Thread

Mac SE with a weird PDS card

68kMLA Hardware 22 posts Mar 22, 2008 to Mar 31, 2008

#1 Sat, 22 Mar 2008 - 12:33 68kMLA

Wel, I went to my favorite place for old electronics once again, Astro Too, and found a Mac SE just sittin on the floor! So I managed to get it for free! There was also an LC II, should I go back and get it, even tho it didnt power up?

EDITL Pics of the card will soon follow, i just need to get the machine in my house, past my dad first!

#2 Sat, 22 Mar 2008 - 13:33 68kMLA

It's debatable about getting the LC. For free you can afford to take your chances with it, but you take a big risk if they want money for it. Those old LC's suffer from leaky capacitors the same as the SE/30's so if it's been sitting for while with leaks the motherboard could be rotted away in places. So basically if it's free, go for it, you have nothing to lose as it could be repairable or at the very least you might get some usable parts out of it.

#3 Sat, 22 Mar 2008 - 13:37 68kMLA

At least pop the lid and check for obvious signs of goo around the caps. It may not power up because the PRAM battery is dead. If you have a good battery, take it in with you. If not, try the on for a while, quick off-on trick.

#4 Sat, 22 Mar 2008 - 17:04 68kMLA

NO MAC LEFT BEHIND. Save them all!

#5 Sat, 22 Mar 2008 - 19:27 68kMLA

i went back today and found out why it was not powering up. the ps is clicking so i left it. and also ran into a fellow mla'er sawtoothdude

#6 Sat, 22 Mar 2008 - 23:10 68kMLA

My LC stopped powering up a while ago due to the clicking PSU. I was in a hurry to test some things and was a bit annoyed 'cuz I didn't have another LC to use.

So, I ripped open the PSU to see what I could see. Lo, and behold: the caps in the PSU had leaked goo all over inside it. I gave it the kitchen-sink treatment and my LC is working fine again. Someday I'll have to recap the PSU but I bet that won't be for a few years at least.

#7 Sun, 23 Mar 2008 - 14:46 68kMLA

well, i just cracked the SE open, and lo and behold, the card inside is none other that an AST Mac86!!!!!!! Any idea where i can find some drivers, im not sure that I can get the drivers off the internal hd, because its having severe stiction problems

#8 Mon, 24 Mar 2008 - 05:25 68kMLA

Congrats on an awesome find! I hope you have good luck getting it running. System 6 / Minix anyone?

#9 Mon, 24 Mar 2008 - 07:11 68kMLA

Good Lord! Is that an x86 in an SE??

#10 Mon, 24 Mar 2008 - 13:51 68kMLA

Good Lord! Is that an x86 in an SE??

http://lowendmac.com/ii/mac286.html

looks like. pretty frickin cool.

#11 Mon, 24 Mar 2008 - 14:17 68kMLA

Holy crap that was sweet find. There's not many SE's out there that can run DOS anymore. I have a similar thing for the Atari ST called the Supercharger that has an 8086 and came with MSDOS 4.01.

#12 Mon, 24 Mar 2008 - 14:45 68kMLA

i just cant find the drivers for it! i am trying to get the hard drive to spin, but i think its dead, already tried hitting it and freezing it.

#13 Mon, 24 Mar 2008 - 15:06 68kMLA

Try holding it in your hands and spinning, sometimes it will make the stiction lose it's grip.

#14 Mon, 24 Mar 2008 - 15:16 68kMLA

i just cant find the drivers for it!

Have you tried the ones for the Mac286?

#15 Mon, 24 Mar 2008 - 16:14 68kMLA

awesome find!

#16 Mon, 24 Mar 2008 - 19:55 68kMLA

Never heard of that board, nice find. AST sold off their designs to Orange Micro, I like their 386 and 486 Nubus cards.

Whatever you do don't junk that SE HD, I would think the rare drivers are on that disk. Could be the heads are stuck to the platters.

#17 Tue, 25 Mar 2008 - 07:05 68kMLA

What make/model hard drive is it? Several older drives, from IBM, MiniScribe, Quantum, Sony, and a few others had the bottom of the spindle motor exposed thru the lower case.

Sometimes, on some of these older drives, removing the drive's PCB and giving the spindle motor a LIGHT spin will be enough to break the stiction.

#18 Tue, 25 Mar 2008 - 13:39 68kMLA

i really wanted one of the Orange Micro Athlon-based cards back in the day. of course, there are none on ebay because nobody bought them in the first place :-/

#19 Sun, 30 Mar 2008 - 22:03 68kMLA

Driver?

A quick visit to http://hotline.tracker-tracker.com and search for Mac86 turns up a 28.65MB file titled: TB2Mac86CD.dmg on the Hotline server Merlin at 91.16.65.134:5500

Cheers...

#20 Sun, 30 Mar 2008 - 23:21 68kMLA

A .dmg is a file that no SE on earth could ever read. Secondly, a driver for a computer that operates off a 1.4MB floppy or a 40MB hard drive is hardly going to be 26MB in size.

#21 Mon, 31 Mar 2008 - 00:07 68kMLA

Hummm...

Dear Dr B.

The question mark after the word driver was meant to indicate some doubt as to whether or not this file is the driver in question. The file, of course, may have nothing to do with the AST Mac86.

When I have a interesting hardware device that lacks only the driver software I check out everything that looks even close. Most of the time it turns out to be just as useless as you predict but sometimes...

Cheers

#22 Mon, 31 Mar 2008 - 00:44 68kMLA

Well, the 'driver' used a 20 MB disk image for use with the Mac286, so it's possible that the 'driver' was shipped with a 20 MB disk image. Just as how many of the questionably-legal OSx86 'Hackintosh' Torrent files aren't just for the couple-hundred-kilobyte hack-files, but are for a full disk image. Technically, that isn't *needed*, but it makes it easier to use. Likewise, I would imagine that the large file found on Torrent is the drivers PLUS the hard disk image.

Of course, after typing the above, I have determined that TB2Mac86CD.dmg is really "Timbuktu for Mac, version 8.6, CD image"