Restoring Mac Compacts
Posted: Fri Mar 20, 2015 8:07 pm
I recently purchased x2 Mac Plus, a Mac Classic and a Mac Colour Classic. The Mac Classic turned on and went straight away, the other 3 weren't going. Luckily all 3 turned out to be easy fixes. One of the Mac Plus just needed its power and Drive cables plugged back into the motherboard, the Mac Colour Classic needed a new PRAM battery, and I think the RAM on the 2nd Mac Plus was bad because I just pulled out the 256K limiting resistor on the motherboard, along with the 256k ram modules, replaced the ram with 1MB sticks and now I have 4 working Macs. Only the Mac Classic has an OS though. I'm a little disappointed that they were all so easy to fix, I was hoping for a challenge somewhere and an excuse to gut one and do something like this: http://spritesmods.com/?art=macsearm&page=10
My next goal is to get games running on the Mac Classic (I want to play Dark Castle, Beyond Dark Castle, Dungeon of Doom, Lode Runner, Crystal Quest, The Colony, Risk, The Ancient Art of War, The Ancient Art of War At Sea, Scarab of Ra, Deja Vu, Uninvited and Zork Zero). Then I'll get an OS on the Mac Colour Classic and hopefully get some games on that one too. After that I'm going to find a way to make some 800k floppies for the Mac Pluses and hopefully sort out a way to have a HD for them too. I'll retr0bright them all along with their mice and keyboards and then, networking and the internet!
Somewhere along the line I'm going to try find time to repair the IIe I have and then probably sell it, unless I get hooked once it's working. We'll see. My wife is keen to see the backside of some of the 5 large boxes of vintage mac paraphernalia I just bought. It doesn't help that it is sitting next to my autonomous robots, recovered PCBs I have yet to to desolder for parts and the CD and floppy drive bits I'm going to use for a salvage-made 3d printer. I can feel the time approaching when I'm going to have to decide what I can bear to part with.
My next goal is to get games running on the Mac Classic (I want to play Dark Castle, Beyond Dark Castle, Dungeon of Doom, Lode Runner, Crystal Quest, The Colony, Risk, The Ancient Art of War, The Ancient Art of War At Sea, Scarab of Ra, Deja Vu, Uninvited and Zork Zero). Then I'll get an OS on the Mac Colour Classic and hopefully get some games on that one too. After that I'm going to find a way to make some 800k floppies for the Mac Pluses and hopefully sort out a way to have a HD for them too. I'll retr0bright them all along with their mice and keyboards and then, networking and the internet!
Somewhere along the line I'm going to try find time to repair the IIe I have and then probably sell it, unless I get hooked once it's working. We'll see. My wife is keen to see the backside of some of the 5 large boxes of vintage mac paraphernalia I just bought. It doesn't help that it is sitting next to my autonomous robots, recovered PCBs I have yet to to desolder for parts and the CD and floppy drive bits I'm going to use for a salvage-made 3d printer. I can feel the time approaching when I'm going to have to decide what I can bear to part with.