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| IIfx-ed Up Beyond All Recognition | |
| Posted by: Muirium on 2024-07-04 06:38:07 What do we have here?  Very almost literally kicking around, behind the scenes at a local museum, the beige box on the floor turns out to be a Macintosh… II… fx! Ooh, let's take a looksie.  That's no way to treat a top of the line 1990 vintage Mac! Well, she's on the desktop now at least. Let's pop her open and see what we've got here.  Only took one single screw to pop the lid open, quite a nice design. There's a pair of plastic levers you press in and up it goes. Also: that's the first Kensington lock I've ever seen actually installed. This was a corporate machine, going by its labels, back in its day. Immediately obvious: one Quantum Fireball SCSI hardrive, floppy drive, two NuBus cards in the slots: they seem to both be graphics cards.  But this is where things turn from giddy discovery to a bit of a nightmare. What is all that corrosion? Let's take a look under the drive bracket.  Oh boy! That PRAM battery is completely and catastrophically blown. In fact, when I tried to flip it out with a screwdriver, the holder came straight off with it! Eep!  NOT the finest PRAM battery I've ever seen. I’m glad none of mine ever did this. I think there's more going on than just a blown half-AA battery, however. The corrosion is much too extensive. It's not just focussed around that blown battery.  Rotten card slots!? What happened to you, IIfx? Which hell have you seen? At this point, I reckoned powering up was quite out of the question. Obvs. As an SE/30 owner—currently mid-restoration, it's still Simasimac—I was interested in the salvage potential of this badly damaged IIfx though. I know its RAM is compatible, and its ROM is 32-bit clean. Let's have a look at those.  The top one is indeed a genuine IIfx ROM. Looks to be in fine fettle, as it was mounted a ways over from the kill zone. Phew! Going by this helpful guide the codes on the RAM chips say that these are 4 megabyte and 1 megabyte SIMMs respectively. The IIfx was fully populated with 4 of each, for 20 megs total. My SE/30 has only 8x1 megabytes so the 4x4 are welcome. Well, if they still work. That one there—it was the closest to the PRAM battery—is however quite badly hit by whatever foul substance wrecked this Macintosh. Maybe beyond reuse… Let's take a look at the hard drive. 80 megabytes of Quantum Fireball.  I put my BlueSCSI into initiator mode to power up this drive and clone its contents. I had just assembled the desktop BlueSCSI and used it to back up my SE/30's drive and another very similar 40 megabyte Quantum Fireball drive from the museum. Initiator mode worked perfectly on those two, which I did immediately before this, using the opened SE/30's power supply. The IIfx's drive whirred into action, but sounded pretty dry and nasty, and definitely louder than its little brother. Its amber LED blinked as it should, and it went up to full speed but the BlueSCSI couldn't get it to talk. A look at the log afterwards showed a lot of this as it tried several times: * No response from SCSI ID 1Nothing from the drive then. That's a shame. I'd hoped a IIfx might have some rare professional software on it, being the Mac Pro of its day. But this drive is thoroughly uncooperative. So, the conclusion is that this IIfx is seriously effed! I might be able to salvage its precious 32-bit clean SE/30 compatible ROM, and mayyyybe the 16 megs of 4x4 SIMMs might work, if that damaged one isn't too corroded. Perhaps those graphics cards are in working order, I've no means to tell. But other than that, I think this one's a goner. Such a strange way to meet you, queen of the 68030 age. It's like Sunset Boulevard. | |
| Posted by: MacKilRoy on 2024-07-04 07:05:50 RAM from the IIfx will not work in any other Mac. Just advising you. | |
| Posted by: Muirium on 2024-07-04 07:11:10 Ah! I quite suspect this RAM won't work anyway, because of the corrosion. | |
| Posted by: AndyMc1280 on 2024-07-04 08:01:26 ooo FX-uck, to coin a phrase. Poor thing.😢 That's nasty. Soo glad my brother's SE30 (still on the original battery dated May '89) hadn't exploded like this. Got off lightly with gooey but not exploded caps and no board damage. Machine still in working order. All now remedied of course. | |
| Posted by: robin-fo on 2024-07-04 08:07:49 You could build a replica board, so not all hope is gone for this one 😃 | |
| Posted by: MOS8_030 on 2024-07-04 08:38:07 Shame about that one for sure. It's just what parts can be salvaged. | |
| Posted by: croissantking on 2024-07-04 09:19:53 You have to build a IIfx Reloaded! @Bolle recently created it! https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/macintosh-iifx-logicboard-recreation.46709/ BTW, isn't this type of lock called a Tiffany lock? | |
| Posted by: Muirium on 2024-07-04 09:31:02 You may well be right about the lock. I’m kinda tempted to put it on one of my Macs if the museum are cool with that. They're not sure what to do with the IIfx as it's so clearly damaged. If I build a IIfx Reloaded it'll have to go back to them. 😄 | |
| Posted by: Durosity on 2024-07-04 11:53:41 PSU might still be ok, and if I recall correctly it was slightly more powerful than that of the II/IIx. Nice find though, do they have any others lurking? | |
| Posted by: ArmorAlley on 2024-07-04 12:05:00 Such a pity. And a word of defence for these much maligned batteries: they were great batteries in their day. They were just never designed to last 34 years. A Mac dealer back in the early '90s told me that 7 years' useful life is what you could expect out of a Macintosh then and this is what they were designed for. These Maxell batteries lasted much longer than 7 years... Still, it is such a pity and these pictures re-affirm my dedication to tell sellers on auction sites to remove batteries from the Macs that they are selling.  On a more positive note, are there any Apple-only chips that can be salvaged from the board? If the PSU works, that will also be a big plus. | |
| Posted by: MacUp72 on 2024-07-04 12:05:07 wow, what a battlefield, what did it look like inside 15min after the PRAM battery nuclear attack.. | |
| Posted by: dramirez on 2024-07-04 12:11:01 damn Maxell's! such a pity... | |
| Posted by: Durosity on 2024-07-04 12:13:02 I do have an unexploded Maxell which when last tested still had about a 3v reading.. so yeah.. if they don’t explode they last a long time! | |
| Posted by: Durosity on 2024-07-04 12:23:43 Oh, and this is my IIFXs motherboard.. pretty awful too 🙁 | |
| Posted by: LaPorta on 2024-07-04 12:28:07 I have a very small request: if you do manage to part out things from it...can I buy the PSU? My IIfx has been hampered by a II PSU ever since I got it. | |
Posted by: Concorde1993 on 2024-07-04 12:38:10My IIfx has been hampered by a II PSU ever since I got it.Is your PS an Astec? That would explain your woes. | |
| Posted by: LaPorta on 2024-07-04 13:49:20 Sony, I believe...but no variable speed fan. | |
| Posted by: pizzigri on 2024-07-04 15:43:29 Every chip or IC from the fx is valuable. Inductors too. And let’s not talk about the CPU, MMU or FPU… Bolle’s Reloaded board is the way to go | |
Posted by: Durosity on 2024-07-04 21:03:25Every chip or IC from the fx is valuable. Inductors too. And let’s not talk about the CPU, MMU or FPU… Bolle’s Reloaded board is the way to goYeah foolishly I sold my CPU/FPU to joshc so he could fix one of his.. but now I wish I’d kept them for a reloaded board 😢 | |
Posted by: robin-fo on 2024-07-04 22:32:54Yeah foolishly I sold my CPU/FPU to joshc so he could fix one of his.. but now I wish I’d kept them for a reloaded board 😢Shouldn‘t be too hard to buy new ones Eric Woo on eBay has 50MHz 68030s for sale at a decent price. His 68882 you‘d need to overclock though.. | |
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