Macintosh SE/30 Triple Threat

[bregard]

Forked up the $$$ for a beautiful vintage SE/30:

Macintosh SE/30 - Restored/Recapped/2gb hdd fantastic computer! | eBay

Very clean and thoroughly tested. 131mb of ram. Board professionally recapped. Added very fast 2 gb HDD. Re-flowed solder on power board. Partial list of software below. Power board connectors were re-flowed and most important of all the logic board has been recapped for long life.

www.ebay.com

I want to triple threat:

Any and all advice is welcome, please. I have ordered:
DayStar Turbo 040 40MHz MC68040RC40 PDS Accelerator
BlueSCSI v2 (50-pin Internal) DaynaPORT SCSI/Link adapter to provide Wi-Fi connectivity over the SCSI bus.
SanDisk Extreme PRO microSDXC UHS-I Memory Card 1 TB + Adapter
TwinSpark PDS riser card
30Video VGA Color Video PDS Card

 

[Nixontheknight]

SanDisk Extreme PRO microSDXC UHS-I Memory Card 1 TB + Adapter

Old Macs like this can't use more than 2GB per disk. There are ways around it, like partitioning, but that gets fiddly quick. Plus, from the looks of it, the hard drive was already replaced with something 2GB or more

 

[LaPorta]

Yep, I gotta be that guy.

Buy a Quadra

 

[luRaichu]

Why?

 

[LaPorta]

Why?

Just a joke. That’s a lot of coin this fella has into this when a Quadra would be more capable and cheaper. He will have one heck of an SE/30.

 

[luRaichu]

I wasn't asking you, I was asking him
Maybe he's going through a mid life crisis?

 

[bregard]

Mid life crisis hobby maybe. Although, I wouldn't call it a crisis unless I blow this thing up.

Old Macs like this can't use more than 2GB per disk. There are ways around it, like partitioning, but that gets fiddly quick. Plus, from the looks of it, the hard drive was already replaced with something 2GB or more

Good to know. Just getting into modding old macs. Would just like to to easily get files to the machine. Possible triple boot.

 

[bregard]

Why?

For fun! I have owned many macs in the past (starting with a IIci and a Quadra 800), but never a original all in one.

 

[joshc]

Hope the TwinSpark adapter works for you, pretty sure people have had issues with them before.

 

[bregard]

Hope the TwinSpark adapter works for you, pretty sure people have had issues with them before.

Thanks. Just looking for some friendly advice. Much appreciated.

 

[croissantking]

Old Macs like this can't use more than 2GB per disk. There are ways around it, like partitioning, but that gets fiddly quick. Plus, from the looks of it, the hard drive was already replaced with something 2GB or more

You can create and use partitions up to 4GB in my experience. I don’t, because:

- it creates some issues under System 7.1 e.g. it can’t calculate free space properly
- block size is quite large, about 64K.

But if you’re running System 7.5 and above it works perfectly well.

 

[frontein1]

Nice! I've been on the look out to buy an SE30 as well.

I used to live in Salt Lake City right across from the University of Utah. I remember back in the mid/late 90's, I would often go into their surplus store. They had a LOT of SE30s on the shelves, but at the time they just weren't of any interest to me.

 

[s_pupp]

I had success in the past with the Daystar 040 and Twinspark, but cannot get them working together at this time. Although I’ve blamed logic board corrosion for this, from what I’ve read recently, having a full 128MB RAM may be contributing to that issue - but I can’t recall the source of that info at this time, and my desk has no space for working on my SE/30’s at this time.

There is a bodge wire fix for some incompatibilities of the Twinspark and Daystar 040 that can be found in this forum.

Be sure to limit the size of the partition the SE/30 sees to 2GB (or is it 4GB - can’t recall at the moment). If the SD card has wear leveling that SSD’s have, a 1TB card should last a long time. I myself use primarily CF cards with Acard AEC-7720U IDE-SCSI adapters - taking out a CF card and writing directly to it via a USB card reader with my MacBook running El Capitan (HFS for Snow Leopard was installed when running 10.6, and still works in El Capitan for writing to HFS volumes) is the work of a moment. I was lucky to buy the Acard adapters for about $35 each back in the day.

Have fun, and keep us informed of the many complications that will likely occur! It’s very satisfying to get one of these up and running, but keeping them up and running can be challenging - I had 8 working SE/30’s in 2013. After about 12 years in storage, only 4 still boot.

 

[croissantking]

I had success in the past with the Daystar 040 and Twinspark, but cannot get them working together at this time. Although I’ve blamed logic board corrosion for this, from what I’ve read recently, having a full 128MB RAM may be contributing to that issue - but I can’t recall the source of that info at this time, and my desk has no space for working on my SE/30’s at this time.

Are you using the stock ROM?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I used to live in Salt Lake City right across from the University of Utah. I remember back in the mid/late 90's, I would often go into their surplus store. They had a LOT of SE30s on the shelves, but at the time they just weren't of any interest to me.

In that '90s timeframe I set up a few computers at Goodwill for fun one day and they sent me out the door with a free SE/30.

Never was all that interested in it or the SE/30 in general until I wound up roping @Bolle and @joethezombie into my madcap reboot of gamba's abandoned PowerCache adapter project. Now I'm fairly well hooked on 'em.

@bregard enjoy your new toys, better late than never to the fray.

 

[s_pupp]

Are you using the stock ROM?

Yes, stock ROM.

 

[zigzagjoe]

Beware that you will likely not have a good experience trying to use the wifi functionality on an internal SCSI emulator. The case is coated with RF shielding paint inside, and the wireless chipset used on RP2xxx based SCSI emulators has a low signal strength nor is it particularly sensitive. I would recommend using an external SCSI emulator such as a ZuluSCSI Slim or one of the bluescsi offerings if networking is a priority.