Newly re-discovered Mac SE

[sircabulon]

A friend of mine gifted his late father's Macintosh SE FD/HD. I tried power it on and got error codes of 0000000E and 000002FF and was able to determine two issues. One was a bad RAM stick, and the other was a missing jumper on the motherboard.
I have now gotten the friendly beep and discovered it has a Brainstorm accelerator card! I am not getting a happy mac or a question mark disk however, so I don't think it is fulling right yet.

Can anyone provide next steps for me?

 

[Garrett B]

Nice work diagnosing the RAM issues! If it were me, I'd remove the accelerator and make sure the logic board will get you to a flashing floppy disk. That way you know the majority of the logic board is in a working state.

 

[Phipli]

Nice work diagnosing the RAM issues! If it were me, I'd remove the accelerator and make sure the logic board will get you to a flashing floppy disk. That way you know the majority of the logic board is in a working state.

If I remember, that accelerator replaces chips on the logic board, so they can't easily remove it unless they have another SE to swap parts with.

 

[sircabulon]

Yes, there is a PDS card that has a motorola 68k chip on it, but I also noticed the crystal oscillator is close to 16Mhz and there is a brainstorm chip in a brown socket as well. I am not sure how reversible it is.

 

[sircabulon]

So I was able to get the memory replaced and got to the ? disk. The hard drive on this computer is kaput, so I have my zuluscsi in it now.
The Brainstorm ROM appears to load and v1.2 displays, but the old hard drive had the accelerator on it. I was able to rip an image from my Mac Classic to get this thing running, and it appears to be stable.

I found some disks online and tried installing the software, but it is not working well. The extension loads, but it has an X over it. I am not sure how to verify that the 16Mhz chip is actually being used.

Any tips on how to check that?

 

[Phipli]

So I was able to get the memory replaced and got to the ? disk. The hard drive on this computer is kaput, so I have my zuluscsi in it now.
The Brainstorm ROM appears to load and v1.2 displays, but the old hard drive had the accelerator on it. I was able to rip an image from my Mac Classic to get this thing running, and it appears to be stable.

I found some disks online and tried installing the software, but it is not working well. The extension loads, but it has an X over it. I am not sure how to verify that the 16Mhz chip is actually being used.

Any tips on how to check that?

Install TattleTech. It will tell you what speed the CPU is probably.

More reliably - benchmark it. Norton System Info perhaps (attached)

Is this any use :

Brainstorm Accelerator - Macintosh Garden

If you really want to speed up your Mac Plus, the one speed upgrade we do recommend is the Brainstorm Accelerator from Brainstorm Products. — Upgrading & Fixing Macs for Dummies (1995)

macintoshgarden.org

 

[sircabulon]

That link to the macintoshgarden is useful. It had a detail that the other places I have read did not about updating the firmware and not needing anything in the system folder. I tried to load up TattleTech, but it won't run on anything below system 6. I will take another look at this tomorrow, but I think it's going in the right direction!

The update is showing now on boot, so that is promising. It seems faster than my classic now too which is a good sign. I will post an update with what I find later. Thanks for the help!

 

[Phipli]

I tried to load up TattleTech, but it won't run on anything below system 6. I will take another look at this tomorrow, but I think it's going in the right direction!

Ah sorry, I didn't think. If you are running Sys 6, TattleTale is the older version :

TattleTale - Macintosh Garden

TattleTale provides very complete information about your computer and its system related software. The information can be viewed on screen by category, printed, written to a standard text file, or output in database readable format.

macintoshgarden.org

But I've never used it so don't know what it does and doesn't report.

Benchmark is the best solution really.

Wish I had a Brainstorm - they're a nice upgrade. Did you know it speeds up your RAM? Actually runs it on a 16MHz bus. It must be the only upgrade that actually accelerates your logic board as well as CPU, without replacing it entirely. (Ignoring systems that just increase the bus clock and nothing more I mean).

 

[Phipli]

Norton System Info won't work on System 6 either, I think Snooper has a benchmark and works in Sys6:

Snooper - Macintosh Garden

Snooper 2.0 detects hardware problems and sources of intermittent failures. It performs over 200 major component tests, prints the results, and logs errors. It also does benchmark testing and reports on system configurations to allow technicians to find and fix problems quickly.

macintoshgarden.org

 

[sircabulon]

I will have to try the benchmark. I got 7.1 installed and loaded up TattleTech and saw that it was running at 8Mhz still. I will also inspect the board to see if there are any broken joints or leaky caps or something. I wish I could find some more documentation on it to know what exactly I am looking for. It appears the PDS slot card has a full MC68030 in it, so it's not just an FPU.

 

[sircabulon]

I finally got my floppyemu so I was able to get speedometer 2.5 on there. I didn't have an 8Mhz baseline, so I put it against my Mac Classic since it has an 8 Mhz Motorola 68000 CPU. The classic scored a 1.01 on CPU and 1.00 on Math and the SE scored a 2.01 on CPU and a 2.01 on Math, so even though all the diag software says it is 8Mhz, the benchmarks are showing twice as fast.
That was a great surprise to find in this old Mac!

 

[JC8080]

I finally got my floppyemu so I was able to get speedometer 2.5 on there. I didn't have an 8Mhz baseline, so I put it against my Mac Classic since it has an 8 Mhz Motorola 68000 CPU. The classic scored a 1.01 on CPU and 1.00 on Math and the SE scored a 2.01 on CPU and a 2.01 on Math, so even though all the diag software says it is 8Mhz, the benchmarks are showing twice as fast.
That was a great surprise to find in this old Mac!

That is a great find, I'm glad the card is working even though software is not correctly reporting the CPU speed! Some diagnostic software can be a bit finicky with accelerators.

 

[mousehouse]

Nice read! From the MacintoshGarden page it reads as if the upgrade is a 16MHz 68000, not a 030, but combined with a chip to accelerate the bus speeds. That would explain a clean x2 on speed as it is all running twice as fast as the original CPU and bus.

If you can spare a few photos that would be awesome!

 

[nathall]

I’ve got a Brainstorm in my SE running System 7.0.1 - I call it my SE/16.

It’s curious yours is only reporting at 8Mhz though. Mine reports correctly at 16Mhz in everything... I wonder if there were different revisions. And yeah, it’s a 68000 not an 68030. It makes the SE a very usable machine, though.