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$2 Find: Macintosh IIci w/ Carrera040 Card

E

EMDarrow

Experienced Member
Joined
Jan 29, 2017
Messages
116
Location
California (92548)
I picked this system up just recently from an e-waste facility for literally pennies. I know nothing about Macs (I've always been a PC guy), but it was too vintage and in too good of physical condition to just let it go to scrap. Getting it home, I found it was almost immaculately clean inside, with almost no dust or anything.

I have no way to test it but I do know the PSU works, but the HDD sounds dead when firing it up. Its a very clean system physically, so I figure the chances are high that it does still work, beyond the HDD.

Anyone have any suggestions on how I can test this further? Short of buying adapters or original Mac keyboard/monitor, that is. I really just want to see this go to someone who will keep it out of the scrap heap, but I'd like to be able to tell people a bit more about its condition. I also know very little about this Carrera040 card, beyond the fact that one (with an additional daughter board) sold on ebay for $180.
 
Very neat find. Many vendors made cpu cards, you could plug a PPC into a Mac II. I tend to draw the line at the IIfx. Though I ain't got one yet. The IIci looks like a IIcx externally if I remember correctly, but was different somehow. Can't remember. Maybe I should look it up.

You should here a chime when powering up
 
ADB keyboards and mice should be easy and cheap to find in CA. The IIci has built in video and you will need a cheap adapter to connect it to a VGA monitor or LCD.
Looks like there are 4x16MB SIMMs in there also.

Systems of that age seem to have capacitor rot on the motherboard (easy enough to fix).
 
640x480 8 bit. You might have issues with an LCD and scan rates but an old CRT should work.
 
Apple RAM tended to not have parity chips (so 8 chips instead of 9 on a 30 pin SIMM so cheaper to make), PC's needed parity. So you can use PC memory on a mac but Mac specific memory might cause problems on a PC.
 
You will need to do a recap. I've heard stories that the strangely packaged SMD ones on that era of Quantum drives like to go bad but I can clearly see the ones on the logic board are leaking, plus the power supply is known for needing new caps as well.
 
Should work OK with an LCD. You may need an adapter. I found that the kind with dip switches seem to work better than the passthrough adapters.

IIci differed from the IIcx in three distinct ways:

PDS Slot
Integrated Video
32-bit clean ROM

The PDS slot is really cool as it allows you to connect a card that talks directly to the CPU. Yours has one of the best upgrades available for it, a 68040 upgrade. They're fairly expensive, so you made out like a bandit.

You can have up to 128MBs of RAM in that sucker. :)

IIci is one of my favorite vintage Macs. Expandable and plenty fast. You have an excellent computer.

It will need to be recapped, though. The PSU may need a recap, too. At the very least, give the motherboard a good scrub. Keep those bad caps from eating the traces and legs on those ICs.
 
So what's the difference between a Mac II/IIx say with a heavy weight nubus accelerator, and a IIci with a comparable pds accelerator? Is the difference in the card? Iow less logic required on the pds card, or can considerably more be accomplished? Granted nubus is going to have slower transfers or more overhead, but in many accelerator setups the host becomes essentially a terminal anyway.

And is the chipset in the IIci essentially the same as the one in the IIcx? I realize the ci is 25mhz, while the cx is only 16.
 
The IIcx is more like a smaller version of the Macintosh II and IIx rather than the IIci. The IIci is slightly faster as you noted. I don't know enough about the hardware to say if the chipsets are the same.
 
The PDS slot of the IIci that can take an accelerator without an adapter is why they are so great. Built in video is crappy but better then nothing, it leaves you more Nubus slots open if you need them. A big box Mac II needs either a rare and expensive Radius Rocket for a CPU upgrade of an equally rare adapter plus expensive Daystar card.

I have a Daystar PDS adapter for the IIcx in use, plus one for the LC II/III and Mac II. Those adapters are hard to find. PDS is faster then Nubus for a CPU upgrade.
 
I have a 68030 25 MHz accelerator card for a LC/LC II that I pulled out of a dumpster 20 years ago, but no idea if it works lol.
 
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