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Some progress has been made on the hybrid recreation. I assembled my new SMD style one and gave it a shot. Under-voltage lockout is now up to 6 volts, which is just about right for a 6v lead acid battery. Discharge much lower than this and you risk battery damage. The -5v generator isn't...

Based on my understanding, it's expected that you need the DOS card to pass through video. DOS card is basically a switch, and outputs either the Mac video or its own signal. It's kind of an awkward setup, where Mac video has to be passed into the DOS card and then the card decides which video...

Order is placed for the first test run of eMate 300 display flex cables. Presuming they work, I'll be using several of these to fix up that lot of eMates I recently acquired. --------- If you have a system which is dead because of a bad flex cable, please contact me about it. A picture of the...

There are a few bare v1 cables remaining at $35 each, so DM me if you're interested. Life has been hectic, I hope to have a v1.1 design which addresses the issues with v1 in the next few weeks.

Took apart a random eMate and yep. Display cable eaten, hinges coming apart. You really have to dig in these things to get to the hinges, it's not convenient at all. At least this cable is a lot simpler than the one for the mac portable...

Next up we have an original Mac Portable, and nine eMates. These eMates have screen and hinge issues, which is not surprising. I'll be recreating the display cable to see if that brings them back to life. And the mac portable is a portable. Needs work.

A DRAM-only version is on my list of projects to do. I'd like to find actually new RAM chips to use instead of buying new old stock and just hoping that they work (given that I don't have a RAM tester).

If you responded to the survey and are still interested in one of these first-batch cables, please send me a direct message. I have 5 cables remaining, including the one which I posted above which already has the connector moved. Looks like 8 people responded to the survey, so it's first come...

@techknight has confirmed that the recreation cable works! It needs a little bit of tweaking to make assembly easier. For example, the soldering rings around the mounting holes for the connector are a bit small and hard to get good solder adherence. I assembled one this morning and...

I did see at least some of what silicon insider is doing on 68kmla. This is an approach I had considered before going down the route of just recreating the existing hybrid. It seems like a really simple idea to stick a 5v regulator in there, but that doesn't take into account the variety of...

Tweaked a resistor and the under-voltage cutout now acts at 5.59 volts, which is much more survivable for a lead acid battery. Turns out that a fair few of these custom resistor values are still available as standard SMD resistors, and their values might not necessarily have to be so precise...

Tested the first prototype of this design (external 12v brick), and it worked - booted my LC III. Barrel jack input (2.5mm center pin) on the left, 12 to 5 buck chip and an inverter hanging off the 5v to get -5. Fuses and protection zeners built in, to safeguard your Mac. The final design...

@techknight has received the cable now, so it's up to his timeframe to move the connector over and give it a shot.

Flex cables in the Atari Portfolio (hinge), PowerBooks (display, SCSI), and many other systems are wearing out, cracking, and becoming unusable. I'm looking for dead flex cables to recreate, basically. There's no guarantee that all possible designs can be recreated, given connector...

It's been way too long since posting a status update here, sorry. The design which uses a power supply that provides 12/5/-5 directly (no down-converters) isn't going to be very affordable. These power supplies have spiked in cost and are near-unavailable due to the parts shortage. We'd be...

Figured out the cause of the -5 volt rail being -6 volts. Counterfeit or bad chips, the whole lot of them. Set up a test circuit on a breadboard, tested about 20 of the chips from my supplier, and none of them were even close. The original circuit hangs the -5 generator off the battery...

In keeping with my latest string of recreations, here's another one. I am working on recreating the 'hybrid module' from the non-backlit macintosh portable because these tend to die and do stupid things thanks to capacitor fluid damage or the coating cracking off of the high precision...

Recently picked up a flock of nine compact macs along with seven keyboards. Five Mac Plus One SE One SE/30 (battery bomb, boo) One Classic (also battery bomb) One Classic II (somehow not bombed, survived the dreaded red maxell) Haven't investigated the Pluses. According to the previous owner...

Production is complete on the cables, and they are currently being shipped to me. Hope to have them by the end of the week, and then can ship them out to my testers.

Glad your portable is working again. The capacitors have been replaced, right? In other news, I just placed an order for a prototype set of 5 of these recreation cables. Chinese New Year is still going on, so it'll probably be some time until production and shipping. Two cables have been...