Replacing the Mac SE CRT monitor

The CRT monitor on my Mac SE was damaged during a floppy drive install. The only way to fix it was to replace it. Fortunately, I have a non-working Macintosh Classic II that I've kept around for parts, so I decided to use it's CRT as a replacement.

Keep in mind that there is a potential of high voltage discharge while working with these components. Be careful!

Opening up the SE is quite simple. There are four screws that need to be removed using a Torx driver.

Once opened, there are a number of cables that need to be disconnected.

Then the logic board, disc drives and power supply panel need to be removed.

Once all of these components are removed, the CRT is the primary component left.

There is still an attached yoke and anode connector that must be removed.

These areas are potential high voltage discharge areas. ABSOLUTE care must be exercised at your own risk. Removing the yoke requires loosening the clamp screw at the yoke's end. The yoke can then be pulled off.

To remove the anode, the rubber body must be squeezed and then removed by rocking the contacts back and forth until it releases.

Now the CRT can be removed by removing four screws.

Basically the CRT on the Mac SE is identical to the Macintosh Classic II. However, the connectors for the yoke are not. The SE has a larger 4 pin connector.

The Macintosh Classic has a smaller connector. 

In addition, if you were to swap out the connectors, the yoke is not tuned correctly for the SE. The image develops an unfocusable overlap on the image side. So be sure not to damage the SE's yoke.

Once the new CRT replacement is made and all of the removed components have been replaced, the system needs to be turned on so that the image can be adjusted. The first adjustment should be the tilt. It's very unlikely that you have replaced yoke in it's correct orientation.

This adjustment is made by slowly revolving the yoke around the CRT neck until the proper image is obtained.

Next is the vertical and horizontal adjustments. These are made by adjusting the potentiometers on the SE's power supply board.

Next the focus and luminosity can be adjusted by similar potentiometers in the same area.

Everything should work well now. In this case one more adjustment could be made.

The image is not quite centered in the CRT. This can be adjusted by moving the centering rings on the yoke.

Macintosh SE

The Macintosh SE was introduced on March 2, 1987. It has the same iconic form factor as the original Macintosh, but with slightly different styling and color. This model has significant improvements over it's predecessor, the Mac Plus. It's most notable feature being the installed hard drive.

I picked up an inexpensive unit on eBay. They can generally be found for a reasonable price (under $100). However, the SE shouldn't be confused with the SE\30 which was introduced on January 1989. These models will sell for considerably more. Though I owned a SE\30 along time ago, I had considered picking one up for nostalgic reasons, but the collector's demand for them are too high for my taste. 

Here are the specifications for the SE:

Processor: Motorola 68000, 8 MHz

System Bus Speed: 8 MHz

ROM Size: 256 kB

Data Path: 16-bit Level 1

RAM Type: 150 ns 30-pin SIMM

VRAM Type: Built-in

Standard RAM: 1 MB

Maximum RAM: 4 MB

RAM Slots: 4 (in pairs)

Standard Hard Drive: 20 MB

Int. Hard Drive Type: SCSI

Standard Disk: 3.5 in, 800 kB, 800 kB x 2 (auto)

Exp. Slots: SE PDS

Battery Type: 3.6 V lithium

Display: 512x342 9 inches (23 cm) monochrome[2][6]

Video memory: 512x384x1

Supported Mac OS: 3.3–7.5.1, 7.5.3–7.5.5

Avg. Weight: 17.0 lb/7.7 kg

An advertisement in MacWorld Nov 1987 has the SE selling with a 20MB hard drive, keyboard and mouse for 3319 USD. That's $7,036.89 in today's dollars!

Hard Drive Installation and Setup on a Quadra 700

Installing a new hard drive on a Quadra 700 is a fairly easy task. The side cover (or top, depends on your Mac orientation preference) is attached by a slotted end towards the front face and then released by pulling up two tabs at the rear.

There are two flexible rubber feet that can be pulled away, allowing the cover to be removed.

Once opened, the hard drive can be easily located on the side next to the power supply. All of the components (including the power supply) can be removed as separate modular systems.

The hard drive is removed by squeezing both sides of the two metal tabs of the hard drive caddy. Removing the ribbon and power cable to finalize the release. 

The hard drive replacement is a Maxtor 7345SR 345MB 50-Pin 3.5" SCSI Hard Drive. However, not all SCSI connections are the same. This unit requires a 50 pin double row SCSI connection with the larger 4 pin molex power connector.

The hard drive is attached to the caddy by four screws. Remove them to attach the new drive and then reinstall the caddy back into it's place and connect the cables.

This is an easy install, however... it was not quite so easy getting the Macintosh Quadra to recognize the hard drive!

A Macintosh computer has a special utility called Apple HD SC Setup. This utility can be found in the Tools Disk. Running this utility should "find" the hard drive and set it up, However... not in this case. 

This problem had to be solved with a third party utility by FBW Hard Disk Toolkit.

FWB Hard Disk Toolkit PE v1.6 can be found at http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/fwb-hard-disk-toolkit-v16-v163-update . This will make a bootable disk with the hard drive utility called RAID Toolkit. Booting this diskette, will bring up a menu with the following information. The installed Maxtor hard drive can now be seen. 

To make the Quadra "see" this hard drive, it needs to be mounted. The tab is located on the far right of the RAID Toolkit GUI. After mounting, I made the choice to partition the drive as two equal parts.

Everything seems to be solved, BUT... the oddities still continue. Installing the Mac system 7.1 disks will not boot the Quadra. The Computer has to be booted with the Disk Tools diskete and then the System Finder has to be copied to the new hard drive. 

The Quadra is rebooted (Disk Tools disk removed) and then the installation disks are installed.

Everything seems fine, but a run of the Apple HD SC Setup, still shows that the Mac Quadra does not have an attached SCSI device!

Using Modern Monitors with a Quadra 700

In order to create a complete vintage Quadra 700 system, an Apple Multiple Scan 15 Display manufactured in 1994 is chosen.

However, it seems rather blurry.

I'm sure the focus can be adjusted, but since I plan to use this system occasionally, I'd like to use a VGA LCD monitor.

 The typical VGA plug is a 15 pin 3 row D-connector.

The Apple Macintosh video uses a 15 pin two row D-connector. 

So simply plugging in the device will not work. For this to work, an adapter has to be used. These are available on sites such as eBay for a reasonable cost.

Generally called a HD15 VGA Monitor Female to DB15 MAC Male Converter Adapter. It should also have a series of DIP switches so it can be set to the type of monitor you are using.

The device can be set to a variety of monitors, including NTSC and PAL formats. A DIP switch chart needs to be available in order to know the proper settings and may come as a hard copy or web resource.

My monitor of choice for vintage systems is a NEC MultiSync 1560V+ manufactured in 1999. It seems to work best for my needs. It has a very sharp image with this system.

Out of curiosity, I tested a 15" Dell E153FPf LCD Monitor. Manufactured in 2005. It dosen't seem to like the setup and it displays a low contrast green image.

I also tested a 21" widescreen Vizio va22l fhdtv10t. It's a great all round monitor for vintage equipment due to it's TV tuner, composite, component, S-Video and VGA connections. It was manufactured sometime around 2008.

It has a beautiful sharp image as well, albeit an elongated horizontal distortion due to the widescreen format.

Setting Up Multiple OS on a Toshiba Tecra 730XCDT

Initially, I installed Windows 98 on this laptop, but I've found that many DOS programs don't work well, or not work at all. I've decided to install multiple OS systems. Three in total: DOS 6.22 , Windows 3.1, and Windows 95.

In order to accomplish this, I'm using System Commander 3.0 ( this is a vintage program from 1996). It's a boot system controller and I covered it's use in my past blog  http://digitalarcane.blogspot.com/2015/01/gateway-2000-p5-100-installing-multiple.html
However, I found that I had crossed some difficult points and need to rehash this operation once again. It's a very cantankerous setup, but once it's installed in place, it's very nice. Here are the following steps. It would be best to read them through before you start.

STEP ONE

Wipe the entire drive clean with Killdisk or another hard drive wiper. Whatever you decide to use, it must be able to get to the entire hard drive--- along with the hidden boot partitions that some OS's like to create. In fact, it must also be able to wipe out the hidden boot partition that System Commander will create. Download a free version of Killdisk here http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm

STEP TWO

You need a DOS boot disk with the command line utilities: FDISK and FORMAT. The best startup disk for this (that will also include a mouse and CDROM driver) can be found here: http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm. There's a choice of OS versions to choose from.

Once booted into DOS, run FDISK. From the floppy drive that would be A:\fdisk.

Choose 1. Create Primary DOS Partition. In my case, I have a 2 GIG hard drive. My first OS install will be Windows 3.1 with a 750MB partition. I follow the prompts and create the partition. NOW this is the important! This partition must now be made active. Going back to the main menu, we see there are now four menu selections.

Choose 3. Set active partition or Logical DOS Drive. Follow the prompts to set the 750MB partition as the Primary C: drive.

STEP 3

Install Dos 6.22. Allow the software to format the 750MB partition that was created. Once DOS is installed, the Windows 3.1 system can now be installed. It's important to know that for System Commander to work well, Windows 3.1 will generally always have to be the first install.

STEP 4

Install System Commander. After a reboot you'll see that System Commander stops the booting process, requiring a choice from it's menu. Windows 3.1 is essentially a shell of DOS 6.22. It shows up as such on the menu.

STEP 5

Choose the A MS-DOS 6.22 and you now have Windows 3.1 starting up. Now we need to set a new boot partition. This is accomplished by using the SCDISK utility that is located in the System Commander's SC folder. Double Left click on scdisk.exe.

Go to Change boot status for OS install. Here you will see the 750MB partition labled as MSDOS5.0 (a quirk of System Commander for Windows 3.1 labeling) at 0 and 1-2-3 empty. Choose the next empty place (1).

Esc to exit and then restart by CMD-ALT-DEL. Make sure the DOS boot disk is in the floppy drive.

STEP 6

Start the FDISK utility and you'll see that the 750MB  partition is now a non-DOS partition. Now a new primary partition can be created. This one is for DOS 6.22 and it will be 266MB in size.

Once the partition is created, it NOW must be made active.

STEP 7

Install DOS 6.22. 

STEP 7

Repeat the partition process for the third and final partition (for Windows 95). In this case, a 1 GB partition is created and made active.

STEP 8

This is where it gets a little crazy. The best solution in order to install Windows 95, is to install over Windows 3.1 with a Windows 95 upgrade. This keeps Windows 95 from corrupting any of the other partitions. In fact, it will rewrite some of System Commander's boot files (more on this later). NOW remember how Windows 3.1 needed to be installed first? Here, we just install DOS 6.22 and then just copy the WINDOWS folder from the 750MB partition to this one. Bypassing Windows 3.1 installation quirks. 

Go back to the SCDISK utility and make the (2) partition active and reboot into a DOS 6.22 install. Allowing for the remainder 1 GB to be formatted.

STEP 9

Once DOS is installed and the WINDOWS folder copied onto the 1 GB partition, it's now time to install Windows 95. Once complete, a fresh reboot of the system Will only boot back to Windows 95! The System Commander menu will not appear at startup! Everything that was created will seem lost. But it's another quirk of the process. 

STEP 10

Reboot with the DOS startup disk. Go to the Windows 3.1 partition and find the SC folder for System Commander. Inside is the file SCIN.EXE. Double click on this, and follow the directions for another  installation of System Commander. This time a warning will appear warning of a possible virus. This is due to the Windows 95 rewrite of the boot sector. This can be ignored.

With a fresh install of System Commander, a reboot of the system will bring back all the OS choices in the menu.

This completes the install. Additional tweaks can be made by renaming the Dos 6.22 partition (with the installed Windows OS) to Wiindows 3.1 and also arranging the System Commander boot menu options to taste (such as placing Boot from drive A: at the bottom of the list).

This laptop is the Toshiba Tecra 730XCDT. The Windows 3.1 and 95 drivers for video, sound and CDROM are still available at Toshiba's site. http://support.toshiba.com/support/modelHome?freeText=1073769796

Macintosh Quadra 700

The Macintosh Quadra series was introduced on October 1991. It was one of the most powerful desktop computers available at the time. It was the first Macintosh model to utilize the Motorola 68040 processor and at 25MHZ, made it powerful enough for scientific work and the most demanding graphic and CAD applications. It also was the first model to ship with the new Macintosh System 7 OS.

This model has become a desirable collectors model. It's form-factor ( along with its compact size and computing power ) is it's major attraction. I've found two on eBay that I purchased reasonably. One is heavily beat up, will not boot a startup disk and the screen image is heavily distorted.

 

The second one can be cleaned up nicely, but the hard drive causes a strange startup and reboots twice. I would like to replace it.

I'm hoping to salvage parts from the damaged unit and make the appropriate repairs.

Here are the Quadra 700 specifications:

Processor

CPU: Motorola MC68040

CPU Speed: 25 MHz

FPU: integrated

Bus Speed: 25 MHz

Register Width: 32-bit

Data Bus Width: 32-bit

Address Bus Width: 32-bit

Level 1 Cache: 4 kB data, 4 kB instruction

ROM: 1 MB

RAM Type: 30 pin SIMM

Minimum RAM Speed: 80 ns

Onboard RAM: 4 MB

RAM slots: 4

Maximum RAM: 68 MB

Expansion Slots: 2 NuBus, 1 PDS

Video

VRAM: 512 kB - 2 MB (six sockets)

Max Resolution: 1152x870

Video Out: DB-15

Storage

Hard Drive: 80-400 MB

Floppy Drive: 1.4 MB SuperDrive

Input/Output

ADB: 2

Serial: 2 Mini DIN-8

SCSI: DB-25

Audio Out: stereo 8 bit mini

Audio In: mono 8 bit mini

Speaker: mono

Networking

Ethernet: AAUI-15

Miscellaneous

Power: 50 Watts

Dimensions: 5.5" H x 11.9" W x 14.4" D

Weight: 13.6 lbs.

In Jan 1992, an ad in MacWorld has the unit selling for 4995 USD. That's $8,574.92 in today's dollars!