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Dead Mac LC475

carlsson

Veteran Member
Joined
Jul 30, 2003
Messages
6,274
Location
Västerås, Sweden
A few years ago I received a Mac LC475 for free when cleaning out in the student union. It worked well - I even got onto Internet with it since it has a network card. My dad used it for a short while before getting a 486 PC.

Since then, it has been stored in our basement, but recently I rescued it from there. My dad said the monitor may have toppled over once, but I don't know if it is broken or not.

Sadly the computer doesn't seem to boot anymore. I turn it on, get the "happy" boing-sound, the hard drive begins to spin up but then nothing happens. I can't tell if the monitor is OK, but have tried to remove removable components with no avail. Bah.

I read on some mailing list that it may be the CMOS battery which went bad, but would the computer say "boing" if it is out of battery? It is a neat little machine, so it could be fun to save, but if it doesn't work... any obvious ideas? Someone suggested make a bootable floppy - can it be done from a Linux PC? - but even when inserting a random Mac formatted floppy, it doesn't even attempt to access it. :(

If nothing else, I believe can reuse the 8 MB 72pinn SIMM with my Amiga, but the SCSI drive, Nubus network card etc I have little use for.
 
Reply to myself: the behavior is the same without a battery (best before July 1994), so if it is cheap, I might pick up a new one. 3.6V lithium, size "1/2 AA".
 
Sonnenschein SL-150, a.k.a. Tadiran TL-5151 or Saft LS14250. It has the dimensions 14.7 x 25.2 mm, not to be confused with similar 3V batteries. I don't have a battery tester handy, so I can check if it is really is out.

http://www.batterycenter.com/lithiumWindow.html

The cheapest I can find around here costs at least $10/battery. I'll see if I bother. In the mean time, I'll see if my '030 expansion card really will swallow the 8 MB SIMM. I don't need 10 MB on my Amiga, but if it works, it is better than throw it away...

Update: Bah, the Amiga still only reports 4 MB.. maybe the memory module is too slow (80 ns?) - the expansion card manual says 70 ns or faster.
 
i have two lc ii's, which i assume use the same battery as yours

if you can't find a battery let me know and i will mail you a used one
 
Thanks for the offer. I never thought it would be difficult to find a suitable battery, only difficult to find a cheap replacement. :wink:

I had located an electronics expert in a distant (well, a few miles away) part of the town, but don't know their price. Their source (ELFA) however asked at least $10 per battery and that was a 3V version I'm not sure would work anyway.

Today I was downtown for another errand (emergency ink cartridge for the fax at work) and thought I would ask at some places. I knew that the cheap a-little-of-everything place (Clas Ohlson, where I bought the ink) didn't keep this kind of battery in their sortiment. I asked at the old computer shop (before C64/Amiga, now PC) but alas, no luck.

However, at the radio store across the street, they maintained a row of this kind of battery. I suppose they sell some equipment today which uses 3.6V Li. They asked 100 SEK, which is about $14 but it is Saft LS-14250, the high-capacity model which can be bought online from ELFA for 108 SEK + shipping and I suppose the local reseller would like to add a few crowns himself for profit. So on chance, I decided this is the luxury for the weekend and bought one. They also checked my old one, and it was stone dead.

Now we'll see if this cures my Mac or not. Hopefully it does, but I don't really know what I'm going to use it for (25 MHz 68LC040, System 7.5, network card).
 
hope it works.

we use our mac's at home, primarily for word processing and also to telnet around. we have nothing runner higher than os 7.5.

i do prefer os 7.1 though.

if you keep the 'bells and whistles' down to a minimum, i find these old mac's can function fairly quickly.

i also use that freeware program "transmac" to transfer files from a mac formatted floppy onto my pc, which gives them added functionality

chris
 
For a MacOS ignorant like me, what is the major differences between 7.1 and 7.5 ? (which still is the most recent version Apple offers for free download AFAIK)

Regarding disk transfer, I believe my machine has a SuperDrive, so it reads PC formatted floppies instead of doing the opposite.

Once I wanted to get Linux/BSD onto it, but due to a CPU bug in a particular bunch of chips, it is not possible to get FPU emulation to work neither in MacOS nor in the other OSes which for some reason want it. The alternative would be to find a true 68040 chip, but since I don't really use Linux on my Athlon PC (despite having it installed and occupying ~ 10 GB), I can't see myself use it on a much slower Mac neither...

Maybe as some firewall/router, but it would be more work finding suitable software than to configure my old Pentium 200 to do the same work and with higher capacity. Oh well, I can surely think of something or else I can try to sell it if it works... :p
 
I don't know the exact differences between all the os's (and man there are lots of versions of os7!), but i can dig up the info from one of my books at home, if you are interested.

i find os7.1 has less add ons, and is not as robust as 7.5 or 7.5.5, but runs much faster on my old mac's. perhaps if i had more ram in my old mac's then os 7.5 and what not, would run faster and perhaps i would go with them.

but i do find os 7.1 boots up quick, of course not as quick as 0s 6 or anything.

chris
 
It turned out to be System S1-7.1 after all.. my memory was bad.

Yes, the Mac booted nicely after replacing battery, and I'm wrting this message on it. The keyboard is a little sticky and of course the computer overall is much slower than the PC I'm used too, but it works.

In order to run Netscape 3, I had to activate 32-bit addressing and virtual memory. It turns out I also have something called Connectix RAM Doubler which conflicts with virtual memory - I don't know which is to prefer. I'm also leaning towards the SIMM is 4MB just like the onboard memory, since it is displayed 8MB internal and 12MB virtual. Maybe the RAM doubler would only use 8MB virtual but be faster, while the traditional virtual memory uses as much as is possible.

Did I mention the HD is 80MB, of which 15MB is free (for virtual disk)?

It was a little difficult to configure network settings - I can't understand the difference between Manual, Server and Dynamic, since it seems I have to configure everything myself anyway. Thanks to the Windows PC next to it, I could manually set IP, gateway and DNS to the values my DHCP server just gave me.

Ok, it works. The disk also contains MS Excel 5, MS Word 6 and some other stuff (why both MS Word, Claris Works and MacWrite?). I have an old 300 MB SCSI in the drawer, but it would take too much work to install MacOS onto it and replace the internal drive.
 
Ok, it reports a total of 16MB with RAM Doubler instead of a total (?) of 12MB with virtual memory (8MB internal, 12MB on disk). It also runs slightly faster, so I assume this is a better mode of operation.
 
I have ram doubler on my centris 610's as well, and i have not noticed any problems.

i have not tried the internet on these mac's, but maybe i should give it a try, like you did.

i have a really coold paper airplane making program you might be interested in. it will even print out the plans out, along with the dotted fold lines etc..

i have so much old mac software, it's crazy
 
Hm. I wonder if my HP LaserJet 6L can be fitted to print from Macintosh. It is a parallel printer, and the Mac interface I think is more like RS-423 serial? Print to file and transfer to the PC doesn't sound half as cool, even if it would work.

I know as much as we had a couple of the LC475 and LC IIci/cx. The latter lacked network cards but we had a couple of spare Nubus cards. While they physically fitted, the LC II machines refused to even say "boing" when inserting one of those cards. Probably they are not compatible at all, but I never bothered to look up why. The same network card would work in the 475 class machine it was meant for.

At the student union, we also had a Performa 630, but I can't remember if it had integrated network or through one of those Nubus cards too. The single PowerMac 6100 was networked but of course used its own (?) aux transceiver. Around 1996-97 the local network was so Mac oriented that we even had AppleTalk services installed on our main Sun server. Then a full round of replacement PCs were bought (going from ~25 MHz '040 to 200-450 MHz Pentium/AMD), and the whole Macintosh forest was dumped for grabs.
 
i found this in reagrds to you connecting your printer to your mac:

several. You can get a USB-to-parallel adapter (the Keyspan brand cable has been reported not to work for this use in Jaguar), an ethernet to
parallel print server, or you can use the parallel port print server
built-in to many internet routers and wireless access routers.

On Friday, Oct 25, 2002, at 21:19 US/Central, Werrog wrote:

> I have an old HP 6L laserjet here which I couldn't use with OSX. Now
> there
> are drivers, but how to connect the printer to the computer? I have a
> Mac
> G4-400 (AGP/Gigabit Ethernet). Is there some kind of solution for this
> problem?

chris
 
i have a ton of cables for the mac, and probably some crazy ones.

i will see if i have one that can connect to non standard mac printer
 
PizzaBoxPowerToggle & System 7.5

PizzaBoxPowerToggle & System 7.5

carlsson, if you're ever in that kind of situation again, where the machine won't drive the monitor, there's a trick which originated on the 68kMLA forums called the PizzaBoxPowerToggle. Basically, flip the switch on the back of the Mac up and down quickly 3 or 4 times.

Those old "Pizza Box" Macs (basically the LC-Series and Quadra 605, as well as the Power Mac 6100 series IIRC) use the internal battery to provide a kick to the video circuitry on boot. Without it, the display won't engage. Flicking the power switch repeatedly energizes the circuit, and the display lights up! It's not easy on your PowerSupply, but if you can't get a battery and need your Mac, it's a good temporary solution.

As for the Differences between System 7.1 and 7.5.x, System 7.1 is a basic, barebones OS which provides you with the essentials to use a computer. System 7.5.x is a more feature-rich operating system, bundling TCP/IP, Speech, Sleep (if available) and lots of other goodies into the OS. You can get a fairly good install of 7.5.x in about 25MB, if you take out the stuff you don't need. (IE: I don't install the Accessibility Options or Printer Support - I don't need 'em.) System 7.1, on the other hand, installs on half a dozen floppies. System 7.1 needs 2MB RAM minimum, but it's happier with 4 or better. System 7.5.x really isn't usable unless you have 8MB RAM or more. If you do get 7.5.x, get 7.5.3 from Apple and update to 7.5.5. The OSes can be found here

Your LC will take up to 36MB of RAM (4MB soldered on the board, up to 32MB in the 72-pin slot). Any RAM 60ns or better will fit, whether it's from a PC or a Mac (Macs disregard Parity chips, if present).

Those LC 475's are awesome little machines. If you can find a full 68040, they can be very usable little machines, that take up very little room!

Cheers,

The Czar[/url]
 
If I free some garbage (like one of the three word processors) to make more room on the hard disk, would the built-in virtual memory support give me more virtual memory, maybe up to 20 MB or more? It doesn't seem likely that I go shopping for a 16 or 32 MB SIMM - unless found dirt cheap on a flea market - so I'll probably keep it in current configuration.

Did I mention I have one more empty LC475 shell, which I use as a TV stand? Apart from that it is slanted (?) slightly so the TV doesn't stand straight, it both looks cool and fills its purpose. Before I've had the thought to "go ITX" onto it, but it would require carving in the back panel and I'm not so good with that. Also I'm not sure an ITX build would fit, but considering that Apple managed to get (an old) motherboard, hard disk, floppy and PSU into the case, it should be possible today too.
 
Mac Virtual Memory

Mac Virtual Memory

I believe that anything system 7.0.1 and above supports virtual memory.

Virtual memory normally runs at 1MB more than your system RAM, and you need at least that much free on your hard drive. The average program consumes approx. 1/2MB - 5MB, so getting rid of unneeded files would be beneficial.

Cheers,

The Czar
 
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