I left my PowerBook 160 on yesterday running BatteryAmnesia to calibrate a new battery. I came back to the screen looking like this.
I already recapped the LCD and I just recapped the inverter board and it persists. What else could be happening here?
Thanks for the suggestions! I cleaned both ends of the display ribbon cable and washed the inverter board in an ultrasonic IPA bath. The distortion persists. 😕
The contrast slider makes the areas change from light to dark, just not uniformly.
Hey, that looks much better!
My hunch was there’s some capacitor goo left around the LCD PCB. I opened it and cleaned both sides with IPA and tons of swabs. It was actually pretty dirty. I did clean it after changing the caps two years ago, just not well enough it seems.
It turned out the issue was capacitor goo had wicked around these small flex assemblies on three sides of the panel. They bridge between the PCB and the LCD. There are sets at the top and bottom of the screen (columns?) on the side with the caps. I cleaned those two years ago.
What you see here is the reverse side, opposite the caps (rows?). I missed this two years ago. I cleaned those with about 50 swabs and IPA.
Installed a BlueSCSI V2 inside the PowerBook 160. It’s wild giving this laptop 4GB of storage (up from 160MB) and WiFi networking!
I also added Control Strip for System 7.1 which was tricky to locate (use the 7.1 install disks for the PowerBook 500 series).
Is there a good way to browse macintoshgarden.org on an old Mac?
The site does load in Netscape 2 but it's ... slow.. and has a few JS errors.
There's also FTP service but the file listing is many thousands of files that never seem to stop loading in Fetch.
Ok I had an idea. I pulled a list of the files from the FTP server and put them in a text file. I created a quick PHP script on my local server that allows simple searches of the file names in that list and presents them as FTP links that Netscape will download and unstuff automatically. It’s quick and works quite well!
Two PowerBook 160 RAM modules. Left is 4MB (8x512k) and right is 8MB (16x512k). The max for the upgrade module is 10MB for a total of 14MB (including on board RAM).
Is it as easy as moving four chips from the left and moving them to the right?!
Hot air is fast. 4 RAM chips removed.
Four RAM chips in. Will it work in the PowerBook 160?
Boo-urns. Chimes of death at startup. No screen. Hmmm 🤔
Hey that’s much better! I reflowed all of the pins on the new RAMs, one or more must have not been connected. 14MB total, the max the PowerBook 160 can take. 👍
Having a peculiar issue with the PowerBook and the #BlueSCSI. I’ve got 3 HDs, CDROM, and the SCSI/Link defined. Boot HD (ID 0) always works.
Booting normally, other 2 drives and CDROM don’t mount. Using SCSProbe to mount manually causes machine to hang.
Booting without extensions, all drives and CDROM show up!
I tried removing all extensions and control panels. Drives still won’t mount at boot. Manually mounting with SCSI Probe hangs.
1/2
2/2
Removing the CD-ROM from the BlueSCSI config and I can use SCSIProbe to mount the drives fine, both at boot and manually.
What am I missing?
I put up a hosted version of my extremely simple Macintosh Garden FTP Search site. Super simple HTML and short result pages. Should be useful if you want to download items from Macintosh Garden directly to your Internet enabled classic Mac!
Reply with a picture of your classic Mac using it! 😎
@paulrickards yeah, as long as there’s no corrosion on the pins then it’s way easier. What mlcc did you use?
I’ve been looking for the sram chips and found K6T4008C1B-GL70 is a possible compatible model. 70ns but that should be fine.
@Random_Seed I just used the bypass capacitors from the 4MB card.
I’d say as long as the specs match it might be OK. Look at photos of other RAM cards and see if that chip is used.
@acn128 Sure, I'll put it up on GitHub or something.
For now, I have it up here to try out. Let me know if it works for you!
@acn128 Oops, that link will force HTTPS. Try this one instead:
@paulrickards It's still not complete yet, and I haven't seen much progress on it, but their alpha replacement site macintosh.garden does work quite well on other browsers.
However it only has a tiny tiny subset of the files on it for testing.
The FTP service would be nice if it was hierarchical in some way, otherwise it's basically unusable without knowing an exact path beforehand.
paulrickards
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