@geerlingguy I have a #PowerBook#Wallstreet that needs the motherboard battery replaced but after reading the #ifixit instructions it looks too daunting and invasive to attempt.
this is Ryza! she's a PowerBook 180 in fairly good condition and the nicest 68k Mac i own.
this MARCHINTOSH, i'm going to try to upgrade Ryza with a WiFi-capable PiSCSI (fka RaSCSI) so i can test and someday play Atelier Esri, my homebrew Atelier demake.
i'm also going to try out a brand new JCS PowerBook 1xx battery. and while i'm in there, i can at least inventory the capacitors and check the PRAM battery.
unfortunately, like most 180s, her active matrix screen is developing "tunnel vision", slowly fading from the corners inward as long as she's on. (it reverts when she's not, but it can take multiple days, far slower than the fading).
fortunately, Ryza has video output and is capable of driving a VGA monitor or capture box, so i won't need to rely on her screen too much.
I've done some pretty major surgery on the PowerBook 145B tonight.
While the laptop makes the happy Mac bootup sound, the display showed only a grey backlight, and never fully booted. The backlit display was dark around the edges of the screen - almost like the laptop had developed tunnel vision.
I had previously replaced the PRAM battery with a new unit but it didn't fix the problem with booting, and it was clear there were more problems to resolve.
Following the service manual, I opened up the display bezel, and removed the Sharp display from the laptop. Clearly, the electrolytic capacitors had been in a bad way for some time. There was evidence of leakage on both sides of the display board, as well as dried electrolyte residue crusting up circuit traces.
The 11 capacitors on the display assembly needed to go.
The recap operation took four hours, mainly because I had never done it before and I was being extremely careful.
It involves using a pliers to grab and delicately twist and wiggle each bad cap until its pins snapped off, then using a lot of flux and a soldering iron to clean off the pads. And alcohol, and q-tips. Lots and lots of q-tips.
Once clean, I put a dab of solder on each trace on the new replacement Tantalum caps, fluxed the pads again, and soldered the new caps to the pads.
It was definitely the most complex repair I've undertaken on a retrocomputer but it was a total success...for the monitor. The display is nice and bright and no longer has a grey halo around the border.
But it didn't change the boot problems. The Mac now boots up with a happy sound and just sits there not showing the Welcome To Macintosh image, or the pointer. Just a freshly brightened blank screen. 😓
I have continued futzing around with the #Apple#Macintosh#PowerBook 145B. My weekend project was to remove the ancient, decrepit SCSI hard drive (functional, but loud as heck) with the #Androda#BlueSCSI replacement unit.
Fortunately I already have some experience working with .hda disk image files from last year's #PiSCSI project, so I had some ready-made virtual hard disks loaded with software I've barely touched.
Today at @mediaarchaeologylab I found a floppy disk for the 1995 Norton Disk Editor, a low-level diagnostic tool that I can't imagine there was much consumer demand for. The disk editor contains some hidden gems of MacIntosh lore I was previously unaware of.
The UI says "The Disk Type bytes identify the type of Macintosh file system in use on the volume. If the bytes are $D2D7 (or 'RW' - standing for Randy Wigginton) then the volume is an MFS volume. If the Disk Type bytes are $4244 (standing for 'BD' or "Big Disk") then the volume is an HFS volume."
Randy was employee number 6 at Apple, and a neighbor of Woz. Turning your initials into magic bytes buried in the filesystem you designed seems just so...early Apple.
The PowerBook is now completely silent when it runs. It doesn't have an internal fan. The hard drive motor was the only thing that made any noise (aside from the speaker, of course).
And the BlueSCSI? With a 128GB MicroSD card, it has about 1600 times as much storage as that old 80MB hard drive.
@melodymayhem Oh niiice! I have its older sibling Wallstreet 233 here, love that machine versatility with double bays. Not so adventurous to try BeOS (afaik it wouldn't work - or at least not easily) so I am running Rhapsody and OS9.1 on it... 🍏 #ppc#g3#powerbook#macosclassic#retrocomputing