I recently picked up this old Macintosh SE for $10.
It's pretty yellow, dirty, and has quite a few scuffs on it.
But for $10 I can hardly complain.
So the first thing I wanted to do was plug it in, power on, and perform what we sometimes
call the smoke test.
Well, I was pleasantly surprised that it did power on and displayed in image on the screen.
No smoke.
Don't worry, the screen had a solid image on it, my camera's refresh rate was playing
havoc with the recording here.
However, it appeared the hard drive was dead, and I also couldn't get it to boot from
floppy.
So, I'm going to completely tear this thing down and do a full restoration on the computer.
And while I'm at it, I'm going to replace the original SCSI hard drive with this.
It's an SD to SCSI adapter, which is basically an emulator that emulates a SCSI drive, only
it stores the information on a modern storage device, an SD card.
This is going to make the computer quieter, faster, more reliable.
But the most important thing is it will easily allow me to to transfer games and software
from the modern world of the internet over to the old Mac.
The first thing you'll need to take apart one of these old compact macs is a special
screwdriver, I often call them the "Mac Cracker."
It's a essentially just a very long T15 torx driver.
I always put down a towel when working on stuff like this, to avoid scratching up the
face.
And here's where the Mac Cracker comes in handy.
There are two screws under the handle, and two more screws on the back.
OK, so let's lift the back off and take a look.
OK, so here's what we have to disassemble now.
I did watch EEVBlog's disassembly of the Macintosh SE.
Now I'm not sure if this one actually works, it is supposed to so we'll find out after
the teardown.
However, he only took out the logic board.
I am going to take it completely apart so that I can retrobrite the plastics.
There are some cables to unplug for the disk drive and hard drive.
However, this particular cable is hard to reach.
But I found that if I removed this back plate first, that made it a lot easier to reach.
I was going to slide out the logic board, but I realized somebody never put it in correctly
last time somebody had it apart.
You see, it's supposed to slide down these grooves here.
OK, so here's the board and it is quite dusty.
I'll need to clean this off.
But hey, take a look at this.
The battery hasn't leaked, and I'm quite gratefull about that.
So the battery has a date of 1989 on it, I don't know if that is the manufacture date
or expiration date.
Anyway, I ordered a new one on ebay for $8.
So let's take a look at the logic board.
It's a surprisingly simple board.
Let's have a look at what makes it tick.
So for starters, this HUGE chip here is the Motorola 68000 microprocessor.
This is the same processor that was used in the Amiga, Atari ST, and even the old Sun
workstations.
These two chips are the high and low system ROMs.
This is the PDS slot which allowed various expansion cards to be connected, including
an ethernet card which I really wish I had.
This is a VIA chip, or versatile interface adapter.
It basically gives the processor some general purpose input/output lines.
This is a SCSI controller chip, which handles the hard drive and any external SCSI devices.
This is called a SWIM, which stands for Super Woz Integrated Machine.
It controls the floppy drive.
This is called the BBU, which stands for Bob Bailey Unit.
It does many things, including video generation.
This is the serial controller chip, which handles the serial ports on the back.
These, of course, are the RAM modules Oh, and this tiny little chip here is the sound
chip.
It's very basic, so it doesn't do much.
So, back to disassembly.
I'm removing this entire bracket, which holds the hard drive and floppy drive.
I am taking care to avoid the high voltage components since this thing could still have
a charge on it.
So here's what I pulled out.
Yikes!
Look how dusty that is.
No wonder the floppy doesn't work.
So here's the hard drive, we won't be needing this anymore, thank goodness.
So I'll definitely be taking the floppy out of this bracket too so that I can clean
it up, maybe get it working.
OK, so now I'm going to deal with the CRT.
Now, I know some people get freaked out at the thought of dealing with a CRT.
And perhaps that is for good reason because you can kill yourself on these things, although
it's not terribly common, it does happen.
And the thing is, if you know what you're doing and you take proper precautions, it's
relatively safe.
Now, want to talk a little about how electric shocks work.
Remember that electricity always takes the easiest route.
So if you were to stick your arm in the machine and the positive touched you here, and the
negative touched you here, it's going to hurt, but its probably not going to kill you.
On the other hand, if you are using both hands, and the current travels across your body,
and of course your heart, that is where really bad things can happen.
So obviously we want to discharge the CRT before we go any further.
So just attach an alligator clip to the ground lug of the CRT.
Then attach the other end to a long flat tip screwdriver.
Then you just insert the screwdriver under this rubber suction cup and touch the metal
clips.
If it sparks, you know you've discharged it.
In my case, it didn't spark so the bleeder resistor had already done its job and discharged
it over the last hour while I was working on it.
So, eventually you want to pop the suction cup off.
Then you can lift this little board right off the back.
It connects exactly like an old vacuum tube.
These wires here control the magnets on the tube, and they need to be unplugged.
Ok, next order of business is to remove the analog board.
There are two screws up here and two more down here, plus one over here for the ground
wire.
Then you can carefully lift the board out of the machine.
There are 4 large screws holding the CRT to the machine.
You need to remove those with the torx driver.
Then you can lift the tube right out of the machine.
All that is left now are 5 screws holding the chassis to the front panel.
So, there we have it.
The front cover to the Mac.
But, we still have to deal with this speaker.
Unfortunately, they melted plastic in order to hold the speaker on.
So I'll have to cut this plastic in order to get the speaker out.
And there we have it.
So, now we can move on to the cleaning phase.
I always want to use the spray especially to clean out all fo the vents and crevasses
on the machine.
I always clean pretty much every part that I took out of the machine, no matter how trivial
it seems.
Although granted, I pay a lot more attention to the exterior case pieces.
It's very important to get this super clean.
And while the retrobrite is an important step, I think a lot of people neglect the all important
process of hard scrubbing to get all of the marks and imperfections cleaned.
Sometimes these marks seem permanent but there is almost always some way to get them off
if you are willing to put the work into it.
Sometimes I find it easier to put the pieces in my lap where it is easier to work on them.
OK, now it is time to lay the plastic out for the retrobrite process.
I always use a paintbrush to make sure I get every part of the surface coated in the hydrogen
peroxide solution.
I also spread it out evenly on the plastic wrap too.
Then I fold it all up and make sure it is more or less air tight.
Then I take it out to sit in the sun for a few hours.
The larger case piece proved to be somewhat more challenging, as it required quite a few
extra pieces of plastic wrap.
I had to coat it in stages and overlap the plastic wrap.
But it wasn't hard.
I brought it out to set next to its sister piece.
I ended up leaving these in the sun for about 4 hours.
Every 30 minutes I would come out and rotate the pieces for even exposure.
I also massaged the cream around inside the plastic wrap each time as well.
While waiting on that, I turned my attention to the floppy drive.
I cleaned it out with compressed air.
Then I used alcohol and cleaned the read heads.
I also re-lubricated many of the parts where the grease had dried up.
I also got to work on building an adapter plate.
OK.
So what I need to do now is figure out how to mount this nicely in there.
In fact, if I look at the original hard drive, and line up the screw holes, it lines up about
right there.
So, if I wanted to be accurate, actually it looks like this needs to be flipped around.
And I have to be able to mount it.
I need to be able to mount it about right there.
So I grabbed a piece of sheet aluminum I had laying around, and I used the original hard
drive as a template.
I took it outside and used my dremel to cut the piece out.
Once I got it out, I used a file to smooth those sharp, jagged edges.
My wife used one of her little tools to stamp out the line where it needs to be bent, this
will make it easier to bend exactly where we need.
That worked out pretty well, so I drew my holes using the original bracket as a template.
So I put this vinyl tape on here.
It's not really necessary, but it makes me feel better and you'll see why later.
I also wanted to be able to operate the front LED on the Macintosh, so I had to add a little
2-prong header onto the board and solder it on.
Here's what it looks like and you can see how it connects to the LED now.
So 4 hours have passed and the sun is starting to set anyway.
So I decided it was time to unwrap the plastics and rinse them off.
And here are the finished case pieces.
You can see this looks fantastic now!
Next it was time for dealing with this speaker.
Since there are no screws and I had to remove the plastic holding it on, I had to use some
epoxy to secure it back in place.
I had to actually let this cure overnight before I could mess with it any further.
However, the next morning it seemed to be held in place quite nicely.
So I reassembled the computer with just enough parts to make sure everything is still working
after my cleaning.
At first it didn't appear to be working, but then I realized I needed to check the
brightness control since I had been messing with that during cleaning.
And there's the picture, looks like it is still working.
I wanted to see if it would boot from a floppy now.
But, unfortunately, it would not.
The drive just moves around, but it can't seem to read the disk.
I also noticed it was making a bad noise when it tried to eject.
I pulled the ejector mechanism apart and discovered some broken teeth on these plastic gears.
I tried booting from an external floppy, but that didn't seem to work either.
I think the external is a low density and my boot disks are high density.
So I snagged the floppy drive from my old Macintosh Plus.
It sits on my shelf and looks cool, but otherwise I've never been able to get it to work.
The downside is that it is only a low density drive.
I got in the new battery so I went ahead and swapped that out.
I also left this blank open on the back with the USB cable hanging out, this way I can
update the firmware or even read and write data to the SD card using a modern computer.
If this works, I'll come back later and buy one of these panel mount USB connectors
and mount it in this spare plate so it will look nice.
Nevertheless the computer will boot with the low density drive and now I'm able to try
initializing my emulated hard drive on the SD card.
I have the HDSC program on a second floppy using an external drive.
It requires a modified version of this software because the version that Apple supplied back
during this time will only recognize apple branded SCSI drives.
However, I've used this patched version on many generic drives in the past and never
had an issue with it.
Well, here goes.
Looks like the LED I wired up is working.
However, I kept getting this error message when it tried to write to the disk.
Well, like always, these sort of projects don't always go to plan.
So, I've got the Macintosh SE more or less completely restored and functioning now, but
as you can see, I can't get the SD-2-SCSI device to work.
Now, a lot of people have had good luck using the SD-2-SCSI device on their old Macs.
But I can't find any evidence that anyone has ever tried it on a Macintosh SE model.
So, I've been going back and forth with the creator of the SD-2-SCSI device and I've
sent him some log files and he's sent me some custom firmwares to try, and nothing
has worked.
But, the question has been raised - we don't know for sure if the SCSI controller in this
Mac is working correctly.
After all, when I got it, it wouldn't boot from the hard drive to begin with.
So, I've never confirmed that that works.
So there's one of two problems.
Problem 1 is the SD-2-SCSI device is simply incompatible with this model.
That may be something we just have to live with.
I may have to use it on a different device.
Problem number 2 could be there is something wrong with this machine.
The only way to really troubleshoot that is to get my hands on another Macintosh SE.
Well, I just happen to know somebody in town who owns one.
The Obsolete Geek did an episode a while back about installing a SCSI emulator device in
his Macintosh SE, which is really similar to the device I have except his is a different
brand and uses compact flash instead of SD cards.
Well, he just lives across town so I asked him if I could borrow his for some troubleshooting.
And so, the Obsolete Geek did, in fact, loan me his Macintosh SE.
Now, you can tell his is not in nearly as good of shape as mine is after the complete
restore.
But hey, his works!
So, I'm going to start taking it apart and take this one apart, and we're going to
swap some parts and find out what's going on.
So I have the two torn apart and I put my SD-2-SCSI device connected to Rob's Mac.
So I'm booting his up.
Now you can see his has this accelerator logo, which I'll talk more about that later.
So here we are and I'm about to find out if this device is going to work in a Macintosh
SE.
Well, it didn't even give an error, it just locked up completely.
So I think we can assume this device is not going to work.
But, I still wanted to confirm that my Macintosh SE was actually working, so I took his hard
drive emulator and connected it to to my Mac and tried to initialize a fresh flash card.
Well, my Mac ended up locking up on his device too.
So now I'm back to square one.
But keep in mind these units aren't entirely identical.
Rob's Mac has this accelerator card on the logic board which changes things quite a bit.
And I suppose there is always this possibility that my software disk has a problem.
So, in one last ditch effort, I used Apple Pi Baker in order to copy a working hard drive
image that somebody sent me from another Macintosh SE, to see if I could get it to boot directly
from the SD card without having to actually install the operating system on there.
And, to my amazement it did actually boot part of the way up, but it would always lock
up at some point during the boot process.
I tried this several times, so apparently this was a no-go as well.
But, it does prove that the card is at least somewhat operational with the computer.
So, I think we've come to the end of this project for the time being.
I still don't know 100% sure if the SCSI bus in this computer is working correctly
or not.
And the only way I'm probably going to find out at this point is to buy or find an original
SCSI drive, and I know somebody who's got one and I'm going to try to arrange that
later next week.
In the meantime, I wanted to mention that it's still not a total failure.
While it's unfortunate that I didn't get the SD-2-SCSI device working, the machine
is otherwise perfectly operational.
And you can use these things without a hard drive.
You can run quite a few old games and stuff on just the floppy drive.
It's just not nearly as convenient, and the main problem is getting software over
to these double density floppy disks.
It's really a pain because the modern USB floppy drives won't write to these.
There is another alternative, by the way.
There's another product out there that will emulate a Macintosh floppy drive.
And one of the neat things about that, besides the fact that you can copy a whole bunch of
different disk images over to this device, but it can also emulate an external hard drive
using the floppy port, because Apple actually did make some external hard drives that plugged
into the floppy port.
So it wouldn't be as fast as an internal SCSI drive, but it would certainly work, so
even if the SCSI bus in this thing is not working, that's still an alternative that
it could use.
Oh, and another thing is, according to the website with this product, it has been tested
on the Macintosh SE/30.
Which, that is the compact Mac I've always wanted, because that was like the best black
and white compact Mac they ever made.
And so if I ever get my hands on an SE/30, then I'm going to put this inside of it.
As always, I hope you enjoyed this adventure, and stick around because I've got more adventures
coming up!
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