRT or a REALLY good MultiSync LCD with a VGA adapter will do as well. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have at least one high quality MultiSync CRT in a 68k or Rainbow PPC toolkit. That's a much better setup for your situation.

I've picked up at least a half dozen Mac II era VidCards from lots I've snagged over the years. All have tested good at some point over the last couple of years. Yours may need caps to function at all or not, but it will need a recap at some point. I've got to start doing those, I've been procrastinating. :

.

 

[captaineos]

Thank you all for the well considered replys.  @Macdrone - I'm at a loss where to send my boards in Australia.  I've looked!  @Elfen - When and if the logic b. is done, I'll be sure to have the card inspected too.  You're right about the age - both logic and video card are stamped 1989 - 25 years!  @Trs-80 - I have a lovely collection of as new apple monitors and 3 different brands of Mac - VGA connectors.  I took your advice and the 'Multiple Scan 17' monitor (M2494) and still no video output through the card.  In a few days I'll try the next best monitor I have 'Macintosh 12-inch RGB' (M1296) as it's a fail-safe resolution.

 

[Macdrone]

The radials on the video cards are super easy. Any radio shack type store and you can get a soldering iron and a few matching capacitors. Cut the resistor out , leave the metal legs, put the new one in (matching direction of current flow) and solder new one to the legs.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

The cute lil' RGB is too new for that card to drive. It was low performance color for the IIsi and LC series and has too FEW pixels for the "High Resolution Display Card" to be able to drive it. Timing is everything. Go figure! :