tinkerBOY
Experienced Member
I'm planning on buying a Macintosh SE and would like to hear your suggestions on which specs to look for. Nothing big deal but I will be using it for testing USB converters.
If it's just for testing USB converters, I'd get a Classic instead. These are cheap and can even boot System 6 from ROM. Also, they come with a FDHD disk drive by default, so getting software onto it is very easy.I'm planning on buying a Macintosh SE and would like to hear your suggestions on which specs to look for. Nothing big deal but I will be using it for testing USB converters.
There's really not a lot in the realm of "specs", all Macintosh SE machines are the same, bar the RAM and storage options. They can come with 1, 2.5 or 4 MB of RAM and either one 800k floppy drive and a 20 MB hard drive, or two 800k floppy drives. The later Macintosh SE FDHD has one 1.44MB floppy and one 20 MB hard drive. This is the preferable machine to have because 800k floppies can only be read and written on other 68k Macs.
The more important thing to look out for is internally damaged/destroyed machines. Any compact mac is going to have a high chance of the clock battery exploding and leaking all over the logic board and the frame. Problems with the analog board and power supply are also common due to failed/leaking capacitors. Bad solder joints on the analog board and neck board are also very common due to the heat. The CRT having bad burn-in is yet another issue if the machine has high hours since people tended to not use screen savers on their machine.
In the worst case, you can end up spending several hundred dollars in parts for an old Mac SE to get it working.
One key thing is there is a macintosh SE and an Macintosh SE FDHD (I have both and can show you photos) the FDHD came stock with a newer ROM that supproted the 2MB superdrive (which was included). The standard SE still used the 800KB floppy drive. I upgraded my standard SE with Roms I found on ebay (you need to swap 2 roms from what I remember the "upper" and "lower" roms. It was like 5 years ago best to consult the internet) but besides the roms, pop in a superdrive and your good..
Yes I would love to have the one with 1.44mb floppy drive but is the diskette readable/writeable from a Windows machine with a floppy drive? I do have a Mac128k with 400k disk drive and a Mac Plus with 800k drive. I just make disk from my old Powerbook 170.
You can't just replace the ROMs and floppy drive and it will work. You also need to replace the IWM floppy disk controller with a SWIM floppy disk controller to be able to read and write 1.44M disks.
The FDHD case was different internally as well giving you more headroom to install a SE CPU upgrade.
Mostly you have to look out for exploded PRAM batteries more then anything.
From what I recal there is more room under the cage above the logic board on the FDHD. I couldn't get a Radius 020 CPU upgrade installed into an early SE but the same board fit fine in my FDHD.
It has a hole and mounting tabs for the vertical memory expansion board, as well as a larger opening for the power connector and one additional hole for the moved over floppy connector.