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Things to consider when buying a Macintosh SE

tinkerBOY

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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.

They came with a 20mb hdd on the first model, my advice is get a scsi2sd as old scsi drives from apple are pretty much hosed at this point.

There are upgrade boards for the system using the pds slot, I have one. Its called the mobius card I think,. So I have a 25mhz 68030 and an FPU as well as 4 more ram sockets. You need to run a driver to utilize the extra ram, and another driver to utilize the cpu/fpu.

I upgraded them with coin-cell batteries for the rtc.

If you want to make floppies or download and unpack system software its best to have a highend 68030 or 68040 system with a large hard drive and cd rom or a power pc based mac to expand the software and make floppies for the SE.

There is also an ISO apple released in 1999 called the legacy recovery cd, which has EVERYTHING apple released for apple II, lisa, Newton, and all the classic MAC os's on it to make disks from or install a system. The CD is bootable (but not really on the MAC SE, need a newer mac) I have the ISO if you need it. No matter where you get it from its probably the same ISO and some of the classic Mac os's have corrupted disk images, regardless its a handy CD.
 
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.
 
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.

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. :)
 
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..

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.

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. :)

No Macintosh formatted floppy is readable on Windows without special tools. In order to have a floppy that can be used in both machines, it will have to be formatted in FAT12. This can be done in DOS, Windows or on the Mac with the PC Exchange control panel installed. PC Exchange is important because it allows the Mac to read and write to DOS formatted floppy disks. Without it, the Macintosh will not be able to read DOS formatted disks and treat them as unreadable.

The problem with transferring files back and forth though is that Windows clobbers the resource fork of any Macintosh file that it reads, so you need to store whatever you're moving back and forth in a container like a Stuffit Expander archive, binhex or zip archive. You'll immediately know when a file has a destroyed resource fork, because the icon is usually missing. If it's an application, Mac OS won't know how to use it because Mac OS uses resource forks to store program code.
 
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.
 
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.

I Didn't do that and I can use 1.44MB disks just fine. All I did was the upper and lower rom with a new drive.

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.


Are you sure about that? I have my SE and FDHD open right now and both look identical inside.
 
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.
 
I recommend a shareware program called MacDisk for interacting with mac formatted 1.44MB disks on a windows PC. Works on windows 10 too. Of course you can always just use winimage or rawrite or equivalent to write a DSK image directly to the floppy in windows too
 
I use HFVExplorer and WinImage. With HFVExplorer you can copy stuff into a blank Mac disk image and then write it to disk using WinImage.
 
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.

I have both a regular SE and a SE FDHD and they're both identical in terms of board placement. The only difference is the FDHD has different holes stamped in the metal plate between the logic board and the drive cage because it's designed to be used with the Mac Classic as well. 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.
 
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.

I am looking at my SE and FDHD and they both have the vertical expansion cutout and vertical mounting points. Floppy cutout is the same as well.
 
My suggestions echo what has been said here:

1. always inspect the inside of the mac for exploded battery (and then remove the batt when you get it and replace w/ coin type)
2. wait and get a FDHD, you will save a lot of time by being able to use the 1.4M floppies in newer macs (or setup AppleTalk and transfer software that way-> NetaTalk)

They are the 2nd best Mac (first is the se/30) and I love using mine.
 
I have never even come across an SE/30 in the wild. I have come across DOZENS AND DOZENS of the rest. (most of which are the horrific Classics which I wont touch with a stick.. All of them melted by batteries,, just best to assume is dead and not waste a buck on them!)

Seems the SE/30 is as elusive as the Twiggy Mac, in places I searched anyway :D
 
If you were around any east coast uni in the 90's then they were to be had for nothing by the dozens. I used to have about 5, and slowly gave or traded away (or left as I moved around) except for one I kept and re-capped. I would see them in Craig's list every once in a while but yes, in the past 10 years they have become more scarce as have a lot of things. I can only imagine how many have been destroyed by Varta...

The 'Twiggy Mac' IMHO is a SE/30 with a Radius Color Card and Apple 13" RGB monitor on the side..
 
I almost have the "awesome Mac" as well. I have a mobius Expansion board for the SE which has a 68030 at 25mhz and a 25mhz FPU with 4 more RAM slots (so essentially my SE is an SE/30... Mostly) It has an expansion for video out but I dont have the connector.. Supposedly someone reverse engineered the pin header and got it to work but the video card option on mine sits blank.. Would be pretty nice to hook it up to a portrait monitor or something unique. But I suppose a color monitor running 640 x 480 or better would be nice.
 
I'm guessing you have the TotalSystems Gemini Ultra upgrade board, at least that's what it sounds like. I have one of those boards too, and it's actually faster than an SE/30.

The only problem is that the memory on the upgrade board can't be used as normal system memory, so you're stuck with the 4 MB max, vs the 128 MB of the SE/30. There is a way to map it to a RAM Disk and use it for virtual memory via Compact Virtual, but it's not the same as having physical memory and applications will be memory bottlenecked still.

As for the external video on the board, it's not really worth it. It runs at a strange non-standard resolution and is still only black and white, not even greyscale.
 
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