New Macintosh SE, First Vintage Mac

[hmbrew]

I am now the proud owner of a Macintosh SE. (My first vintage mac ever) It came with a huge repertoire of software that I will not be able to catalog completely for quite awhile. (All on 3.5" floppies) Off the top of my head, it has Microsoft Works, Print Shop, and a few educational games.

Later, I will have a printer for it too. (Just need to pick it up from a friend)

It has a 20MB Hard drive.

Currently it has system 7 installed. I have heard that although this is the most recent version this mac can run, it might not be the best for the system. (Stability issues?) If this is the case, which system should I install? I also have floppies for system 6. (I think) Would that be better?

And lastly, what can I do with it? What are the limits of this machine? Can it browse the web in a way that would be simple to set up? What games are good on a monochrome mac? Where might I find ink for the printer? (It's an Stylewriter II.) Is there a way to make it talk to my Apple //e for file transfers or something? Anything else I should know?

Thanks.

 

[Unknown_K]

The SE (not SE/30) is a 68000 CPU systems that works best with OS 6.0.8 and 4MB RAM (system max).

 

[hmbrew]

Okay, thanks. Unfortunately, hard drive problems seem to be arising.

It has been several years since the last boot, and it worked twice.

After my second boot, the system refused to boot from hard drive. It just displays a floppy with a ? mark. I booted it from the 6.01 master disk and it gives me errors when I try to initialize the drive. (When it tries to verify it after formatting.) It seems like the drive just died. I'll do some web-searching about the problem

Edit: I got it to format, but when I try to install 6.02, It gives me the error: ID=15 This means "Segment Loader Error" according to a website. Seems like the floppy might be bad or something.

I found another install floppy, and now I have system 6.01 running. Later I'll try to find 6.08. (And yes, I have 4mb ram.)

 

[hmbrew]

So, now that I have it working reasonably well, what can I do with it?

Can it act as a terminal? Are there freeware games available for it? (System 6 compatible)

Can it browse the web somehow? (Easiest way might be serial to modern-ish pc to ethernet or something, but can it actually do that?)

Are there any recent software developments for it? (Stuff that makes it do cool stuff that it normally can't do?)

 

[Starshadow]

for getting It online, there were ethernet cards made for it. Look up Asente cards. I found mine by dumb luck in a SE with a bad monitor so I took it out and installed it in my good SE. For web browsing you probably want to use a text web browser, however Telnet and i think IRC are other online uses the SE works great for. FTP is also an option for downloading more programs. You might want to find a Power PC or late model 68040 Mac with a working floppy to act as a machine to go online, download software, and put them on a 800k floppy disk, unless you have a Superdrive SE, then HFV Explorer or even good old rawwrite can be used to write disk images to actual floppies.

 

[hmbrew]

Thanks. I will look for some of that stuff.

I have also noticed that the image does not completely fill the screen. Are there any ways to adjust this, or is that how it's supposed to be? There seems to be about a 3/4" to 1" blank margin around the perimeter of the screen.

Sorry, I seem to have nothing but questions here.

 

[cgrape2]

StyleWriter Ink

StyleWriter Ink

I'm pretty sure that the ink is made for a Canon printer.It's very common and not at all expensive.
cgrape2

 

[Anonymous Freak]

First, you'll want to go hang out at the 68k Macintosh Liberation Army, (aka "68kmla") full of old Mac heads.

The printer is a Canon-made printer that uses Canon BC-02 ink cartridges.

As for the screen; you would have to open the system up (not an easy task, requires a very long Torx screwdriver, and a bit of prying,) and use a plastic (fiberglass, whatever,) screwdriver to adjust; as the adjustment controls are inside the system, and in a rather delicate location, right next to the CRT power electronics.

Although 3/4" to 1" isn't that unusual. (I think 1/2" was considered the "minimum acceptable" margin, closer to the edge than that, and you're running into the parts of the CRT that weren't actually meant for long-term use.)

An Ethernet card would be your best bet, they're easy to find on eBay, and relatively cheap. (But require opening the system.) Another option is a more rare SCSI-to-Ethernet adapter, which doesn't require opening the machine.

System 6.0.8 will be the fastest on that hardware, and there are lots of old games and productivity apps that work fine in System 6. And that machine is capable of running up to System 7.5.5; but any 7.5 will be dog slow. For everyday usability, I prefer System 7.1 on an SE with 4 MB RAM. There are a couple web browsers that will work on that machine running System 7, but only one on that hardware (and it's *REALLY* buggy. And it doesn't do pictures. And it's so horribly out-of-date with modern HTML standards that most pages won't even render the text properly.) At present, there are none that will run in System 6 on that hardware. (One is under development, there's a thread on it over at the 68kmla.)

The other option is to just use a telnet application to command-line in to another machine, and run Lynx. (It really is the only reasonable way to do any kind of web browsing on that hardware.)

One website to check out for old games is the Macintosh Garden. It houses a large collection of freeware, old shareware, and "abandonware". (Abandonware, if you are unfamiliar with the term, is used to refer to commercial software from companies that either no longer exist, or no longer sell or maintain the software. It is a legal gray area; because it is technically violating the software's license, but companies most often don't do anything about it for software that old, or aren't around to complain.)

 

[hmbrew]

Thanks for the info.

As for the printer, I can't actually get it to power on. When I plug it in and press the power button, it doesn't light up or anything. I sense a long sequence of troubleshooting in my future.

I won't bother with adjusting to screen. It works good enough for me. :wink:

As for web browsing, I'll probably just telnet. That'll work well enough I suppose.

And thanks for the software link, I'll check that out later. (Got homework...)

 

[Kerosene]

I can remember the day when we took our old SE to the op shop, and I saved the bag because I thought I might use it for something (yeah.. like storing an SE in you idiot!!!)

It's a sad reminder every time I open my store room door.