u/EsoTechTrix

Yes, yes I do.

You have to ponder how many of these things are still just going to be shredded these days.

Here's a fun one for you. I have a Mac 512K that appears functional, but does not seem to load. Recently I came into the possession of an M0130. The thing was seized up as one would expect, but has the *exact* same 400K drive as the 512K does. So I tag teamed the cleaning (un-gluing?) of the 2 drives and hooked the M0130 up to the SE I have limping. I was able to verify that not only does the SE see and read the 400K disks I'm trying boot with, it boots with them two.

So I moved the 400K over to put it *in* the 512K that was unhappy. Same issue. Now I verified the drive, and the disk. I've been digging online and these are the dead chickens left to wave:

* Check the pin voltage on the drive and adjust the analog output pot.

* Try and swap the ribbon cable

* Try and adjust the zero sector indicator on the 400K for the 512K

The first two seem sensible, the last one seems silly, but I'll try it.

Any thoughts of what I could be missing? Am I better off just burning newer ROMs for the 512K board than continuing to chase my tail on this?

So all the bits are from different places, but I managed to get a Macintosh SE reassembled. Needs some cleaning. The keyboard seems to have lost control. I'm also cheating and using a (meter tested, I did not YOLO it) S-Video cable in place of an ADB for the keyboard (for now). The SCSI drive is toast, but it's booting off disk, so it likely has a Blue SCSI upgrade in its future.

Never thought I would see a Fairchild Channel F in the wild at this point. Of course they wanted an arm and a leg for these.

These are being designed and tested to work with T|E and T|E2, but I believe these are supposed to also work with the W and the C. I've dialed in the fit. The end looks OK. I kicked off a batch that turned out OK, but I want to play with a few more materials. These should be available soon.

I have a Clie coming next week and I'll start adding that to the mix as soon as it gets here. See if I can't get some more options out there.

This is fun. I just watched this music video again (likely for the first time in like over quarter century). It was released in April of '94 for time reference, but is that a PowerBook 150 I spy? There are multiple scenes in the video going over equipment. I grabbed shots of each segment.

Bit of a blast from the past.

Curious if this is common or folks have seen this before on these units. Went to power this up and was getting nothing (not even dead air) off the RF. I noted the jack was a bit wobbly, but more importantly 'twisty' (which is never good) so I cracked it open and sure enough, the jack has broken the resistor it's attached to free.

Assuming I can just swap the resistor, and perhaps tack the jack to the frame (seems to be how the outer jacket is 'wired'. Just curious if I'm missing something.

That and curious if I can still get my free cartridge. 🤣

No video, but it beeps. Crack it open to get a quick look at the analog board and well... this may be a bigger project. I should likely put trigger warnings on this, but, well, consider this a PSA on reflowing your analog board as your first soldering project. 😬

The icing is the RIFA are still in place.

Was toying with making some styluseses, but a quick glance at eBay and it seems like the market is still flooded with unopened packs of Palm styli. Is the market saturated? Is there anything out there you can't find Palm wise these days.

Not sure that it's just because they were so ubiquitous, but there seems to be very little that is unobtainium out there.

So, rather fascinating rabbit hole. Got ahold of this SPT-1500 that GreggAlan found. Did the basic disassembly as well as pulled out my stash of other Palm III class devices that I had yet to muck with.

So the display on the unit seems to work, but it is oddly not OEM. (The url on the board also seems to now be defunct) That would have been an easy win. The fun started though in that I first grabbed a Palm IIIx. Turns out, Palm decided to save some cash on the IIIx and *removed* the SO-DIMM(esq) slot. I checked the IIIxe and found it was the same. I then grabbed my old vanilla Palm III and verified that it was, in fact still there.

The OG Pilot, as some may remember, has a (somewhat) easy way to upgrade. For the III they kept that mentality, but buried it in the case. The SPT-1500 actually uses that and the scanner is actually attached to the RAM board. The base of the unit is likely very much a stock Palm III.

For yucks I slapped the Symbol RAM module in my Palm III and sadly, it did not start with it in. While that does not confirm or deny the issue, I am going to try the reverse. If I pop the Palm III RAM board in the Symbol main board and it starts that likely points to the scanner board being bad, which is sad. If it does not just pop off, it may still be an issue with the main board. (Or both) I ran out of time at the lab today and the Symbol had no screen to quick test.

I did find it interesting that the x and xe are technically downgrades (IMHO) board wise.

(The Symbol RAM board in the OG Pilot is just to show it's the same slot.)

Why is it that even folks that think they have 'really valuable Macs" tend to proceed to store them on the floor of a barn for decades? Like seriously?

I find way too many sticks in this, but sadly I also find way too many perfectly good sticks with chopped cords. You save the ones you can.

This was a fun flea find. Basically it let you 'multiply' (get it, rabbit) your expensive VCR feed to multiple TVs in different rooms. Apparently two boxes could interface so you could even control the VCR from the other room. Alas, I have only found the one in the wild (so far).

You have to appreciate the sleek modern design.

This was my desk radio for many moons.