Apple MAC SE/30

A local seller posted an unknown condition SE/30 on FB Marketplace so I took a chance and am in the process of trying to save it. I powered it on before purchasing, and was greeted with a SIMASIMAC screen. From my limited knowledge of these systems it sounded like an easy fix (recap) so I thought I would try my luck. Unfortunetally I didn't get quite that lucky and a recap didn't fix it. Its not battery bombed, so thats at least a start. The screen doesn't appear to have any burn in, appears bright, and the case is in great condition with minimial yellowing. Time to break out the oscilliscope and start tracing circuits!

Progress so far: I've tried the quick fix of just recapping the whole board. I have also replaced some of the video circitry next to a cluster of caps (UA8, UB8, UC8, UD8, UE8, UF8, UG8) that had leaked. The legs of the chips where dull looking, but didn't seem to have anything growing on them. It also gave me the opportunity to check the traces under the chips which are known to get eaten away. It was the first time I had used my hot air station, and was a bit worried I would make things worse. I ended up being quite impressed with the ease of use and how quickly I was able to remove the chips. I cleaned all the pads with solder wick, cleaned the board, and then applied solder to the pads as I don't have any solder paste. After applying a generous amount of flux around the chips I once again hit them with hot air to resolder them in place.

Things to try: I need to break out the schematics, a multimeter, and the oscilliscope to start verifying that traces are all still intact, and the signals are ok. The board looks really clean, and the traces appear to all look really clean with no black spots or cracks. I'm really suprised the recap didn't fix it.

Update: It's working! I spent a morning with the multimeter using a schematic redraw I found online testing traces from each chip to chip. I finally found a broken connection on Address Line 11. A quick bodge wire from the Video ROM to the VIA2 chip. After that I was still getting some quirks. After adding a"mac-rom-inator-ii" and different ram if finally started giving the startup bong and booting! Since I was on a roll, I decided to recap the powersupply and the analog board. The machine once again went back to an even worse condition of a black screen and no posting! I then spend the rest of the afternoon swapping parts between my Mac SE and the SE/30 to figure out it was an issue with the analog board. I put all the original caps back in the analog board, just to rule out a few things and was presented with the same symptoms, a dead machine. I started going over the analog board and found a few solder spots that looked "layered." After reflowing all the larger plug connection there was once again sign of live.

A/UX: An afternoon was spent attempting to get A/UX installed on the ZULUscsi. Its a very quirky install to say the least. You MUST boot off the boot disc in order for setup to complete properly. If you run from regular MAC OS the installer on the CD-ROM will happily start with no errors, bring you through the setup to select software, and install to the drive. Once you restart to complete setup, it will load the MAC OS portion of A/UX but will never load the UNIX shell properly and will error out on unable to chroot. Some sort of error would have been nice stating you can install from an existing OS would have been nice. Once I figured out the whole mandatory boot disk, an hour and a half later I was able to get A/UX installed. Now onto the configuration and network support!

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