Brainstorm Clone?

Stephen

BetterBit
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Sep 5, 2021
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Did anything ever happen with this?
@ScutBoy made a brainstorm available for decapping and imaging in collaboration with @MacEffects. Kay recently sent his faulty brainstorm to me. Let's see if there's any progress which can be offered from the decapping images; I'm not really convinced there's much more I can offer with the broken unit other than carefully checking it all over. I will have to defer to ScutBoy to provide the example images from the decapped chip.
 

ScutBoy

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Sep 2, 2021
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@ScutBoy made a brainstorm available for decapping and imaging in collaboration with @MacEffects. Kay recently sent his faulty brainstorm to me. Let's see if there's any progress which can be offered from the decapping images; I'm not really convinced there's much more I can offer with the broken unit other than carefully checking it all over. I will have to defer to ScutBoy to provide the example images from the decapped chip.
@MacEffects - do you have the images that Johan Grip was able to pull from the BBU I sent in?
 

trag

Tinkerer
Oct 25, 2021
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They are the shields that underlie the ROMs. Curiously, I couldn't boot the MacPlus without them. There is no continuity between the 4 pins.

My guess is that they are capacitors. Perhaps they're driving the ROMs a little too fast and the capacitors provide that extra little bit of current when the ROMs draw extra power.

Totally guessing and could be totally wrong, but a component without continuity which is nevertheless needed, really screams capacitor.
 

JDW

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Sep 2, 2021
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Interesting how this older thread popped into my view today. I missed it back when it was originally posted, so thank you, @trag !

I had a Brainstorm accelerator in my compact Mac back in the day. I ended up selling the machine to a co-worker when I was in college, I believe around 1990. I later purchased a IIvx while still in college and then paid $1,000 to swap the slow motherboard for a Quadra 650 a year later. That was the Mac I brought with me during my move to Japan in 1994. Yep, I've been in Japan 30 years now. Amazing how time flies.

All said, I remember the Brainstorm with fondness because it offered me a great overall upgrade experience for a very respectable price!
 
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