SE/30

7 Articles

Affordable Networking For Your Classic Mac

December 5, 2023 by 1 Comment

The Mac SE and in particular the Mac SE/30 number among the more sought-after of the classic all-in-one Apple computers, and consequently their peripherals including network cards are also hard to find and pricey. Even attempts at re-creating them can be expensive, usually because the chips used back in the day are now nearly unobtainable. But if the search is widened to other silicon it becomes possible to create substitutes, as [Richard Halkyard] is doing with a modern version of the SE Ethernet card.

The chip which makes this possible is the Microchip ENC624J600, an embedded 10/100 Ethernet controller with an impressively configurable interface that can be easily mated to the 68k bus. For The SE it’s mapped to a memory area, while for the /30 there can be a declaration ROM which informs the machine where it is.

This is an as yet unfinished project, a work in progress. But it deserves to succeed, and if we can provide encouragement by featuring it here then it’s definitely worth a look. Or course, this is by no means the only replacement for an original board.

SE/30 picture: Cornellanense, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Resurrecting A Recalcitrant SE/30

October 8, 2019 by 26 Comments

The Macintosh SE/30 is well regarded as the choice pick of the compact Mac line. Packing a powerful 68030 processor and with the capability to use up to 128 MB of RAM, it brought serious grunt to bear in a tight form factor. With these machines now over 30 years old, they’re often quite worse for wear. [This Does Not Compute] had his work cut out for him getting this particular example up and running. (Video embedded below.)

With the computer displaying the famous SimasiMac screen on startup, it was sadly non-functional when switched on. [This Does Not Compute] went through all the usual attempts to fix this – washing the board, recapping, checking potentially broken traces – all to no avail. After much consternation, the fix was not so hard – a fresh set of RAM helped cure what ailed the Mac.

With the Mac now showing some signs of life, there was more to do. The floppy drive refused to boot, ejecting disks and failing to read anything. A head cleaning proved helpful, but not enough. It was only when the head motor’s worm gear was relubricated, enabling it to seek properly, that the drive was successfully able to boot. The hard drive proved resistant of any attempts to get it to work, so was replaced with a SCSI2SD instead.

With the suite of repairs completed, the SE/30 was once again up and running. With a little elbow grease, the case and keyboard turned up a treat, too. [This Does Not Compute] now has one of the all-time classic Macs in excellent condition.

We’ve seen some great restorations over the past – this Commodore 64 full of dirt was a particularly compelling story. Video after the break.

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The Greatest Computer Ever Now Gets A New, Injection Molded Clear Case

January 21, 2019 by 55 Comments

The Macintosh SE/30 is the greatest computer ever made. It was a powerhouse when it was launched almost exactly thirty years ago today. You could stuff 128 Megabytes of RAM into it, an absolutely ludicrous amount of RAM for 1989. You could put Ethernet in it. You could turn the 1-bit black or white internal display into an 8-bit grayscale display. I think there was a Lisp card for it. These were just the contemporaneous hacks for the SE/30. Now, people are actively developing for this machine and putting Spotify on it. There’s a toolbar extension for Macs of this era that will let you connect to a WiFi network. You’ll be hard pressed to find a computer that still has a fanbase this big thirty years after release.

Now, there’s a project to create new injection molded cases for the Mac SE/30 (and the plain ‘ol SE). These cases will be clear, just like Apple prototypes of the era. It’s also one of the most difficult injection molding projects retrocomputer enthusiasts have ever taken up.

Over the years, we’ve seen some interesting projects in the way of creating new plastic cases for old computers. The most famous is perhaps the remanufacturing of Commodore 64C cases. Instead of a purely community-driven project, this was an accident of history. The story goes that one guy, [Dallas Moore], went to an auction at an injection molding factory. The owner mentioned something about an old computer, and wheels started turning in someone’s head. A Kickstarter later, and everyone who wanted a new C64 case got one. You could get one in translucent plastic to go with the retro aesthetic.

New cases for the Amiga A1200 have also been made thanks to one fan’s Solidworks skills and a Kickstarter campaign. There is, apparently, a market for remanufactured cases for retrocomputers, and it’s just barely large enough to support making new injection molding tooling.

So, about that SE/30. The folks on the 68k Macintosh Liberation Army forums are discussing the possibility of making a new case for the greatest computer Apple will ever make. The hero of this story is [maceffects] who has already modeled the back ‘bucket’ of the SE/30 and printed one out on a filament printer (check out the videos below). This was then printed in clear SLA, and the next step is crowdfunding.

While this isn’t a complete case — a front bezel would be needed to complete the case — it is an amazing example of what the retrocomputing community can do. The total cost to bring this project to fruition would be about $15,000 USD, which is well within what a crowdfunding campaign could take in. Secondary runs could include a translucent Bondi Blue polycarbonate enclosure, but that’s pure speculation from someone who knows what would be the coolest project ever.

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Giving An Old Mac Spotify

December 21, 2018 by 15 Comments

The Macintosh SE/30 is the greatest computer ever made, and I’m not saying that just because I’m sitting on a cache of them, slowly selling them to computer collectors around the world. No, the SE/30 is so great because of how powerful it is, and how much it can be expanded. A case in point: here’s an SE/30 that’s a Spotify player. Oh, it does it over WiFi, too.

You might be asking yourself how a computer from 1989 (it’s late enough in the year that we can safely say this computer is thirty years old) can possibly play music over the Internet. While the SE/30 supported an astonishing 128 Megabytes of RAM, it’s still just a bit too slow to play MP3s or any modern audio codec. The 68030 CPU just wasn’t fast enough to play audio, to say nothing of streaming it over a network connection. The trick is that this SE/30 is simply a remote for Spotify Connect. You could theoretically get the Mac to speak, “Alexa, play Despacito” and get the same functionality, but that’s not fun, is it? You need to do it wirelessly.

This is a continuation of one of [ants] earlier hacks that basically put a WiFi to Ethernet bridge inside an SE/30. Tie that together with a Finder extension and you have System 7, with WiFi. That’s a connection to the Internet, but [ants] actual wrote an app to connect to a Spotify playlist, browse tracks, and display album art in beautiful 1-bit color. Writing the app involved dealing with OAuth, which means the MacPlayer isn’t entirely standalone; some of it must be done on a ‘modern’ device. This, along with porting a conversion utility that translates UTF-8 text encoding into something the Mac can understand ties everything together.

With all those pieces, the SE/30 becomes a handsome, functional piece of art. Apple is never going to release a computer like this again, and you’re not going to find a touchbar MacBook being used like this in thirty years time.

Yet Another Restomod Of The Greatest Computer Ever

December 4, 2018 by 40 Comments

The best computer ever made is nearly thirty years old. The Macintosh SE/30 was the highest-spec original all-in-one Macs, and it had the power of a workstation. It had expansion slots, and you could hang a color monitor off the back. It ran Unix. As such, it’s become the prize of any vintage computer collector, and [Kris] recently completed a restomod on our beige king. It’s a restored Macintosh SE/30, because yes, we need to see more of these.

The restoration began with the case, which over the last thirty years had turned into an orange bromiated mess. This was fixed with RestOBrite, or Retr0Brite, or whatever we’re calling it now. This was just Oxyclean and an off-the-shelf bottle of 3% hydrogen peroxide, left out in the sun for a little bit.

Of course the capacitors had spilled their magic blue smoke over the last three decades, so a few replacements were in order. This is well-trodden territory, but [Kris] also had to replace the SCSI controller chip. Three of the pads for this chip had lifted, but this too is something that can be fixed.

With the restoration work complete, [Kris] turned his attention to doing something with this computer. The spinny hard drive was replaced with a SCSI2SD, currently the best solution to putting SCSI disks into old computers. There are a few more additions, including a Micron Xceed color video adapter, a video card that allows the SE/30 to drive two monitors (internal included) in color.

The current plans are to attach a modem to this SE/30, have it ring into a Raspberry Pi, and surf the web over a very slow connection. There is another option, though: You can get a WiFi adapter for the SE/30, and there’s a System 7 extension to make it work. Yes, we’re living in the future, in the past. It’s awesome.

Apple’s Best Computer Gets WiFi

September 26, 2018 by 20 Comments

The greatest computer Apple will ever make isn’t the Apple II, it isn’t the Bondi Blue iMac, it isn’t the trash can, and it certainly isn’t whatever overheating mess they’re pushing out now. The best computer Apple will ever make is the SE/30, at its time a server in a tiny portable shell, and capable of supporting 128 Megabytes of RAM thirty years ago.

Over the years, people have extended and expanded the SE/30 to absolutely ludicrous degrees, but now we have a simple way of adding WiFi to this classic computer. Over on the 68kmla forums, [ants] discovered a tiny cheap card that could easily serve as an Ethernet to WiFi bridge. After attaching this card to a Danaport Ethernet card and bending some aluminum for a bracket, they had a WiFi antenna sticking out of the back of a 30-year-old computer.

But adding a WiFi card to an old computer is nothing new — this could have been done with a Pi, or if you’re a hacker, a TP-Link router flashed with OpenWRT. To really do this right, you’ll need integration with the operating system, and that’s where this build goes off the rails. [ants] wrote a WiFi extension for System 7 (with the relevant GitHub)

The problem with the Vonets WiFi card is that configuration has to be done through a browser. Since there are no modern browsers for classic macs, this meant either pulling out a PowerBook or doing the configuration through your daily driver desktop PC. The WiFi extension gets around that by giving a classic mac the ability to configure the Vonets card almost automatically. This extension also looks like how you would configure the WiFi on a modern mac, complete with the WiFi icon in the toolbar. It’s beautiful, and one of the rare examples of modern 68k mac programming.

As for what you can do by adding WiFi to a 30-year-old computer with a 16MHz processor, the answer is a resounding, ‘not much’. Your choice of browsers is limited (iCab seems to be the best), but you can load the Google homepage slowly. HTTPS isn’t going to work, and the Internet right now is full of megabytes of Javascript cruft. If you find a nice, lightweight web page — such as the Hackaday Retro Edition, for example — you’re looking at a capable web browsing machine. Of course, the real use case for giving the SE/30 WiFi is file transfer around the home network, but still: it’s WiFi for the best computer Apple ever made.

Hackaday Retro Edition: The Macintosh SE/30

October 28, 2012 by 45 Comments

In 1988, Apple introduced the Macintosh IIx, an upgrade of the Mac II that included a Motorola 68030 CPU. The IIcx – a compact version of the IIx, also with a 68030 – was introduced in 1989. That same year, product designers at Apple created a more powerful version of the all-in-one Macintosh SE using the same CPU found in the IIx and IIcx. Unfortunately, the naming convention didn’t hold but the Macintosh SE/30 is still the greatest computer Apple will ever build.

Earlier this month, [Greg] sent in a submission for our retro edition successes. A huge mac fan, [Greg] connected his Powerbook Duo to an Ethernet adapter and loaded up our retro edition. [Greg] is back again, this time with an SE/30.

In the three pictures [Greg] sent us (in the gallery after the break), you can see his extremely clean SE/30 booting into System 7 and loading up our retro site. In the third picture, you can see [Greg] playing Bolo, one of the first network-enabled games ever made, and still a very fun waste of time today.

If you’re wondering what makes the SE/30 so great, consider this: the SE/30 is able to address up to 128 MB of RAM. Keep in mind this computer is from an era when one or two Megabytes of RAM would be more than enough to get just about any job done. The SE/30 also made a fabulous server. Even today it would be a capable home media server if it weren’t for its relatively slow networking capabilities and 2 Gigabyte file size (not volume size) limit.

[Greg] has a very cool machine on his hands here, and we’re pleased as punch his SE/30 could make its way over to our retro site.

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