Macintosh SE color

This is a very common misconception - digital photos of some of these compact Mac tubes give the picture a slightly blue or green tinge. It is due to the type of phosphor coating used on the inside front of the tube and is present in many of the compacts.

I didn't notice anything color about the screen, nor was there mention of it being color either. Definitely what MacMan mentioned since the only compact Macs that came in color were the Color Classic series and the LC 5xx series (including the Macintosh TV).

The phosphors of a monochrome crt are actually somewhat bluish in hue in general, and a photo can accentuate this characteristic. That can give photos the illusion that the display is in color, but it's just good old monochrome.

Heck, before the Lisa and the Macintosh, most monochrome displays were shades of green, not black/white. (There were also a few amber (orangish-yellow,) and even a few red monochrome displays.)

Red displays were plasma from what I remember.

There was an applet that displayed a colour Apple menu icon on black and white Macs. It was an optical illusion but quite effective.

There were also some SCSI video adapters that drove external colour monitors. They were pallete based devices that used system software add-ons (probably INITs) to hook into QuickDraw. When an application drew one of the common QuickDraw patterns, it was mapped to a colour block on the external monitor. The number of applications that they supported were limited and the software was very sensitive to system version. The market was people using Macs for business presentations. Similar SCSI projector and slide writers were produced. Check the small ads in the back of Mac User during the late 1980s.

I think it was radius that had a card that would let you run greyscale on a se/30. IIRC, it had a external connector on the rear of the unit, so this se probably doesn't have one.

Also, the 'composite color' mode on the Apple II series was really digitally black and white, it just took advantage of some quirks of composite monitors to turn certain patterns into specific colors.

However, there have been hacks where people try and put color screens in compact macs. Wouldn't that be fun?

However, there have been hacks where people try and put color screens in compact macs. Wouldn't that be fun?

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I don't think that would work. The video circuitry would still output black and white. That would be like putting a color picture tube in a black and white television. It's not going to suddenly turn it into a color television without the right hardware generating a color signal.

The only way I can imagine it would even be possible would be if you had a Micron XCEED with the greyscale adaptor. In fact, here is a discussion on this very topic. Another thing you'd have to consider would be, does the SE/30 have a strong enough power supply to run a colour CRT?

The Samsung CRT is more likely to produce a blue tint than the Clinton from what I've seen. (See my stickied thread for more information about CRT types).

There are two issues at the root of any such project. First, what support does the hardware have for color, or what modifications will be needed to display color, and second and more importantly, does the version of QuickDraw stored in the machine's ROMs support color.

In the case of the SE, the ROMs contain plain old original QuickDraw, but a little known fact is that original QuickDraw actually has support built in for eight colors. For example, using Excel, an SE and an IWII with a 4-color ribbon, you can print colored cells in your spreadsheet. There is some method in Excel for specifying the color of cells, even though you won't see the colors on the screen.

So, I think, in theory, one might be able to build hardware that makes use of those eight supported colors in early QuickDraw and get 3-bit color (eight colors) out of the Classic, SE and Plus. The external boxes which produced color displays may have made use of this feature of early Quickdraw.

In the case of the SE/30 the work is relatively easy because it is just a IIcx with the NuBus slots sawed off, and the equivalent of a PDS/NuBus video card added to the logic board. The video card is monochrome (1 bit) but it does have its very own VRAM chips and such. More importantly, the SE/30 has full Color QuickDraw support in ROM. So to display gray scale or color, one merely needs to interface hardware which reports its support for colors or grayscale to the Display Manager (IIRC) and then does all the fancy work as a frame buffer and analog video output.

Has anyone put an LCD display into an SE/30 and built and interface for it yet? I mean with the SE/30 logic board still in place. I'm not interested in Mac Minis in an SE/30 case.

A 9" colour CRT probably wouldn't fit in the case of a compact Mac anyway because the tube and electron gun assembly is longer than in a monochrome CRT, so it would have to stick out of the back of the case.