Tag: Computer

Mac SE 30 Repair

I found this Mac Se 30 on eBay, not the cheapest of my finding considering the seller stated it was broken, but looking at the pictures I knew I could probably repair it.. and accepted the challenge.

I already repaired Macs with similar issues, and also had a few spare chips in case the problem was the horizontal sync on the logic board…

It arrived in a few days sitting on a bunch of cozy bubble wrap. Great cosmetic conditions! No scratches or labels, minimal yellowing. Once opened I noticed that the motherboard was almost in impeccable shape. The Mac had also a radeon Colorboard installed.. and the usual expired battery.

The floppy drive was in poor conditions, and with a system disk stuck in. I took it apart and patiently remove all the dust, clean the (extremely dirty) heads and lubricate again the slides and moving parts. Always disassemble and clean the drive before insert any floppy! The risk of damaging both the drive and the magnetic support is quite high when you have 30 years of dust stuck in the unit.

Moving on… The issue with the display has been quite easy to find, some solder joints on the analog board were cracked. After reflowing the joints I tried to turn on the machine and the screen was working.. showing the annoying checkerboard pattern, this happen with all the SE30 I tried. I simply replaced all the capacitor on the logic board and the machine worked properly.

The entire process took around 3 hours. Once booted I discovered a nice 20Mb of memory installed in the system! I backed up all the files on my external drive and contacted the owner. I think he was surprise to find something this old still on the hard disk : )

Discreet Flame 9.5

Behold the mighty Flame. After days of attempts I managed to install the software and have all the hardware and drives properly recognised and functioning. I can’t thank enough the people of the Irix NETWORK forum. Special thanks to gijoe77, def13 and irikinus for their direct help and support.

As a professional compositing supervisor it’s amazing to be able to play again with this software on the original SGI hardware.. actually in this case the very same machine I used 20 years ago.

The original workstation came with Flint 7.6 installed, after some testing and consideration the best version of a discreet product that can run well on my Octane is Flame 9.5 from 2005. Finally with the version 8 they introduced resolution independent projects management and v 9 was completely rewritten as a 64 bit application. After this release Discreet launched another 2 versions of Flint / Flame for Silicon Graphics hardware, the last one named Flame 2008. Sadly I would need more memory and a V12 graphic card instead of my V10… soon or later I will upgrade : P

I copied via FTP a bunch of clips that I had in my photo library just to play a bit with the software. I am still quite impressed by the smoothness and responsiveness of playback, 3d space and painting tools.

Quite shocking how the system handles real time reflections on a 3d object… on a video card with 32 Mb of memory of which only 8 dedicated to textures.. yes megabyte!

Power Book 170

I found this PowerBook 170 a few years ago on eBay. Put a bid of 50£, forgot about it and discovered after a day that I won . The laptop is in great shape but the screen after some use gets darker around the corners, a well known issue with such old active matrix panels.

Apparently this Mac has been used in some university, I’ve backed up the content of the hard drive labelled “Eloise” and installed a fresh copy of MacOS 7.5 on the partially glitchy hard drive.

This configuration has an expanded 6Mb of ram and a 40Mb hard drive. With a 25Mhz 68030 cpu this is by far the fastest Mac classic I own.

Mission Octane 2

When I heard that one of the first studio where I worked shut down I needed to investigate since there was something I was looking for. Back in 2002 I started my vfx career learning Discreet Flint on a Silicon Graphics computer. I was still in contact with my boss and after a few calls I managed to acquire this beauty…

The poor abandoned sgi has been sitting in this warehouse for a few years. After loading almost a 100 Kg of hardware in the car, once at home I inspected all the components. Despite 15 years of inactivity the logic board was simply immaculate.

And here we are, all cabled for a first test. Octane 2, the Video breakout box, fibre channel disk array and, out of frame, the SGI Crt display. A couple of things have been lost, but I will hunt for an original keyboard and mouse on eBay.

And… here we are. The machine was up and running perfectly. Well lost the root password, lost the hardware key for Flint, external CD drive not working, couldn’t set up the network.. basically a brick. But it was the first step : )

Mac SE

This Mac SE from 1987 is the first 68k Mac I acquired a few years ago.. and the one that sent me down the rabbit hole. 8Mhz cpu, maxed out with 4 Mb of ram and a 20 Mb hard drive. Yes megabyte.

The machine was in perfect working condition, but I am glad that I decided to open the case and have a look at the board. This is what a 30 years of dust looks like. Despite that not a single capacitor leaked.

“About this Mac”. The original system 4.3 was still there, plus a bunch of files from the previous owner. I backed up everything.. one floppy at the time and updated the OS to System 6 : )