So, dear readers, I have been keeping myself amused.
Firstly, Mac SE/30 is still dead. I completely stripped it and thought I had fixed it with some deoxit in the power switch, but it still arcs once it gets warm.
General consensus on the Australian Apple II users board is that the PSU switch is dead. I’ll have to strip the entire thing and remove the switch. Thankfully one of the board members has also had this problem and has found a replacement switch, so as soon as I confirm which switch mine needs, I’ll be ordering that and hopefully finally getting the Mac in a state where I can continue my explorations.
My plans for it are as follows: Get it back reliably. Install System 7.1 and 7.5 on different partitions. Get the CD-Rom that Greg so kindly gave me working, so I can play with CD software as well.
In the meantime, I got a friend (Hi Shane!) to print me a special bracket and now have the SCSI2SD mounted in the slot for the PDS expansion. This means I have access to the SD card and the USB setup port without having to open the system.
It looks so neat as well!
Once I had that off the bench, I was able to get to the Atari STᴇ systems. I fired up the first one (Labelled as “4MB”) and the lights on it lit up immediately. An encouraging sign. After a few (long long) seconds I was looking at the GEM desktop. Huzzah!
I then set up the second one (Labelled as “1MB”) and it also fired up first time.
Inspired by my success, I decided to investigate whether the machines had the RAM that their labels claimed. This turned out to be a bit more difficult than I initially expected as I needed to work out how to get software onto a floppy disk for the Atari ST.
Some reading suggested that I could format a floppy disk in Linux, but I wasn’t having much luck.
As a long shot I simply copied the programme onto a preformatted 720k DOS floppy disk, and stuck it into the system and it worked! This also revealed that both systems have slightly gummy floppy disks so I’ll have to clean and lube them somewhere down the track. They did indeed have the RAM printed on the stickers on the front.
Conveniently, STᴇ systems use 30 pin SIMMs, of which I have lots left over from upgrading the SE/30 to 20MB, so I tried upgrading the 1MB system to 4MB and, yes, it now has 4MB which is nifty IMO.
Long term, I’ll need to get two ACSI2STM drives, a couple of Gotek FDD emulators and possibly a single external FDD cable made up so I can plug in an internal FDD as an external drive. This will take time, if only because those 14 pin connectors are as rare as hen’s teeth. Wonder if I could make a little PCB that would plug in with the pins preconfigured? It wouldn’t be as pretty but the 14 pin plugs are unobtanium.
Leave a Reply