Macintosh IIci, can I finally get a working machine?

[@tenminutetokyo2643]

The cache card will make a difference overall. I remember buying one of those brand new for my IIci in 1989. I think in ‘89 it only cost $50.

[@CRG]

Really, I would have thought a lot more than that. I'm keeping an eye on eBay for other expansion cards but nubus stuff seems to command a decent price these days.

[@chriswareham]

I have a soft spot for System 6 of the classic Mac OS. It was the last one written primarily in M68k assembler, and is much faster than System 7. Now feeling nostalgic for the SE/30 I sold a couple of years ago!

[@CRG]

You'll enjoy an upcoming video then, I've got an SE30 to repair. Why do I put myself through this again ?? 🤣🤣

[@elfenmagix8173]

Even if you do not have video on the Mac IIci board, it is still a working board. Now You can put in a standard 8Bit Video card on it and it should work. Once you get that far with that board, you should need to check the Mac Serial I/O, SCSI and ADB for Mouse and Keyboard. A machine that bongs is a machine that works. You just need to find those issues and deal with them. As for System OS? I use System 7.6.1 on my IIcx and IIci, and 8.1 on my IIci with the '040 DayStar accelerator. Mac the RAM where you can; 8 - 4mb SIMMs will give you 32MB on the board; 16MB Simms (hard to find but they do exist) will give you 128MB. Added Cards? Depends on what you want to do with the IIci? First of all - a separate Video Card, if you can get it, the 24Bit video card for 16million colors and use any monitor with it. But any added video card frees up your System RAM so you have full use of your RAM and not share it with the video on the board. Ethernet is a must if you want to connect it to a network and eventually the internet. Clarification: The Cache Card on the IIci only speeds up application, not necessarily the System Boot. So for things like CAD, Photoshop, Illustration, etc. the Cache card will be a great asset. If you can get a '030 or '040 accelerator for it, even better. But as is, the Cache card will improve things greatly. The Cache Card and the accelerators only speed up the system and applications, not the I/O (Serial, SCSI, Floppy, etc) so loading and saving times are not affected but applications and data processing is greatly sped up..

[@mk500]

Crystal Quest and Jewelbox are two of my favorites for that era Mac. I’m trying to get them running on my recently acquired Macintosh II that is identical to the machine I bought when I was 16. It took a lot of hours stocking shelves at the grocery and cleaning up after folks at the local nursing home to pay for it, but I eventually had to sell it. Great to own one again for 1/10 what I paid for the original. I’m really enjoying your videos and they are very helpful!

[@CRG]

Thanks for the tip, I'll try to get those titles. Glad to hear you're enjoying the videos 👍

[@SidneyCritic]

There was stuff you could've just tested :- To check ripple you put your DMM in AC. To check if crystals are working you put DMM in frequency - you can also use a cheap oscilloscope -. You can also buy cheap transistor checkers that can test a multiple different parts, ie, they can do cap ESR. An oscilloscope can also check signals, reset, etc. Adrian's Digital Basement is good to watch for that. I don't know how this Mac video works, but modern GPU with regular lines indicate video memory - maybe broken line rather than IC -.

[@CRG]

Thanks for the tips. Unfortunately my scope can't get to the frequencies of the crystals on this board and it also doesn't do AC coupling. I have since bought a new one though that should do all this (it's a cheap one and I haven't tested it yet). Just so you know, the board has since been repaired by the guy I sent it onto. There was one more broken trace that I had missed. But silly in the end but I'm just happy that it is now working and he can enjoy his IIci.

[@Otakunopodcast]

That old Quantum drive is probably suffering from stuck heads. They have a rubber stopper where the head goes to park itself when the drive loses power, and over time that rubber turns to goo, and the heads stick to that goo; the drive head motor doesn't have enough torque to unstick the head from the sticky goo. You can open the drive and gently push the head and get it unstuck, and that will probably get the drive to boot (assuming there is no other problem with the drive.) But once you've opened it, I wouldn't trust it to function for very long. If you care about what's on it, I would image it as quickly as possible on another computer, and then boot the image file using a SCSI emulator such as the BlueSCSI. My SE/30 also came with a Quantum drive (might even have been the exact same model as yours) that suffered the stuck head problem, and I was able to get the drive to work long enough for me to image its contents. It worked for a few more boots but then started failing in other ways. Those grooves in the disk worry me, that looks like maybe it had a head crash, although I would still try gently pushing the head while the disk is initializing, you may still be able to get it to spring to life a few more times. (ok ignore my previous comments, I am now getting to the part where you actually disassembled the platters. That definitely ruined it ;-) ) But this info may be useful in the future should you encounter another cranky Mac hard drive. Those Quantum drives specifically are famous for the "drive head stopper turns to goo" phenomenon. You may need to install a system extension (basically a driver) to get the full benefit of that cache card. I'm actually surprised that you got any improvement during the booting benchmark, since the booting process is mostly I/O bottlenecked (disk access.) Glad you were able to get the IIci up and running. It's a really nice machine, one of my favorite of the 68k Macs. A floormate of mine at uni had a fully decked out system -- maxed out the RAM, had a large color monitor, might have even had a processor upgrade (memory is fuzzy after all these years ;-) ) etc. -- and he was the envy of everybody in our little circle of friends. I hope to get myself one someday.

[@PJBonoVox]

You gave it your best dude, that's all you can do. Also agree with not transplanting surface mount components. You might end up with two broken boards if you do that and it goes south 😬

[@CRG]

I did what I could but at least I got a working machine out of it, even if it wasn't the one I had hoped for! I don't mind swapping smaller SMD components and I probably could swap that larger IC but there is risk involved and best not to chance fate as you say.

[@SianaGearz]

Best way to deal with most formulations of hot melt glue is not a hot air gun, but alcohol. Ethanol and isopropanol both work, concentrated. You just dab a few droplets somewhere in vicinity, the vapours absorb into the hot melt glue within 20 seconds, and it just debonds from all the surfaces, becomes crumbly and falls off with a little encouragement in satisfying chunks, not too small.

[@Stjaernljus]

i was about to say this, but alcohol would remove the coating from the coils, something one usually wants to avoid.

[@SianaGearz]

@@Stjaernljus Really it's that easy? I have not seen alcohol wash off magnet wire lacquer yet. Or do you mean what coating?

[@CRG]

Thanks for the tip, noted for future.

[@enigmaticmf]

@@SianaGearz I agree. All magnet wire I've dealt with is impervious to alcohol. There are even people that hate dealing with magnet wire because it can be such a pain to removed the coating. Of course there is solder-able insulation such as P155, but that is impervious to alcohol as well. It's possible there could be some obscure coating that might be affected, but I would tend to doubt even that.

[@SianaGearz]

@@enigmaticmf I am one of those people who bought magnet wire from a local vendor several times different thicknesses and have struggled to get it stripped by any means, it doesn't even budge below like a minute at 450°C. I hate it. I need something easier to work with for trace repair and ad hoc wiring.

[@MarkTheMorose]

I know next to nothing about Macs, but as for games I know that Oids was released on it (I wanted that so badly on my Amiga!). Seeing a photo of the box for Oids, it does mention it working on the IIci, and was released on the Mac in 1990, says Wikipedia. Also, out of historical interest, Brataccas was released on the Amiga, ST, and Mac (1985/6?, so I should think it's for the original Mac). It probably doesn't play any better on the Mac than it does the Amiga or ST, but might be worth a look.

[@envoycdx]

Agree on putting that board to bed an drawing a line on it, but that said.. another day may bring another idea. wall art that board for now :) Nice to see another board repaired in the meanwhile though.

[@CRG]

It would get screwed to the wall but it's going to another guy who's going to try and finish off the repair. I'm fairly sure the issue is a bad component somewhere rather than just more damage but for me it got to the point where I had to move on.

[@envoycdx]

@@CRG fantastic hopefully it rocks back into life.

[@arnolduk123]

It takes "balls of steel" to spend all that time on a heavily corroded board and to then admit defeat. Passing it on for a fresh pair of eyes to look at it is usually the best solution. That floppy drive probably saved the whole chasis.

[@noggin73]

Nice! Stick a BlueSCSI V2 in it. I have one in my A4000 and it's great. Cheap too.

[@CRG]

Funnily enough I have a bluescsi that was recently sent my way. That might be going into this machine or might find itself in something else, not decided yet.

[@GeorgesChannel]

I admire your patience and endurance. You mentioned a new graphic card for the new board. Maybe this idea could by pass the video output of the old board. Great video and thank you for the journey! Stick to 7.x OS version. I heard the 8.x versions are much slower...

[@CRG]

Thanks, it was a lot of work and a little disappointing I couldn't fix the original board but just happy to have a working machine now. I think I'll just stick with OS7.1 for this machine but I still think it needs a fresh install to just clean it up.

[@decidedly_retro]

System 6.0.8 would work very quickly with any amount of memory. My SE/30 with 2MB of RAM and an SD2SCSI v5.1 boots completely in 9 seconds from power-on! (My other with 8MB RAM and SD2SCSI boots in about a minute.) If you have at least 8MB you could run System 7.5 successfully. 7.1 is rather buggy so 7.5 is definitely preferred if you can get it.

[@GeorgesChannel]

I can confirm this. Has been a time, when i was working on my Apple Macintosch Classic. I knew there was somewhere a buggy version..

[@olepigeon]

I second this idea. If you get a video card and get it to boot, then you'll definitely know it's the graphics subsystem.

[@Ragnar8504]

8.x requires an 68040 so it wouldn't even run on the IIci with its 68030.

[@kencreppin2146]

My IIci has a DayStar Turbo 040 Processor Upgrade, a Radius Macintosh Display Card 24ac and an Asante MacCon+ IIET Rev C network card.

[@CRG]

Sounds like a fantastic machine. I'd like to add a network card at least.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

My favorite MacOS was System 7.5. Not sure what the latest version was but I'm presently using 7.5.5 in Basilisk II.

[@CRG]

I think 7.5.5 is the last to support this machine. Not sure how well it would run though and I might need some more RAM.

[@Ragnar8504]

@@CRG 7.6.1 because the IIci is 32-bit clean. I used that system for a very long time until I got a G3 that required at least 8.1 and had 8.6 on it. 7.6 has most of the nice features of later versions but is still nice and quick. It does need at the very least 8 MB of RAM, 16 are better. If you only have 4 MB I'd stick with 7.1 or 7. My dad's IIci ran 7.6.1 perfectly fine but it did have 16 MB of RAM. We even got the poor thing connected to the internet using a NuBUS network card and coax cable, running iCab as a browser. Slow but it worked (a little over 20 years ago). I think the original version was 6.0.3 but that's really bare bones.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

@@CRG I forget how much memory you said it had. On my PowerBook 180 I have 4MB of RAM and run System 7.1. So I recommend at least System 7. Maybe 7.5, as I bet it's a bit less bloated than 7.5.5 if you have limited memory. There is a stark difference between 7.1 and 7.5, since the latter adds some really cool add-ons that were third-party (shareware) extensions, like a clock in the menu bar, persistent menus (i.e. they stay up when you let the mouse go), and window shades (double-click on the top part of the window and it furls up like a window shade). You can also use RAM Doubler to double your memory (on Macintosh Garden). It's basically virtual memory, but uses a driver-level compressed RAM disk (i.e. tripled in size) for the swap space, so it's much faster (this is all done internally, but that's basically how it works). Also, use CPU Doubler if you want to add pseudo preemptive multitasking-like task control (I can get you version 2.0 as only 1.0 is on Macintosh Garden -- it was my product I developed in the mid 90's and it sold quite well).

[@CRG]

@@8BitRetroJournal I don't think I did actually say how much ram it has 😄. There 4mb total at the minute although I should have some Simms in the drawer so can probably stick another 8 in it easily enough.

[@mogwaay]

Ooof this does look like a really hard project, it's so dispiriting when you find fault after fault but nothing makes it work... It looks so tantalisingly close too with that 1 boot screen - I bet you wish it had never showed you that at all! I think the only way you could get closer to a fix on that board would be to see where it is getting in it's execution before it dies like with a Logic Analyser, but on a 32-bit machine that's not trivial to do. More practical would be if there was a diagnostic ROM for it to see what is and isn't executing. The beep on startup makes me think it can reliably execture *some* code, just something makes it hang. Maybe a diag ROM that just tries all the various bits of required hardware might isolate what that is down. Also now you have a working board, you have something to test things against? However this is all more time consuming ideas and you've given it a damn good shot on the hardware side, I'm sure you are keen to move on! So tough project, but I really enjoyed watching, thanks for sharing!

[@CRG]

100% if it had never shown that one boot screen I probably would have given up long before. Analysing the logic as you suggest, to be honest, goes above my head. From what I understand the IIci has an inbuilt diagnostic system that will communicate over the modem port. I don't have the correct cables for it though. If I had more time I could have built a cable but to be honest, now that I have the other working board I just need to draw a line under the faulty one and walk away.

[@mogwaay]

@@CRG very rude of it to dangle the bogus carrot of possible repair at you 😁 hmm that modem port diagnostic sounds cool, but yeah move on, pastures new - I look forward to your next one, hope it is less painful!

[@olepigeon]

27:30 - Are you sure? I skimmed the Technical Procedures, and it says "The video signals that are generated by the RBV chip are driven through a CLUT/VDAC (Color Lookup Table/Video Digital-to-Analog Converter) chip." So if the VDAC isn't working, the signals won't get through, right? I'm sure you've checked, but is the video connector grounded correctly? "When a monitor is connected to the built-in video ports, the monitor will ground certain pins on the connector which allows the RBV to identify the type of monitor connected. The RBV automatically selects the appropriate pixel clock and sync timing parameters. If an unknown monitor is plugged in or no monitor is plugged in, built-in video output is halted."

[@CRG]

Am I sure... nope 😆 My assumption of the video generation was based on the scrutiny of the schematics. The VLSI chip I pointed to is the RBV but I have nothing to say if the fault lies in that and not in the VDAC. Ultimately though I think it still stands that if the fault was the VDAC, the only place I'm getting another is on another IIci board and considering said other board is in far better condition I still prefer to have it working. I suppose part of my reasoning for it to be the VLSI chip is that when it does crash the databus more or less completely falls over. I know if the MAC doesn't detector a monitor is halts video but would it also halt the system? All connections at the video connector are fine.

[@olepigeon]

@@CRG That's true. At some point is it really worth it? :) If I lived in the EU I'd offer to buy the bad motherboard from ya since mine is also bad (power on circuit), so I wouldn't mind swapping parts around. But I'm on the other side of the planet.

[@Stefan_Payne]

Cap Tip for old PCs: Low end Low Impedance Caps, Panasonic FC for example. FS might be too good.

[@michaelsworkshop9031]

If you can, send the non-working board to Bruce at Branchus Creations - he will get it working again!

[@CRG]

It's already promised to another guy. If it is ever repaired I'll put up an update on my community page.

[@ArmpitoftheGiant]

Great video as always. I hate working on these old Macs, Apple used the worst caps imaginable, not a single one I've ever had from that era that hasn't leaked. I have a Color Classic that works when it wants to, no idea why it doesn't sometimes. But I just gave up on it, too frustrating!

[@CRG]

Thanks. I think to be honest this will be my last battery bombed board. They are just more hassle than they are worth. I've got another Mac project coming up soon although it's nothing like this so I'm hoping it will be a more straightforward repair.

[@brynjarborgersen8131]

Shame you couldn't find the fault of the board. But I agree, sometimes you just have to look at the time you spend on something and say enough is enough.

[@CRG]

To be honest I really thought the repair around the via chip was the answer but to not even get something on screen after that, it was just enough.

[@xredhead7135x]

All the risk of breaking the power supply for no reason than ~old parts is much bad~

[@andrewb9830]

Have you tried applying pressure and flexing areas of the old board to see if it affects the booting?

[@CRG]

Yep, while not in the video I have tried that in the hunt for a bad connection somewhere. Also tried pressing on each ic but it makes no difference.

[@gilbertvera1678]

Also what options did u have on that vga converter? The one with the 10 switches.

[@bufordmaddogtannen]

Silly question: were the capacitors the previous owner replaced installed correctly?

[@CRG]

Yeah, I checked all that and they are installed fine.

[@bufordmaddogtannen]

@@CRG bummer.

[@digitalarchaeologist5102]

Parts board glen? You mean flog it on E-Bay as untested, pulled from a working system, sold as-is? 🙂

[@CRG]

L@@k genuine loft find, untested 🤣

[@arnolduk123]

@@CRG Unable to test, no power cable 🤣

[@gilbertvera1678]

What Dell monitor are you using ?

[@drkamilz]

Save that floppy drive and make a video for it.

[@CRG]

It has unfortunately been promised to the next owner of this machine so has to go with it.