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Spent yesterday replacing the two 22 AWG +5V wires in the Mac SE/30 cable harness from the analog board to motherboard with 16 AWG. Voltages at floppy port went from 4.78V before to 4.98V after. Quite an improvement!

My monster SE/30 rig is getting bigger and more stable.

paulrickards

You may remember that I recapped my Radius PowerView a few months ago. Recently the video started getting distorted. Turns out there’s still cap goo on the board causing issues. Gonna clean it in the ultrasonic.

Got my Mac SE/30 SCSI chain fully populated with more things! And no termination issues! 😎

Top down, beige Epson Zip 100, Iomega Jaz 1GB, Logitech ScanMan, Apple CD 300i, SyQuest 88MB. Not pictured: internal BlueSCSI v1.

I opened the CD-ROM drive to discover a present: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis for Mac. It has both 68k and PPC versions on the disc and it works on the SE/30.

@paulrickards I’ve never seen a beige Zip drive!

@paulrickards What's the enclosure on the bottom two? I haven't seen many external 5.25 enclosures for more than one thing (and kinda wish they were more of a thing, albeit with SAS or USB these days)

@becomethewaifu It's just a generic external SCSI enclosure. No name brand on it. It originally came with a giant full height SCSI drive inside but it has provisions for two separate half-height devices, like I have now.

@paulrickards you magical maniac! you have conquered SCSI Voodoo!

@paulrickards @ai6yr very cool to see that! Does all that run? No capacitor or power supply or rubber belt issues?

@sfoskett @ai6yr Yep! It works now that I've recapped it all 🙂

@paulrickards @sfoskett I've got my Powerbook 140 which needs recapping, but I have not yet done that. It boots up but no screen display...

@ai6yr @sfoskett I recapped the display in my PowerBook 160 (likely similar procedure). I had to revisit it two years later because there was still capacitor juice on the board causing issues. Cleaning it more thoroughly fixed it.

biosrhythm.com/?p=2007

biosrhythm.com» Recapping the Apple PowerBook 160 LCD Display

@paulrickards what is an epson zip drive vs a plain iomega one?

@dustinrue No difference. Epson sold then too and put it in a beige case. This was my Zip drive back then. I bought it because it was a few dollars cheaper on sale at the time.

@paulrickards I never knew there was an epson variant. Nice

@paulrickards Where did you find a beige one?! Also, mad props for using all the SCSI IDs!

@philpem Thanks! I bought it new back in the day. It was slightly cheaper at the time (maybe on sale?) so I got it instead of the Iomega blue version. It served me well then and continues to work great!

@paulrickards I've noticed that the Iomega ones are like that too. They either die early or last forever. I'm currently trying to find a way to get an ATAPI one working behind a SATA adapter. Works on Windows but not on Linux.

@paulrickards Holy COW! That's a lot of SCSI action! Great job!

@kalleboo It’s a mess for sure. It’s a challenge puzzling the cables together with the right connector and length.

What’s your SCSI tower look like from the front?

@paulrickards This was the final set up, front and rear and screenshot

I have a blog post on it here kalleboo.com/retrotech/perip/s

@kalleboo @paulrickards Man, I’ve got the nostalgias for a 3.5" MO drive.

My favourite external storage system of all time.

Is that a 640MB one I see on its side? How do they go with the smaller disk capacities?

I did a bad thing and now know you can get USB ones from aliexpress.

I almost feel like getting one just for the feels.

@kalleboo @paulrickards Oh, and I love the SCSI ID slider on the NEC drive - *so* convenient! 😵‍💫

@europlus @paulrickards It’s handy when you’re just messing around but seems too tempting for a kid or someone to play with if you’re actually using it for production haha

@europlus @paulrickards I had never heard of MO before I moved to Japan and saw them all over. Reading up about them I got really angry that they never took off elsewhere, and instead we got the crappy proprietary and unreliable Zip drives as a “large disk” de-facto standard! If the world had adopted MO as a bigger floppy it would have really been so much better!

In my experience the 640 drive has been backwards compatible with the 230 MB disks at least.

@europlus @kalleboo @paulrickards all 3.5“ MO drives are downwards compatible: 540 MB (512 bytes sectors), 640 MB (2048), 1300 MB, 2300 MB to older media

@europlus @kalleboo @paulrickards Still looking for a Fujitsu DynaMO DMO13LT (1.3 GB USB, small form factor), these are rare in the EU. Same for the Panasonic LF-1500E or LF-1600 (external Phase Change / PD and CD-ROM drive).

@3rz @europlus @paulrickards Just as we’re talking about MO drives another one shows up

@kalleboo @3rz @paulrickards

FOR ¥1,650??!!

I thought it was shrink wrapped, but I see it’s possibly reboxed and cling-wrapped. Man, so tempted to ask you to ship it for me (if you’re willing), anyway.

@europlus The label on it says “Powered on. Did not recognize a floppy” so either it doesn’t work or they had trouble testing it

@kalleboo ha - it doesn’t use floppies - I wonder if they tried a floppy disk instead of a 3.5" MO disk? 😵‍💫

@europlus Yeah I wonder. Would it even fit though??

@kalleboo I’m happy to pay for the drive and your time to test it with MO disks, and post if working?! 🙏🏻

@europlus Alright I’ll pick it up on my way back later

@europlus Do you also need literal piles of Mac-formatted MO disks for 20 yen each? lol

@kalleboo wouldn’t mind some disks as well, larger the better, but some 230MB for old time’s sake would be nice if available.

@europlus Got home, plugged it into my Sequoia MacBook Pro, seems to work perfectly 🤷‍♂️

@kalleboo so, next question is how much to ship to Aus?!

Seems maybe they did test with floppies! 😵‍💫

@kalleboo I don’t necessarily need tracking, but is there a speed difference? That is actually cheaper than I feared, either way!

@europlus The cheap option says it’s sent via regular letter mail and makes no guarantees for delivery time. The expensive option (EMS) says guaranteed 9 days.

@kalleboo Wow super cool stack! I've heard of MO discs before but never had the opportunity to use them. You have a lot more HPDB50 connectors available than I do (only the Jaz drive has it). Most are DB25 or Centronics.

@paulrickards It seems they were really popular in Japan for PC98 SCSI accessories

@kalleboo @paulrickards how can you NOT call this the Tower of Power??

@paulrickards Great game! Also, love the screen upgrade on that SE :D

@paulrickards Such a great game. The intro alone is amazing.

@paulrickards I love how the beginning of the game has the credits playing over it. Great memories.

@paulrickards is the game applying some sort of upscaling filter on Mac or is the photo?

@ideimos The Mac resolution is set to 640x480 here and the native resolution of the LCD panel is 1024x768 so there is upscaling happening. But not sure if that's what you're seeing.

@paulrickards Now I'm wondering if that might be why I'm having sync issues with some old VGA cards. I've already seen VCO loop filter cap issues in RISC PCs, hmm