I have been wanting to get the Mac II I bought earlier this year back to life but I am having trouble upgrading the video on it.
When I first got it there was only this (
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer%20related/P1010198.jpg) video card installed and a monochrome monitor. I have what I assume to be a better NuBus video card here (
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer%20related/P1010197.jpg) but when I install it I am having problems.
First, the system will boot blindly if I only have the newer card installed and I can get no video output from the card.
Second, If I install the older video card (and hook a monitor to it) and the new one I discover the mac can see the new card.
I see that the card has two unpopulated simm slots (I assume for more vram) but even when I fill them I still get no picture.
Could it be because the board is just too old to properly support the card? This system has not had a ROM upgrade and still lives with the single 800K floppy and about 16Mb or ram seen here (
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer%20related/P1010200.jpg).
I want to set this system up with my Token Ring card (
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer%20related/P1010199.jpg) and if I ever find an Apple Twinax card, with that as well.
I also repaired my Apple tape drive so I am almost ready to load my copy of A/UX 1.1 into the system. The video card and Twinax card will finish off the internals and If I ever find an Apple CD SC drive and an HD20/40 SC drive I should have one heck of a nice looking system. This is what it looks like now. (
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer%20related/P1010204.jpg)
A/UX 1.1 :D nice, I have disk image of 2 and 3.0.1
Lucky dog.
I had to go and make a new roller for the tape drive as the old one turned to goo.
I know that A/UX can be quite fussy about display cards. I have a nice card that came with a 20" SuperMatch display that works fine with System 6.0.8 and later, but doesn't work with A/UX 3.x.x. I haven't attempted any of the other display cards I have as I run A/UX on a Quadra 700 and have stuck with using the onboard video.
With my non-Apple display cards, I've noticed that they seem to do a hand-shake during start-up, and I'm guessing that the display info is stored within memory after that. Because of the issues with the SuperMatch display card, I never even considered trying my Radius display cards with A/UX (though I don't think I'd ever be willing to pull either one of those cards or one of my Radius displays off of my Quadra 950 anyways).
It is odd that an Apple display card won't work though. Did you reset the logic board after installing the card? Sometimes just pulling the battery before restarting the system will help with adding new hardware on Mac II's.
You can reset the logic board on a mac II?
Right now the only way to boot it is if I jumpstart it using two AA batteries. Those two installed batteries are dead as a doornail and the system will not start unless it has a good battery.
I had to cut my troubleshooting short as whenever I turned the Mac II on it knocked the radio out in my parents bedroom and they were yelling at me to stop. :P
I got something.
I removed all the other cards and booted the thing up from a hard drive.
A few moments after it started to boot I got something.
Click me. (
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer%20related/P1010207.jpg)
It was very fuzzy but it WAS the desktop.
I tried several different sized monitors and even a multisync to see if it was a size problem but I couldn't improve the picture.
Try a newer video card. many of the old mac video cards were sync on green and many of the newer monitors will not support it. If you are using an adaptor plug/vga monitor setup it can really mess things up.
Quote from: "pentium"Lucky dog.
I had to go and make a new roller for the tape drive as the old one turned to goo.
Has it been an Apple Tape Drive? If yes I really would like to know how and with what part you exchanged that roller because mine has gone, too. Any hint is appreciated very much -so thanks in advance!
J
