Macintosh SE Advice

[Dashopepper]

Hi I've been collecting console games for years but when it comes to vintage computing I'm at a total loss. My first console was a SNES but before that my family would always get second hand computers with software. So I have a huge amount of unscratched nostalgia for these games of my early childhood.

 

I stumbled across this Macintosh SE at a flea market this weekend and picked it up for $9. So now that I have it I've been doing a lot of research and am a lot better informed than before.

 

So the Good: It looks like I am in the right vintage of computers. Looks like the games I'm interested in can be played on it. Oregon Trail, Super Solvers: Midnight Rescue, Prince of Persia.

 

The Bad:

 

Not even sure if it works at this point. I'm looking for a 800k boot disk to test it out.

 

Keyboard and Mouse - Don't have these either, Not sure how hard it will be finding apple stuff without having to go to ebay.

 

Only 800k drives - Looks like pretty much anything I'm looking for needs a 1.4mb drive. So I'd have to get an external hard drive with the games already on. Not sure if this is economical over getting something other then the SE.

 

Also how do I know if these games are monochrome compatible? I read this somewhere. I've been looking up games on Macintosh Garden but the site seems to be down right now.

 

Any information of advice is welcome!

[Opry99er]

That's a powerful computer..

 

You can DL Omniflop (a PC based software) and DL the Mac files you need from various repositories across the web.

 

Omniflop will write Mac-formatted floppies via your standard disk drive.

 

BTW, welcome to the Dark Side.... Classic Computing is absolutely the Black cat's robotic meow.

[JamesD]

If you turn it on and you don't get a checkered screen that's half the battle.
Bad capacitors are common in old Macs.

[Osgeld]

PC's cant write 800k mac floppies, requires a variable speed drive which never appeared on PC

 

you will want a hard drive, floppies are a pain in the ass, once you have a hard drive, if you have a pc with a scsi card linux will read and write them with HFSTOOLS installed, then you can even bootstrap an OS from the PC onto the hard disk and put it back in the machine

 

for later (cuase you dont want to fiddle with linux and a hard disk every time you want to install a program) you can use a network card, or get a mac serial adapter and terminal software like zterm on the mac to "download" disk images and stuffit archives like you would from a BBS back in the day

 

keyboards and mice can be had for a small ransom on ebay but you can get brand new aftermarket ones at places like welovemacs.com

 

and yes turn it on to see if it comes up properly, the analog board in those all in one models have cap problems, which can cause all sorts of screen distortions (ie my SE flickers)

[Opry99er]

^^Yes... This is good info.

 

I was mistaken about the Omniflop on PC being able to write Mac 800k disks.

[+OLD CS1]

$9... I am not a Mac guy, though I have a few, and that is a great fine.

[Dashopepper]

Yea, I forgot to mention that I started it up. Screen looks good and both blanks ejected so looks good so far.

[0078265317]

I still have the Macintosh SE HDFD my sister took to college. Works great. I lost the OS disks. But it boots because it has a 20mb hard drive inside. And I have 2 keyboards. Look on ebay for the spare parts. And I upgraded to 4mb of ram.

Edited October 16, 2015 by 0078265317

[0078265317]

Adb keyboard and mouse. Not bad price.

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-ADB-Extended-Keyboard-And-ADB-Mouse-/171966064874?hash=item2809f9e8ea:g:1pMAAOSw5ZBWGzP-

[Osgeld]

Yea that's not a bad starting price have to watch it though as its an auction

[Willard]

Don't forget to check sites like the old Info-Mac FTP servers (most are defunct but a few are still around if you look really hard), Machut, Tucows, MacGamesFiles, and AppleFritter.

 

While macintoshgarden is a great site, it's also missing a significant amount of software that is readily available elsewhere.Macintoshgarden doesn't always have all the major versions of games either, as sometimes older versions will work on hardware that newer versions do not. When I get some time I've been thinking about trying to help fill in some blanks.

 

Not sure about the monochrome compatibility issue. I know some games specifically state it. Personally I try to avoid the monochrome games and my Powermac G4 doesn't support 16-color mode (that I'm aware of) so those are out too .

Edited October 17, 2015 by Willard

[Osgeld]

http://www.macgui.com/

 

has a good collection as well (though you will want to make a login cause without it you can only download a few things a day)

 

I have not run across a LOT of games that has issues with monochrome, though they might have the mono version on a different disk and its missing from an archive.. couple things that help is age and OS, if its fairly old in the relm of 16 bit mac's then its usually fine, if it will run on system 6 or lower then its usually fine, and just use common since, like CIV or Wolfenstein run stupid slow on my 1990's LC2, those have no chance on a 1980's SE

[Flojomojo]

Buy the recreation of Crystal Quest Classic for five bucks. http://gamemechanics.com/

It runs in modern computers but uses Unity for easy porting. It's very faithful to the original (albeit in Mac II style color, not SE style monochrome).

 

Read the Old World Mac section of the site Low End Mac.

 

An SE like this was my first real computer, so I have higher than average nostalgia for it, but it's going to be a PITA getting it to do stuff without a host server for software. You might want to build an old-style AppleTalk network around it.

 

Or, try the software in emulation like Basilisk and MinivMac for a while first. I would not rush into making lots of 800K floppy disks, personally.