Restoring my first se/30

[Dudejustus]

Greetings all!

I stumbled upon this form after finding a se/30 at a thrift shop for 10 bucks. I'm in IT so when I saw it, I immediately snagged it without question. It's going to take a bit to even consider getting this thing to POST. I can tell who ever owned this last, attempted to recap the board, so its missing all its 47uf caps.

Missing the following parts:

Analog board

psu

floppy drive

scsi hdd

ram

battery

I'm making a post because I'd like to figure out why there's a wire jumping two relatively close chips together. Pin 4 of RP5 to pin 16 of UI3....? I'm assuming these two pins are ground or a bad trace but I want to be 100% sure before I try to power this guy on. Let me know what you guys think. Also, this se/30 was utilizing the expansion slot and i'm not sure what it was used for. I've already ordered the bare essentials to get this to boot, and I cant wait to start tinkering.  []

 

[bibilit]

IIRC this expansion board was used for an external display of some sort.

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Yep. This takes internal video and converts it to some odd signal a TTL monitor should be able to interpret. I say "should" because it's still running at the same refresh rate (and the Mac's refresh rate is not standard). This article describes in greater details the video signal.

I have a similar adapter. Mine has an additional plug for the Mac Plus.

 View attachment 14555

It's pretty straightforward to install. The real issue is that odd refresh rate. There are a few scalers/VGA converters on the market but I haven't gotten around to try any yet. Perhaps this cheap one works?

 

[Dudejustus]

Wow, thanks for sharing a picture of something similar Badgoldeagle. I was pretty sure it was for an external display but I'm not as knowledgeable on equipment that is this old. It will be interesting to see if the external adapter still works... My other worry is that who ever tried reworking the caps on this board damaged anything but the board looks really clean, especially around were the 1/2 AA battery goes.

 

[techknight]

You definitely bought a basketcase. Hopefully you can get it going. 

 

[BadGoldEagle]

No problem. Those adapters are pretty scarce. I think most of them were used in conjunction with a projector. That's what I intend to use it for, once I figure out a way to connect it to something 'modern'.

A few things you need to know about restoring these things:

1/ You should clean the board with isopropyl alcohol before you replace the old caps with the new ones. The old ones probably leaked all over the board and into crevices. 

2/ You don't (really) need a replacement battery. It's just there to keep track of time and some of the keyboard/mouse settings. You can find new ones quite easily but it might destroy your board in the future if you forget about it.

3/ For the missing parts, I recommend checking ebay and/or posting a thread in the Trading Post section of the forum. 

4/ Don't buy an old SCSI hard drive. Those are on their last legs. Get a newer 68 pin SCSI drive with a 68pin->50pin adapter or even better if you want to future proof your SE/30, a SCSI2SD.

5/ The Analog board and the PSU will need new caps too. You can probably get hold of refurbished units so you won't have to do it all yourself. 

6/ That extension connector is known as the SE/30 PDS slot. You can install an ethernet card, a color video card or even an accelerator (68030 or 040).

 

[Daniël]

Get a newer 68 pin SCSI drive with a 68pin->50pin adapter

Or 80 pin SCA drives, as long as they support the 8 bit "narrow" bus mode. Drives supporting this should have a jumper setting for it. And going above 7200RPM isn't recommended. 10k and higher RPM drives get hot and are loud.

 

[Dudejustus]

Techknight, I completely agree but this will be a great opportunity to get some use out of my new rework station! Badgoldeagle and Daniel, those are some great tips! I didn't even know a scsi to sd existed, that's awesome. I'm for sure digging those 68 pin scsi drive prices too, glad to know that's an option.... I saw a post on which caps are better, it was between Aluminum Electrolytic and Tantalum Capacitors, I'm assuming the Tantalum Capacitors are the better choice since last longer and dont... "Blow up" lol.

 

[Dudejustus]

The Se/30 project has been put on pause for a while but I've gotten serious about getting it running. So far I've washed the board with IPA, recapped the board with tantalum caps, ordered ram for bank 0 and have a working analog board. When I power it on, It gets the simasimac with death chime. I'm pretty sure its a slow chime so I've been checking every pin that simm1 and 2 connect to. So far all pins have continuity but I did find one break I haven't attempted repairing yet, UI8 pin 73 to UK8 L2 which is trace SI2 (0). It seems the break is between UI8 and the Via on the top side, would it be safe to run a jumper to the via or does it need to run to the other side of the board?

 

[LaPorta]

The schematics will let you know:

https://museo.freaknet.org/gallery/apple/stuff/mac/andreas.kann/schemat.html

I've been chasing a gremlin on my spare board for days...