The Auction
I already have a Macintosh SE/30 that I was lucky enough to find at a reasonable price, and which had already been recapped. But I couldn't resist putting in a low bid on a scruffy looking, but apparently working, Macintosh SE recently. I was surprised to win it.Shipping
I was concerned it wouldn't survive being shipped from Scotland to London (I had collected my SE/30 in person) - but the seller assured me he had sent compact Macs before without damage.I did not have high hopes when it arrived like this:
However the whole thing was bundled with two full rolls of bubble-wrap to the extent it was roughly spherical inside.
Physical Condition
I tested it still booted up to the floppy prompt, though the fan sounded like a coffee grinder. This was mentioned in the auction listing, and may have deterred bidders. I then opened it up to assess.Very dusty, but the original soldered battery had not leaked. I clipped it off, then gave the board a once-over with the vacuum and a soft paintbrush. No need for a bath for this one. It shined up beautifully:
I checked the RAM chip part numbers using ChatGPT, and the RAM jumper resistor was clipped. Good news: 4MB of RAM, the maximum specification! Whoops - I had already ordered four 1MB 30 pin SIMMs which I had seen for a good price (£17). Good spares to have nonetheless. I hadn't appreciated that Macs accept parity RAM intended for servers (ignoring the parity) - which is why some SIMMs have the extra chip, shown above.
There was a dead 40MB Quantum hard drive on an aluminium bracket on top of the floppy drives (just enough space). I discovered that hard disks had never been sold as an option from Apple for the dual floppy SE, so it must have been an aftermarket addition. I tossed this away believing there to be no chance of repair, but I have subsequently learned that it is usually possible to slide the cover back slightly, opening it just enough to replace the decomposed rubber head parking bumper. Oh well, one for the next restoration perhaps
Floppy Drive Refurbishment
I didn't want to open up my SE/30 to take its BlueSCSI, so the only way I could test the machine was to refurb a floppy drive. Quite a task, as it turned out! This machine must have been a workhorse.During this process I discovered that my SE/30 SuperDrive was itself a bit sticky despite me re-greasing it only months ago. I bought some sewing machine oil from eBay to use in addition. This apparently does not dry out. I cleaned the heads with a cotton bud soaked in isopropyl alcohol. Where the metal looked roughened by microscopic surface corrosion, I rubbed it with WD-40 which seemed to be very effective. Neither drive needed the eject mechanism cog replacing. I do wonder whether these get broken by people attempting a motorised eject while the drive is all gummed up, which I was careful to avoid.
System Check, and Floppy Media Sourcing
Next, I bodged the components together to test. I tried unsuccessfully to tape over the cutout on some high-density floppies I have, to write an 800K floppy for the SE. Although I could create them ok, these were not recognised by the SE 800K floppy drive. My recently restored Amiga could use the same HD disks without issue. I suspected the worst, that the first drive might be dead.However, after a bit more research I discovered that double-sided and high-density media in fact have a different composition and are written to with a different magnetic intensity. I only had a single double-density floppy disk in the house - the PCMCIA enabling boot disk for my Amiga. I wrote a minimal System 6.0.8 to it, crossed my fingers, and gave it a try...
Successful boot!
Probably its first start up in decades. I then repeated the cleanup and lubrication process for the second floppy drive.I often forget to take the 'before' photos when I clean things up so I thought it would be fun to do a half-clean on this SE, like they do in car restoration videos (see above image) to highlight the impact.
At this point both floppy drives would boot OK a few times then invariably corrupt the disk. A bit concerning, but this could be recovered by reformatting and re-imaging the same physical disk on my SE/30 SuperDrive. The media was still ok.
Since I got this machine so cheap, it seemed absurd to double the cost of it by buying another BlueSCSI, so I decided to buy some double-density floppies. It was at this point that I discovered how rare they are these days. In the end I bought 20 recycled ones from an eBay seller (around £10 shipped), to get a yield of around 10 which reliably formatted multiple times as Macintosh 800K with its more picky variable rotation speed. Some disks that would fail were still usable on the Amiga, whose own constant speed 880K format is a little more tolerant. Then I used a hairdryer (to soften the old adhesive) and some solvent to remove the old labels. I was later lucky enough to find a new sealed box of KAO MF2DD floppies for around £10, but they normally sell for many multiples of that number.
Testing both drives with Beyond Dark Castle, which is spread across two 800K disks, one of them bootable:
After a few days it became clear that the floppy drives had both settled down and were no longer corrupting the media, which was nice. This issue may have been caused by some thin residue on the drive heads, despite the cleaning with IPA.
Case Fan Replacement
Next problem, the bearings of the helical 'squirrel cage' fan (as used in the early SE) were completely destroyed so I sourced a Noctua NF-A6x25 FLX 60mm fan which was 'opened never used' on eBay for £7, and I had a new fan shroud manufactured in black PLA by JLCPCB for around £6 delivered. Who needs a 3D printer of their own with this kind of cheap reliable service.Notice the designed clearance around the CRT neck board. Very nice.
I clipped and taped the original fan wires and wired the new one up to the hard drive molex connector. I did not use the optional low noise connectors since the full 3000RPM flow rate only just about matches the original fan's specification.
Case Cleaning
Unscented baby wipes and a toothbrush are the tools of choice here, with alcohol and label remover solvent for any sticky residues. Magic Eraser, used gently, will clean dirt out from scuffs, which really works wonders. The front bezel above the screen is a good example of this. If you scroll back up to the Beyond Dark Castle photo you will see that this has been gouged quite badly, presumably to remove an asset tag at some point in time. You might think that would be pretty awful, but it's not very noticeable after cleaning.I cleaned the inside of the case the same way but the vents were quite a pain. I repeated the paintbrush + vacuum cleaner technique for areas like the PSU and the CRT coils.
The SE is a little yellowed compared to my SE/30 (not very visible in this image) but by chance it perfectly matches the colour of a M0116 keyboard which I already owned. I may try the sun-briting method next spring. I did leave it out in the autumn sun for a single day but I didn't notice any change.
PRAM Battery
Having measured up the PCB pad spacing for the PRAM battery, I had ordered an appropriate CR2032 holder but it was slightly too wide when loaded with the cell. To avoid it touching the adjacent components I decided to mount it obliquely, soldering it onto the leftover clipped legs of the original battery:AppleTalk Networking
Next tinkering objective: an AppleTalk network. I bought a serial cable on Amazon for £7 which had specifically been confirmed to work as a LocalTalk cable. AppleTalk was easy to configure on the SE and I shared my whole Macintosh HD from the SE/30 running System 7.1. This worked very well, but some of the older games do not work with AppleTalk active (the Dark Castle games, Arkanoid), hence using floppies for those.Next, I wanted to try some networked games (Spectre, Vette!). For best performance I needed to run these on System 6. But, try as I might, I could not get AppleTalk to enable on the SE/30 printer port in System 6 ("AppleTalk cannot be opened" in Chooser).
I tried all sorts of things, reinstalling System 6 multiple times, until I discovered that it worked only after I updated to AppleTalk v58 from the BlueSCSI's DaynaPort driver install floppy. Not sure if this was an SE/30 incompatibility or perhaps caused by the presence of the BlueSCSI emulated DaynaPort Ethernet device. System 6.0.8's stock AppleTalk v57 would not enable for me.
Since Vette! is larger than an 800K floppy I decided to use RAMDisk+ to create a 1200KB RAM disk, then copy the game across to it via AppleTalk, then reboot the SE/30 into System 6 to launch the game on both systems. The game would crash launching the 3D engine on the SE, until I re-downloaded the original disk images to find a note in the README that the system disk cache must be disabled in Control Panel on 68000 Macs. After doing that it was fine. Surprisingly fine in fact considering the SE/30 with its FPU must be around 10x faster than the SE.
Way ahead of the curve: two players driving around the same 3D open world using a fully restored computer from 1987
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