Table of Contents for this issue:
How to set interleave on External for PLUS
Photoshop 1.0
Re: Big 'n' little drives for the Plus
Re: Classic II/ Powermac Comparison
Re: Broken Mac Classic
modems?
Re: Compact Virtual
Re: MacPlus/mounting a hard disk [HD 20]
Faster use of the modem on a Plus?
Re: Booting a Plus from a HD
Re: help! zterm+system 5+gv teleport gold II??
LCll and aol
Re: Classic II vs PPC Mac
Wanted: System 7.1 or 7.5 disk
Problems with Mac Plus/HD!
Re: Dying date battery on a Classic II
big problems with SE
Mac Plus hardware question

I can't figure out how to set the interleave on my external HD to 3:1.
I've tried Anubis, and HDSC neither will do it.

Thanks , Josh

Does anyone know where I could find the first version of Photoshop? I
have hopes that it will run on 68000 macs, but I'm not certain. I have
version 2.5 but you still need a '020 to run it.

Matt Eberly

"Hot Tip: Some Quantum drives aren't happy on a Plus. Unit attention must
be turned off. Anubis and Hard Disk Toolkit both give you access to such
low-level settings."

Now I realise that there is plenty of misinformation floating around... but
is this tip about "unit attention" worth something?

When I first got my (ex-PC) 100MB Quantum drive to use with an SE, it would
mount only about 50% of the time. Then I found a Hard Disk Toolkit v1.5
readme that gave the following info:

-----
"Quantum LP52S and LP105S should not have Minimum Prefetch ... set to any value
other than ZERO or else random crashes could occur. This is due to a
Quantum firmware bug.

"Quantum Q250/Q280 drives should have DELDIS enabled or else transfer
errors can occur.

"When connecting a drive that has not been used with a Mac, make sure the
following settings are correct, if available: Parity off, Synchronous
negotiation off, Wait spin off, Unit Attention disabled, Spindle sync
disabled, Terminator power supplied by the drive to the SCSI bus."

-----

I can't remember now which of these settings I changed, but it did the
trick. With that old version of HDT, you use (with care) a utility called
'World Control' to mess about with these low-level settings.

Chris Adams, Birmingham, UK.
The Mac SE Support Pages http://www.edprint.demon.co.uk/se/

Hi Goos,

Listen, you are going to catch a lot of crap from a lot of people for
your post, so I thought I'd give you a word of encouragement. You are
absolutely right; for a lot of mundane tasks, the old systems are about as
fast as the newest systems. This is especially true for any task that
involves accessing the hard disk, which is a major bottleneck. In fact, if
you could have taken the hard disk from the newer PPC and stuck it in the
Classic II, the Classic would have looked even better in your tests. Sad,
ain't it?

However -- and this is a big however -- if you are doing work which
requires a lot of computational horsepower the new machine will leave any
old one in the dust, as you demonstrated to yourself with the search and
replace test. If you want to run complex documents in Photoshop or
PageMaker, you would grow old waiting for the Classic II to finish a task.
If you just want to write letters, the older machines are more than adequate.
BTW, my Power Mac 9600 is actually pretty stable, going days or weeks
between crashes, and it's loaded to the gills with extensions and apps and
I push it hard all day long. Let's hope your system will settle down soon.

Best wishes, Jon

Conclusion 1...PPC performance VERY disappointing. A 75 mHz PPC computer
should have blown away a lowly '030 Classic II on every test.

Conclusion 2...Those of you who think you are missing a lot by not having a
PPC Mac, think again.

Conclusion 3...The Classic II almost never crashes. The Power Mac 7100 and
Performa 6214 crash all the time. You are buying misery with a PPC Mac.

Goos

Emma wrote:

On bootup all I get is the sad mac with a top
error string of 0000005 and a lower one of 00EF00FF, with occasional
0000001's with and different errors underneath.

This is from MacSecrets (tho' it misses out code 0005!):

-----
In our experience, the Sad Mac most often appears just after you've
installed new RAM chips. It tells you that one of the chips is defective or
improperly seated. Try reseating the chips.

Sad Mac Codes (second 4 characters on top row)

Code Explanation
0001 The ROM chip is having trouble (may not be seated correctly).
0002 Something's wrong with a SIMM in bank B, if your Mac has two banks
of SIMMs.
0003 Something else is wrong with bank B.
0004 Something's wrong with a SIMM in bank A.
0006 Something's wrong with your ADB (keyboard/mouse) jack.
0008 Again, an ADB problem.
000A There's a problem with the NuBus slots.
000B Trouble with the SCSI chip.
000C It's floppy drive trouble.
000D Something's wrong with the printer or modem port.
-----

Do any UK users know where I might get a torx screwdriver that will get the
case off if need be?

The usual mail-order companies may still have 'Mac Cracker' kits, even
though they don't put them in the catalogue any more. It's a very long
3/16" allen (hex) wrench, otherwise known as a Torx T-15. Somebody here
once suggested trying to find a screwdriver/bit set that has both a long
shank and an extension, or an extension and very long bits. Maplin?
Halfords?

Chris Adams, Birmingham, UK.
The Mac SE Support Pages http://www.edprint.demon.co.uk/se/

Hi y'all,

I'm running this MacII with a 2400 ext. modem, but I got really tired of its
slowness. I was lookin' around to buy a faster one, but apparently I cannot go
over 9600 internal (because of Nubus slots), and probably the same external
because of ADB ports. Is there any way to work around these obsolete
limitations and stick a faster (14.4 or greater) modem into it? Can I "add" a
PCI slot?

Thanks, Cornel

[MODERATOR]

Internal modems are pretty rare on old macs and a bad idea anyway.
The more logical choice is to buy a standard 33.6 external modem, which
the mac II will have no trouble driving. The serial ports go up to at least
56.7 kbps, and perhaps 230.4 kbps (that speed is present at least on my
later IIsi.

[END MODERATOR]

Hi all,

Does anyone know where I can get the Connectix Compact Virtual software?
I got the MicroMac accelerator for my Plus and find that this software is
no longer available from either MicroMac or Connectix. It is supposed to
act like RAM doubler and I would love to break that 4MB barrier on my Mac
Plus.

At last check Galaxy Hardware Publishers still had this little tidbit
available. I have tried it on my Plus, but found no end to hard drive
corruptions when used along with my ISP. Without the ISP compact virtual was
great, without compact virtual the ISP is great. That is with one or the
other I do not have problems with hard drive corruptions. This is my personal
observation only.

Galaxy Hardware
1679 Willamette Street
Eugene, OR 97401

PHONE SALES ORDER LINE: 800-366-2234 or 541-345-1817
Web Site: www.galaxyhp.com

neongooch

Subject: MacPlus/mounting a hard disk

I just found an Apple Hard Disk 20 (model M0135) that looks like it connects
to the floppy port of my Mac Plus. I'm not sure how to go about testing
and/or using this drive. Will I need to initialize it? How will I know if
the CPU is recognizing it? I assume I would need some utility for such
things. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Brian Robson

Thats the wonderfull floppy port hard disk, and is real simple to use. Just
plug it into the Plus and then start the Plus. If it is unreadable then just
erase it from the special menu. There is some software out there from Apple
to check the disk, but about the same thing can be done if you can erase it
while running system 7 (that is check for bad blocks). That could be a trick,
the Plus is the last Mac that can use the HD 20 floppy port hard drive and
system 7 won't fit on a floppy (would need another HD on the Plus). The file
you want to test the disk while running system 6 (made to be put on a 400k
disk, but not a disk image so you can put it on an 800k disk if you prefer)
is called "HD 20". The file is on AOL, but I've not seen it anywhere else. I
have a copy myself, I used to use an HD 20 and system 6.0.7 on my Plus. Other
notes, this hard drive is not much faster than a floppy disk, and if you have
a system folder on it your Plus will always boot from the HD 20 as it is seen
as a floppy disk.

neongooch

Hi all,

I am trying to get my modem on my Plus to run a little faster. I am using a
Supra 14.4LC. My Plus runs a MicroMac 030 at 16mhz and system 7.1. The setup
works great, but not fast enuf. I know this 14.4 (19,200) modem can work
faster, I've done so on an SE/30.

The problem is that transfer of data keeps stopping and starting, the Plus
seems to not keep up with full flow. I here some out there saying duh <g>.
What can I do to help? The connection is very reliable, I have CTS/RTS on and
DTR disabled, with the hangup on close on in PPP to get offline. My string in
PPP 2.01 is <AT&F1&D0&K3%C0>. "D0" is to ignore DTR, "&K3" is RTS/CTS on (as
per the setting in MacPPP), and "%C0" is to disable compression, this seems
to make it a little faster. Any better ideas out there?

I have one, but it would be a bit of work. I have an old BrainStorm board
which I could install instead of the 030 upgraded board I now run. The
brainstorm does not speed things up as much (about 190% instead of 240%), but
since it accelerates the system bus to 16mhz it is an idea. Anybody tried
this? Is it better? I don't even know if the BrainStorm works. From what I
understand it does add more to the power demand of a Plus than my 030.

One last thought, how about AppleTalk on and putting the modem to the printer
port? Will that improve its priority, and hopefully speed?

Paul

So I got all set up with a Mac Plus, 4MB, new analog board, and decide to
hook up a HD. I take this 80MB drive, hook it up to my other machine
(LCIII), format it, install 7.0 w/Tune-Up, hook it up to my Plus, and turn
it on. And wait... And eventually get a flashing disk... No startup disk
found. So I try it again. Same thing. Norton can't find anything wrong.
I would try to boot my LCIII w/it, but it needs 7.1 or later. Anybody have
any idea what went wrong?

- Chris

Try formatting the hard drive on the Plus, then taking it to the later Mac
for software installation. Of course this will require a floppy with a
minimal system on it (will have to be system 6.0.x) and your hard drive
formatting software (HD SC Setup is only for Apple drives). The Plus has a
different and picky SCSI interface, its early and does not fully implement
SCSI. There are a few hard drives that the Plus cannot use because of its
SCSI, but not likely you have one if your drive is an 80meg unit.

neongooch

Subject: help! zterm+system 5+gv teleport gold II??

Trying to help two friends who own a Classic. They'd like access to email
via a shell acct. I gave 'em a GV teleport gold II modem. (Their Classic
has System 5 and 2 mb RAM.) The account is set up and working fine, at
least as far as I can tell. After many failed attempts, I dialed in on my
own computer and everything looked fine. On their system, though, when we
dial in via Zterm (v .9) we can only type a login and a password before
gibberish and wierd words start scrolling across the screen. Seems to be
English, but with lots of characters transposed or garbled for some reason
no one at the ISP can figure out. Been over and over this with the ISP and
no luck on fixing zterm settings so far.

The moderators note on possibly trying to gain shell access through a TCP
account is a very real possibility, but I would have hoped that your ISP
would have figured that out in talking to you.

Another possibility is that you cannot use the Gold II modem on the 68000Mac.
I know I've been told before that the Gold modem won't work on a Plus, not
sure about the rest of the 68000 series Mac's though. I just use the Plus
(well, its the only 68000 series Mac I use anyway). Try contacting Global
Villiage, and ask them about compatibility.

neongooch

Janet Seiz wrote,

I have an LC and a friend has an LC II . We are trying to make these
internet possible beasties. The LC II has 10 Meg of memory, but still
can't seem to boot AOL 3.0. AOl 2.7 works okay. What are we doing wrong?

My experience is that you need something faster than an LCll to run AOL 3.0.
My LCll has been upgraded to 16 mg ram and is still just waaaaaayyyyy too
poky on 3.0 to work. It also needs sys 7.1 or higher, 7.5 or higher
preferred. If anyone has any tips to make it work I'd be happy to hear them
but until then I'm still using v 2.6 as it is more stable than 2.7.

Kathi

Well, the salesmen scared me into buying PPC Macs. I bought a Power Mac 7100
for work and a Performa 6214 for home. I have been thoroughly unimpressed
with their stability and performance. Stability is horrible for both
machines. I've had every OS since 7.5. Every upgrade promised more
stability. That was bunk. They are all unstable, even with the minimum set
of extensions. Even with 7.6.1 they both crash at least once a day,
sometimes four times a day. I've tried all of the suggested fixes (rebuild
desktop, zap PRAM, re-install System software, Conflict Catcher) without
success.

All I can conclude is that Apple deserves all of the financial trouble it's
in. They sold a lot of people a lot of unstable PPC systems, and they
deserve to lose business. That's why I didn't buy OS 8. They promised me
more stability with 7.5 release 2, 7.6 and 7.6.1 but didn't deliver.

So, my kids are using the Performa at home a lot, so I started looking for a
second Mac. Instead of spending another $2000-2500 for a PPC crasher, I
bought a hardly-used Classic II for less than $100.

I did a speed test of the Performa 6214 versus the Classic II. The tests
were not scientific (MIPS, BLIPS, or whatever), it was only a test of some
things that I could understand. The results are listed below:

Speed comparison

[snip of performance comparison]

Conclusion 1...PPC performance VERY disappointing. A 75 mHz PPC computer
should have blown away a lowly '030 Classic II on every test.

Conclusion 2...Those of you who think you are missing a lot by not having a
PPC Mac, think again.

Conclusion 3...The Classic II almost never crashes. The Power Mac 7100 and
Performa 6214 crash all the time. You are buying misery with a PPC Mac.

I think there are things which must be considered before arriving at the
conclusions you have:

1) I will agree that the 6200 series was disappointing. My sister bought
one and it never felt _that much_ subjectively faster than my IIci (with
cache and a separate video card).

But

2) keep in mind that, in color, your 6200 is putting eight times more
information on the screen than your monochrome Classic II -- slowing down
throughput a great deal. Color is eight bits per pixel, not one. That's a
lot more data to move.

3) You probably could do lots more with your 6200 than you could with the
Classic II. The Classic II did not come with a CD-ROM drive or a modem
standard. Color is somewhere between nice-to-have and must-have nowadays.
Your Classic II can't "speak" a word. So you probably weren't browsing
the Web or using multimedia CD-ROMs on the Classic II. You probably
aren't loading QuickTime, the Speech extensions, or CD-ROM drivers on the
Classic II. You've removed all kinds of potential trouble spots. In fact,
your post really doesn't say if both Macs are using the same System
software.

There _are_ issues connected with the use of a largely-non-native (that
is, non-PowerPC) System on the PPC Macs; I won't deny that. But I also
cannot deny that I have done far more with my IIci (color, CD-ROM,
Internet) than I did with my SE/30, and I do more with my PowerCenter 150
(Java, multimedia extensions, SoftWindows, third-party extensions and
control panels) than I did with my IIci. My systems have become
progressively less stable simply because there are more points of
failure. But would I trade the PowerCenter for the SE/30? Nope.
Apparently right now the instability is the price we pay for progress.

You might want to take a look at Extensions Manager on the PPC Macs and
then look at a Web page called "The Pruning Page" and see what you can
excise from your System Folder. I'd guess you wouldn't miss most of it
and would be far happier with the results. If you want, email me; maybe
we can figure out what's causing the problem and what can fix it. Good
luck!

sdropkin

I have a MAC SE/30 8/80 with System 7.1 installed. It has a couple of
quirks that I have been consistently been unable to fix.

1) The cursor sometimes "floats" off the screen when I am not even
touching the mouse, or just after I stop moving it.

2) FreePPP works, but only after opening MAC TCP, switching from
FreePPP to Apple Talk, closing MAC TCP, opening it again, switching
back to FreePPP, and closing MAC TCP again. After all that, the FreePPP
"Connect" button is highlighted and everything works.

Through this list I've received suggestions on how to correct these
problems and the only one I haven't tried is to reinstall the system
software. The reason: I don't have the disks as I bought the machine
through an Auction Web seller and it came with System 7.1 installed,
but no disks. I would like to upgrade to System 7.5 if I can get the disks
reasonably, or at least get a set of System 7.1 disks so I can re-install
the existing system software. If anyone has the appropriate disks and
wants to sell them drop me a line.

Typing serenely in Berkshire County, MA

I am a teacher, & I was given(Donated) a Mac Plus with all the original software
& I have a 20 meg SCSI hard drive! I connected them with a SCSI cable & The
Mac Plus did not read or acknowledge the hard drive. I loaded a copy of the
original software (Sys. 3.2!!!) on the hard drive & the Mac still did not
know the hard drive was there!

Help!

The Mac has only 1 meg of ram, and a 800k(or maybe a 400k) disk drive!
What can I do?

-Also,If it's the low memory, then where can I get that?

I think I solved a problem similar to yours but just backwards. I was given
a Mac Plus and an external 20 MB hard drive. The Plus booted up fine from
the HD but I wanted to hook the 20 MB hard drive to my IIsi and then boot
up the Plus w/ a floppy and then use file sharing to access applications
from the IIsi.

I couldn't get the IIsi to recognize the 20 MB HD even after checking scsi
#s, using the scsi probe and reformating the HD. I cracked open the 20 MB
HD box and took a look inside. I noticed that two wire connectors had been
or come disconnected. I opened up another HD that looked similar and found
the the same connectors but connected. I connected the wires, closed up the
box and connected it. The IIsi recognized the HD.

Why? I don't know. Can some one enlighten me.

stephen.bunker

Can anyone help me? my Classic II appears to be displaying all the symptoms
of a Mac with a dying date battery i.e. on boot up it imagines that it is
living in the early fifties and it keeps putting Appletalk on the printer
port.

Can anyone tell me where the battery is and how to swap it out?
Any help would very much obliged - as you can probably tell I have never
had the top of the box and since I love my Mac I do not want to screw it
up.

Thanx in advance
Patric

I just replaced a battery in one of those critters last week. A fellow
teacher has a Classic II and was always having to reset her clock and turn
on AppleTalk and then restart her computer. I replaced the battery and the
Classic II hasn't had any further problems.

You will need to take the computer cover apart and take out the old battery
and replace it with a new one. I suggest if you haven't done this before,
you have a technition do it. It doesn't take a rocket scientist, but you
will need the right tools to take the chassis apart. BTW you could get a
nasty shock if you don't know what you are doing.

stephen.bunker

Hello All,

My fiance just bought an ancient SE for $15. It seems to work, after a
fashion, but it has some really funky stuff going on that has me a bit
concerned. It was loaded with a bunch of stuff that I took off it to
try to free up some memory. I assume it only has one meg of RAM, but
one of it's problems is that all of the type on the desktop is so huge I
can't even read the full names of the programs or files. And when I try
to access the info about the computer from the apple menu, everything
displays on top of each other and makes it impossible to read.
Sometimes, but not always, when I click on an icon the computer will
instantly delete its name and replace it with a long series of slashes.

I did utilize a control panel called (I think) Who Who that gave me the
following info: system 6.07, finder .1.8, CPU 68000, BW QuickDraw,
keyboard ADB-SE, sys. folder -32733, and trap vers. (Glue) 1.

I have also determined that this machine has an 800k drive, so I have
downloaded all 4, 800k disks for system 6.08 from the Apple site onto my
other computer. Unfortunately, I now have absolutely no idea what to do
next in order to either reformat the drive or reinstall the system on
the SE. I assume I should transfer these downloaded segments of sys.
6.08 onto 800k floppies and somehow get them into the SE. How? And
what of reformatting the drive? How is that done? I, unfortunately,
don't have access to any sort of external drive.

I have managed to rebuild the desktop with no improvement in the
problems mentioned. Could someone now please tell
me how to zap the PRAM on this machine running sys. 6.07? I can't
remember the proper keystrokes.

This machine will only be used for some light word processing and
perhaps a little database work. Would the old version (2.00b, I think)
of Microsoft Works that I have on my Classic work on this SE? Is 1 meg
enough to run Works?

Anybody have any ideas how to fix the font display back to a normal size
or have any ideas about the renaming files to slashes thing? Please
offer any advice in idiot-proof, step by step instructions. I know how
to use my software, but I know nothing of how the machines work or how
to fix them when things go wrong. I need help! Anybody game?

Thanks for any and all assistance,

Laurie

Well, I finally got my Mac Plus apart today - the screen's needed adjusting
for a while and I thought a quick fiddle with a screwdriver would do the
job...

What the problem was is this: the picture was too far over to the left.

I adjusted the picture *width* so it fits on nicely, but there doesn't
appear to be any way of shifting the picture left or right.

Does anyone have any idea how this might be done?

And then I did a Bad Thing. While I was trying to work out whether you
could move the picture left or right, I shifted the pot marked:

Voltage
Spanning

Thinking that it had something to do with spanning something... I worked
out too late that it's a DC voltage adjustment knob (it's not like it
didn't have a little DC symbol by it for any fool to read - I suppose I
must be too stupid). What I'd like to do is adjust it back to where it's
supposed to be. Can anyone tell me what voltage it adjusts, and where I
can measure it? (I've got multimeters and I know how to use them and I'm
well aware of the dangers of the high voltages you get around CRTs. btw,
is there an approved method of ensuring all the high voltage capacitors
have discharged?)

Thanks in advance,
Rowland.

You may have noticed that messages are now separated by
hyphen lines instead of underscores. Hopefully, this will not
present a problem to anyone. This is to help someone who really
likes hyphens.

I received a lot of mail about the Pseud040 program. Here's
the latest news.

1. Someone says it won't let you install OS8 because the
installer looks in ROM to find the CPU type. Well, this may be
true, but I'd like for someone to try it anyway.

2. It will be distributed soon. I am trying to work out last
minute buggy behaviors. Payment will be $20 via Kagi. (Do you guys
think that's too much?

Michael Connolly