Hey everyone, it's Colin. How's it going?
This old Mac doesn't want a boot.
Question is, can I get it up and running again?
I was given a Macintosh SE/30 by my friends over at Free Geek Twin Cities.
It's a favorite among classic Mac collectors, but it also suffers from a common problem.
Instead of booting up,
It just displays this black and white mosaic pattern.
Like with a lot of vintage electronics, bad electrolytic capacitors are often the culprit.
So I took the Mac apart to see if replacing them would bring it back to life.
Well shit!
So yeah, that... that didn't fix it.
Which is frustrating.
At the same time,
there was always a chance of that being the case.
This particular problem, well,
it effect pretty much the entire line of black and white compact Macs
and it's so prevalent that it even has a name.
Reportedly, a group of Japanese compact Mac enthusiasts
came up with the term "Simasimac" to describe this exact scenario.
What sucks is that there's no single clear-cut solution to fix it.
Obviously, bad capacitors on the motherboard are going to be a common cause because well,
technology from the 80s and 90s,
bad caps were a thing.
We're going to see more and more of it as
more and more people get into retro technology and want to restore it.
But that's not the only cause for this particular problem.
Now, in my case,
It seemed like it was worth a shot because the caps had failed.
I saw plenty of electrolyte residue on the motherboard
and so it's a good first step to do for troubleshooting anyway.
What I didn't see on the motherboard though,
when I was working on it was any obvious signs of damage.
I mean, none of the solder traces looked like they had corroded,
didn't see any damage to the pins of any components.
I went through and cleaned the board
actually a couple of times, once on-camera and once off,
again with a toothbrush and a whole lot more IPA.
Nothing obviously wrong with the board,
based on visual inspection,
and that's where this particular problem
starts to get kind of nasty when it comes to solving it
because once you've tried the obvious step of replacing the caps, well,
It's a rabbit hole that you end up going down to try
and figure out exactly what else could be wrong.
And it could be many different things,
I've read reports of people trying to restore these boards
Especially in the SE/30, and having to go back
to the original motherboard schematics and test
pretty much everything point-to-point
to see if there's any sort of break and a solder joint somewhere,
figure out what component may be failing or half-failing.
And not only is that time-consuming, but sometimes
it takes special knowledge
The diagrams and schematics for circuit boards like this
are great at telling you how everything is hooked up,
but they don't really tell you how it works necessarily.
There's still a whole bunch of knowledge as to what
exactly happens when you power the computer on
like what components talk to each other and what are they expecting to see?
That's just knowledge that I don't have so,
it may come down to where I need to reach out to someone else
who has more experience fixing these problems to try to figure out
what may be going on with this board.
That said, I'm still holding out hope because that board
does look like it's in good shape.
I also looked at some of the other components in the system
thinking "Well maybe there's an external factor involved"
and that doesn't really seem to be the case.
The analog board and power supply, they have capacitors on their boards as well
but they all look to be in really good shape.
No obvious signs of leaking or anything like that
and furthermore, when this "Simasimac" problem tends to occur,
usually doesn't implicate either the analog board or the power supply.
It'd be a different set of symptoms
if that was what was going on. So,
I'm pretty sure it's just limited to the motherboard in this scenario
question is, what's it going to take to fix?
Well, that is something we will find out in due time.
I'm sure I'll revisit this topic, but for now at least, well,
I just have a whole lot more research and tinkering to do.
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and as always, thanks for watching.