68kMLA Classic Interface

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New to this board - Macintosh II & IIfx
Posted by: Doccers on 2020-10-20 21:19:15
Hello!  Happy to have found this board! I suspect I will be spending a lot of time here!

Been a huge fan of the 68k macs since I bought my first LC in 1992.     Now that I'm older, I've recently had the itch to get back into these classic machines, and managed to snag a Macintosh II and a IIfx off of craigslist!  Sadly neither powered on - there was some cap leakage on the II, and the IIfx was missing both CPU and it's FPU.    I spent a few months dusting off my soldering skills with some ... less expensive projects, and gave my shot at recapping the II and cleaning it up/restoring it. 

Huzzah! It lives!  Floppy drive is still a bit janky, so I may need to recap that as well.  Managed to score an original High Resolution 13" display for it, and found a pristine ImageWriter II at the Puyallup hamfest near Seattle!

The original 40mb HDD in the II makes some .... interesting... noises, but it did power up and boot to 6.0.8!   I quickly replaced it with an SCSI2SD.

I was also able to track down a CPU and FPU combo for the IIfx, and after inspecting the board and finding it looked in great shape, I gave it a shot - and it powered right up!  I have an SCSI2HD on the way for it - I was lucky enough that while the drive didn't seem to work, it did have the "magic" SCSI filter attached to the drive. Now I just need to hunt down the elusive Black Terminator for the external side, and boy is *that* proving to be a pain. 

Anyways, just thought I'd share my fun little projects here. 

20200616_195313.jpg

20201017_155154.jpg
Posted by: cheesestraws on 2020-10-21 03:32:19
Hello!  Happy to have found this board! I suspect I will be spending a lot of time here!
Welcome to the forum!  Yes, this place can be a bit of a time gobbler.  I joined to ask a question about video cards and... looks at my post count that was a good theory.

I was also able to track down a CPU and FPU combo for the IIfx, and after inspecting the board and finding it looked in great shape, I gave it a shot - and it powered right up!
Very nice!

Now I just need to hunt down the elusive Black Terminator for the external side, and boy is *that* proving to be a pain.  
If I remember correctly, the difference in the Black Terminator is just a capacitor, so you might be able to either hack a normal terminator, or I believe none of it is a problem with modern(ish) active termination at all.  If you end up using, say, an external scsi2sd, I believe the termination that's onboard on that should be fine (though I haven't personally tried it).
Posted by: MJ313 on 2020-10-21 05:56:25
That's a stunning Multiscan 1705 display. I've not found one in even *good* condition in years, so passed them all up. Had one in college and loved that thing even though it was beastly to lug around 🙂

Nice setup!
Posted by: MrFahrenheit on 2020-10-21 06:30:28
Awesome!

I picked up a IIfx in March and recapped it in June or July. I haven’t used any special filter of terminator on my IIfx. Strangely enough the SCSI on mine works just fine without it. Not sure why. 
 

Externally I used an Iomega Zip and Jaz drive, with the Jaz drive being at the end of the chain and I used an active terminator on it instead of the Jaz onboard one. I also installed a new internal hard drive without any filter and it ran fine too. I don’t get it. 
 

In case I needed it, I recently bought a black IIfx terminator. I identified it in a bulk cables lot and asked the seller to verify the part number and it was the one. So I bought the entire lot just for the one terminator. 
 

I can check and let you know the exact part number because there are non-IIfx black terminators that aren’t the same out there. 
Posted by: cheesestraws on 2020-10-21 07:07:55
active terminator
Active termination will be fine.  It's older passive terminators that are the problem on the IIfx, if I remember correctly.  The black terminator has an extra capacitor in it for reasons I can't remember (it's a long time since I looked into this) to make passive termination work properly.
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