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I'm probably going to have to recap the screen on one of my 1xx series PowerBooks. It has those weird sideways electrolytic caps with rectangular enclosures, with both leads coming out one end. There aren't any modern elecrolytics that are close enough in size or value (3.3uF, 35V), but ceramic...

I've made significant progress in building my SE/30 Reloaded board. Unfortunately, all I'm getting out of it is a Simasimac. There's no chime at all from the speaker/headphone jack, except for a quick pop when I power the machine on. Here's what I've done so far: --Tried multiple known-good ROM...

I was handed a pair of IIsi power supplies to try to fix. One of them was easy to get working again, but the second is being stubborn. It's been fully recapped (including the SMD caps on the daughterboard), and it's producing the 5V standby rail. A known-good IIsi won't power on with it...

If you're looking to recap the PSU from your Quadra 700 and/or you have a Mac with an Astec AA15831, here's the complete list of all the electrolytic and film safety caps. For convenience, here's a DigiKey list of everything you need: https://www.digikey.com/en/mylists/list/X1H5MFVEFT Note...

Out of curiosity I've been reading Bob Brant's "Build Your Own Macintosh and Save a Bundle" and found it to be quite interesting. The technical contents aren't exactly remarkable, but it's a great time capsule of what being a Mac owner was like in the late 80s/early 90s. Are there any other...

I've been finding that ever since I switched to Inventec Amtech flux, isopropyl alcohol just doesn't cut it when trying to remove the residue. I can scrub (and even soak) a board and it'll still be sticky afterwards. Does anyone have a recommendation for a cleaner that will work better? I know...

You may have seen another thread in which I ran a group buy for a batch of Bolle's SE/30 Reloaded boards. Let's get something out of the way: I am not going to be doing that again. This thread is a deep-dive into what that process was like, and in it, perhaps you'll understand why. But if...

I'm working on a Mac Classic. I recapped the motherboard and it boots and works fine. However, I noticed that the screen image has a weird subtle shake/wobble to it. I haven't seen this sort of thing before, I attached a video clip that illustrates it (watching the menubar is the easiest way to...

I have a DayStar Genesis MP with the quad CPU card, and it doesn't want to boot. Pressing the power button gets the system to power on, but there's no chime, video, or hard drive activity. The system has a brand new PRAM battery. Swapping the CPU card for another one, like a Sonnet G3...

I'm picking up a project I've been sitting on for some time. I have a Color Classic that doesn't want to boot. When I press the power key, the light will come on and the hard drive/fan will spin up, but there's no chime or image on the CRT. It's definitely not trying to boot because I'm not...

I'm testing out a DayStar Universal PowerCache card in my IIci. It's the 50MHz 68030 version, so it *should* be wicked fast. And it's certainly faster than the IIci in stock form, but the benchmarks suggest it's not performing as it should. The IIci has 20MB of RAM and is running System 7.0.1...

At some point in the past I ran across a photo of someone with a clear MacEffects SE case, who had trimmed the metal chassis to offer a better view of the internal components. Anyone know who this was?

A while ago I had another Power Computing machine drop into my lap. It's a PowerTower Pro, and it looks like it's had some upgrades (as was common). But while poking around inside the system, I noticed that the L2 cache card slot is empty. The PowerTower series is based on Apple's Tsunami...

The Outbound Laptop Mac clones from the late 80s have an interesting feature called the Silicon Disk. It's basically a RAM disk, but uses dedicated SIMMs that aren't shared with system memory. As long as the Outbound has power, it will preserve the contents of the Silicon Disk, even if the...

1. The keyboard can work either over infrared, or with an attached cable. The keyboard has two ports, an RJ11 (with matching RJ11 on the Outbound itself), and a mini-DIN. What's the pinout of the RJ11 cable? And what's the mini-DIN for? 2. You could get the Laptop with either an internal floppy...

So you may know that I have a soft spot for the Color Classic -- it's my favorite desktop Mac. And while I own two of them, the original Color Classic wasn't the only model that came in the form factor. I've always wanted a Color Classic II, for no other reason, really, than for the sake of my...

It's perhaps no secret that I'm a huge fan of SimCity 2000. I remember long ago having a cheat patch that could be applied to the application that maxed out your budget to something like $10 million, and also unlocked *everything*. This was *not* the porntipsguzzardo cheat code, it was...

There are a *lot* of SMD caps inside these machines, but thankfully, there are only two kinds. Here's the breakdown: Logic board 23x 47uf 16V 3x 33uf 25V PCI riser/graphics card 8x 47uf 16V CPU card 1x 47uf 16V The attached photos show where and which ones they are. (Sorry that they aren't...

I'm working on a project where I need to benchmark a couple of Macs from the 1993-1995 era to see how they compare, at least in terms of computational performance. I never really got too much into this during that time period, so I can't remember many benchmarking utilities. Can anyone recommend...