portableleo

After some reading on the forums it looks like TechKnight got much further than me. Too bad the project seems to be on hold... maybe time to revisit it if there is enough interest?

Hi Guys, I had this wacky idea when I was reading about old Mac SE CPU upgrade cards... would it be possible to retrofit a 68030 CPU upgrade card made for an SE into the Mac Portable? Both use the same base CPU and same PDS slot (however with different pinouts). Assuming that a new harness would have to be made of course as the PDS slot pins are not the same. But, if all the pins on the upgrade card were hooked up to the correct pins on the PDS slot of the Mac Portable, would it work? I got so far as to compare both the PDS slots of the Mac SE and the Mac

hey Cheesestraws, thanks for your suggestion! I took a look at the link you sent and I worked out on the floppy connector: SEL is pin 12 CA0 is pin 2 CA1 is pin 4 CA2 is pin 6 I found this link https://github.com/ppieczul/macintosh-portable that shows the pinout of the SWIM chip: The pins you mentioned are not labeled on the diagram - I tried to check for continuity from pin 12 on the floppy connector to pin 16 on the swim chip and it appears they are not connected. I repeated this on my for parts m5120 and it also was not connected.

No worries at all. I have a hunch it’s a bad trace somewhere, but I can’t seem to see anything that looks obvious.

I don’t think so, as the floppy drives (all 3 of them) work in another macintosh portable 5126 I have. In the working machine, all 3 drives can read, write and initialize disks.

Hi guys. I’m attempting to restore a macintosh portable backlit for a friend and I’m running into a strange issue. The system boots just fine off the scsi hard disk but it keeps trying to spin up the floppy drive once I’m booted and telling me that the disk inserted cannot be read and needs to be initialized, when there is nothing in the drive. Most times when I click cancel the floppy drive will whirr again and the message will come back. Removing the floppy drive is my current get-around, but I would like my buddy to have a fully working Macintosh Portable. i

Hey Techknight thanks for getting back to me. The plot thickens, but I can rule out the cards as the issue, as the stock card is triggering the bus error now on boot as well. Though taking your advice, and setting up the cards for 5MB, it seems to work fine now, no boot problems and no flickering with that one working card in the 5 MB configuration, but the other card that didn’t work in my fist post when configured for 5 MB won’t boot at all (just chime and nothing no bus error either) With all the examples in my previous post, the jumpers were set at the 7MB on position

Hi all, First post here - I have been trying to restore a Macintosh Portable m5126 (backlit) model and I'm running into some problems when using the MacEffects 8Mb Memory Expansion card (https://maceffects.com/products/8mb-memory-upgrade-for-macintosh-portable-m5120-m5126). I have 3 memory cards total; the stock 3 MB (4MB?) card, and two MacEffects 8Mb Memory Expansion cards So with the stock 4mb card, things seem to work just fine. Here's video to show it's working normally: https://youtu.be/3rL3qQXVArk With one of the MacEffects 8Mb Memory Ex