One fast Macintosh Color Classic!
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- Опубликовано: 16 окт 2024
- #twistmethod
Ready for some motherboard repair? The Mac Color Classic is back, and this time it comes back to life!
Part 1: • Can I save this Macint...
Part 2: • The Mac Color Classic ...
Part 3: This part!
Part 4: • You won't believe why ...
--- Video Links
Macintosh Color Classic
en.wikipedia.o...
Macintosh LC 575: (Mystic Upgrade)
everymac.com/s...
The Power Color Classic Resource
powercc.org/
--- Tools
Deoxit D5:
amzn.to/2VvOKy1
store.caig.com/...
Jonard Tools EX-2 Chip Extractor:
amzn.to/2VazxDS
www.jonard.com...
Wiha Chip Lifter:
amzn.to/3a9ftWw
www.wihatools....
O-Ring Pick Set: (I use these to lift chips off boards)
amzn.to/3a9x54J
Elenco Electronics LP-560 Logic Probe:
amzn.to/2VrT5lW
Hakko FR301 Desoldering Iron:
amzn.to/2ye6xC0
Rigol DS1054Z Four Channel Oscilloscope:
www.rigolna.co...
Head Worn Magnifying Goggles / Dual Lens Flip-In Head Magnifier:
amzn.to/3adRbuy
TL866II Plus Chip Tester and EPROM programmer: (The MiniPro)
amzn.to/2wG4tlP
www.aliexpress...
TS100 Soldering Iron:
amzn.to/2K36dJ5
www.ebay.com/i...
EEVBlog 121GW Multimeter:
www.eevblog.co...
DSLogic Basic Logic Analyzer:
amzn.to/2RDSDQw
www.ebay.com/i...
Magnetic Screw Holder:
amzn.to/3b8LOhG
www.harborfrei...
Universal ZIP sockets: (clones, used on my ZIF-64 test machine)
www.ebay.com/i...
RetroTink 2X Upconverter: (to hook up something like a C64 to HDMI)
www.retrotink.com/
Plato (Clone) Side Cutters: (order five)
www.ebay.com/i...
Heat Sinks:
www.aliexpress...
Little squeezy bottles: (available elsewhere too)
amzn.to/3b8LOOI
--- Links
My GitHub repository:
github.com/mis...
Commodore Computer Club / Vancouver, WA - Portland, OR - PDX Commodore Users Group
www.commodorec...
--- Instructional videos
My video on damage-free chip removal:
• How to remove chips wi...
--- Music
Intro music and other tracks by:
Nathan Divino
@itsnathandivino
Outro Music:
Abyss by | e s c p | escp-music.ban...
Music promoted by www.free-stock...
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
creativecommon...
I am very jealous of this beautiful machine
aye! action retro!
@@CrazyTechReviews Aye, CTR!
@@xPLAYnOfficial hehe! Aye xPLAYn!
Me too. The Color Classic was always intriguing to me, not only because of its looks but also because of its weird place in the Apple product lineup back then. It was so different yet it still felt like a bit of a parts bin machine
Most soft power Macs don't require batteries to power up successfully, exceptions for the 6-slot Mac II models. The only hard-power Macs that require batteries to start up are the '040 and PPC-based models. Even then these will power up but they won't boot; you need to do a jumpstart (either quickly flick the power switch off and on or press the reset button a couple times) to get the CUDA chip to work properly and allow it to boot.
With the introduction of the '040 the LC PDS was decoupled from the processor: it now runs off of an emulated 16MHz '030 bus provided by the new PrimeTime IC (which also provided the same '030 bus to the Comm Slot). This was done because the '040 does not support the byte steering or dynamic bus sizing features of the '030, so they just emulated it to enable the continued use of your legacy peripherals. The same thing is true of the PPC models w/LC PDS except they're also running an '040 emulator to talk to the '030 emulator; this allowed them to use up their old stock of chips and for you to continue using your old LC PDS or Comm Slot cards (except the Apple IIe card, which required 24bit addressing that the later '040 and PPC models don't support).
Suggestion: flying toasters.
I used to have a Pumpkin Pi shirt I wore back in high school, but this is my first encounter with a Chicken Pot Pi shirt. xD
Yeah, that shirt is hilarious!!
"Chicken Pot Pie" by Weird Al comes to mind.
I'm glad that your channel focuses on board problems and repair, I think it's sad when salvageable machines get thrown away.
Agree!
Essential Saturday viewing!
That print turned out great! Really nice, painting it makes all the difference.
Hi Adrian,
I love your videos and have been watching them for quite some time. Very interesting and informative and I really appreciate that you leave the bits in where things don’t work out as hoped. It gives a good sense of reality for other budding engineers.
What make of caps do you like recommend for recapping boards?
I was wondering how you dry PCBs thoroughly after washing them please? I know 8Bit Guy is also keen on washing boards in the sink too 😉
Keep up the good work.
32:26 be careful Adrian, that's definitely not the one hand rule. Thank you for another enjoyable video on a very special machine!
Wow, great to see the performance increases with the Mystic motherboard swap and nice job with the custom 3D-printed back panel!
Looking forward to Part IV!!
Someone may have already commented, but I believe the delay when booting is just the board doing its memory check. I have a 128Mb SIMM in my Q605 and it takes an eternity to post. :)
Same with my 575.
Same with my Q9000.
Pretty sure if you hold down the option key while opening the "Memory" Control Panel there is an hidden option revealed to disable the memory check each time that you turn on your machine.
@@TheTriskitty I hadn't heard about this one before, I'll have to give it a try. Thanks for the tip.
@@TheTriskitty you probably need a working pram battery to retain that setting.
love the shirt - chicken pot pie mmmmm
Pot? That's a bucket.
I believe the delay on the activation of the screen is because of how much memory you have installed. I have 132 MB on my Performa 476, and that takes a good while to start putting out video.
I seem to remember that being the case. The system board is counting up the ram before initializing the screen. He could try removing the ram to see if that speeds it up.
Hold down Cmd + Option while opening the Memory control panel to turn off Memory checking at Startup. Then reboot to test it out.
@@minty_Joe that memory check is for later PPC macs, as far as im aware classics macs dont allow that as the memory test is performed on boot up by the ROM itself. you can however patch a 68k mac rom to remove that check (and you need to disable rom checksum check too). the lc575 can accomodate a 64pin rom socket that would allow for a custom ROM to be installed and used should one want to go that route. however getting those sockets is very difficult as you would need to source a NOS part as no one makes them anymore
Yeah, it was my first thought when I saw the issue. Memory checks is the first thing I turned of on old x86 Pcs just because of time saved on boot up
correct, I have 70MB of RAM in my Quadra 610, and it can take up to a full two minutes after the boot chime for display output.
Some Mac II's (and maybe others) need a working battery as the power supply doesn't have a standby rail, so for the soft power to work the power supply needs some juice from the battery on the MB to initially power the relay that connects the mains to the PS. Basically they took an AT-like PS design and shoehorned in soft switching. I think that's why it was suggested
Ya know, I have little interest in the old Macs outside of "Old computers, neat". But damn do I enjoy these videos, just flat out entertaining. Always look forward to a new one.
Same. Almost none of the computers he repairs I have an active interest in, and yet it doesn't matter, as all his repair videos are incredibly fascinating and educational.
Loved the latest episode on the Colour Mac, thanks so much!
At our office in the 90's we had an accelerated SE to 68030 and I had an LC III on my desk. My co-worker had a Quadra 605 pizza box running the 68040 and that screamed. By 1995 we got a Power Computing 040 machine and the Radius Power PC 601 machine and boy the speed was outstanding. Before we had Zip disks to back up I would spend Fridays running backups to floppy - about 80 for the LC III - weekly! The Zip disk saved so much time!
The long wait time on boot for the LC575 board is due to the ram test. Imagine having 132Mb Ram ;-) - The PCI-like slot is the communications slot and supported mainly modems and network cards. The CPU can be safely overclocked to 33mhz. The Q605 and LC475 share a similar mainboard design and can be overclocked the same way. You may encounter some sound problems depending on the mainboard (maybe due to age or revision?). The perfect companion for this machine is the Apple IIe PDS card. When paired with an ethernet communications card (comm slot), you have the perfect all-in-one 68k/Apple IIe machine. There may be some problems when using the Apple IIe card together with the comm-.slot card. I had no problems though. I didn't even need to do the 512pixel screen mod. My LC575 board just worked (i did no overclocking since the machine is fast enough). I would recommend the 640 resolution mod. It helps with newer games and programs that need a minimum of 640x480.
I had an apple 2 when I was really little. But one day a friend of my dads gave me his old Macintosh classic. That thing blew my mind! I wish I still had it lol
Was not expecting a motherboard to enter from the bottom 9:17
Another killer video Adrian. I'm taking notes on how you managed to take such a dense topic and keep it reasonably short to hopefully apply techniques to my own videos. Cheers man!
In the 90's in Japan, this mod was called Color Classic Mystic that I had at that time. You also can modify the screen resolution from 512x384 to 640x480 by simple modification on the CRT conection.
Good thing, too. It feels wasteful otherwise to have that beautiful Sony tube running at such a low resolution.
Gotta say I’d love to see the Color Classic running in 640x480...I still remember at one point the ImageWriter II driver wouldn’t allow a page width on the Color Classic (or any 512 pixel width screen incl the LC!) so anytime you tried to type, the screen would move left and right when you’d reach the edge of the page...was annoying as all get out!!). People would pick the StyleWriter which did format to the screen width, more or less but the when they’d switch back to the ImageWriter II to print the page was definitely not WYSIWYG! I think Apple fixed it at some point. I love your channel, so many memories this brings back, and the even covers some hacker-ish dreams I had back then (like a Mac Color Classic with a 640x480 display!)...LOL man, back in the day this would have given me a total MacFanBoy excitement overload! Wow, still remember waiting breathlessly for my copy of MacWeek. And those slick B&W spec sheets for the new Mac Models...days gone by.
Thank you, your channel is the top in my list, both educational and entertaining.
I've actually serviced a Mac that wouldn't turn on because of a dead battery. The thing is I'm not an Apple technician and I certainly didn't have any documentation for the machine. This was way back before the internet became the place to look for these kinds of resources. Manufacturers still used fax to provide service documentation. I remember calling a service number to end up at a automated phone answering board. There you followed instructions going through a voice menu entering numbers as replies to questions. The first thing you did was request the service index. Then you entered your fax number and in a few minutes the fax spit out the index on a few pages worth of paper. Then you called the service number again but this time you requested the service documentation using the document numbers in the index. And again you would have to wait for the fax to slowly receive these pages.
Now back to this Mac. I have no idea what model it was, but I remember that it only had a power button on the keyboard, and whacking that did absolutely nothing. As we were PC builders I didn't think it was worth the effort to look for more than just the basics on this Mac, but my colleague was a bit more curious about just how the machine worked. Long story short: He ended up finding a dead battery inside the keyboard. Replacing that, which required the keyboards to be disassembled and involved soldering, got the machine to work. Now I don't remember what kind of battery it was. It might have been a nicad cell that went bad over time, or it was just a simple alkaline cell, I have no idea. But it was actually mounted inside the keyboard and not in the computer. Also I remember thinking it was pretty weird that they battery wasn't accessible from the out side so it could be easily replaced when needed, but then the machine had worked for something like four or five years before the battery ran out. We also tested the power draw, and as I remember it the only time there actually was a load on it was when the power button was pressed.
Another funny thing was when the same customer came back with a very old portable Mac that needed some attention. I can't remember the name or model number, but it was one of those early models that had a relatively large track ball in front of the keyboard. Again it was a battery problem, this time it was the real time clock that no longer kept the time. A quick battery swap and it was good to go again. However the funny part was that the OEM Apple used had put it's logo on the motherboard, which was something I hadn't seen in a Mac before this. I'm not 100% sure, but I think it was manufactured by Acer for Apple. But I am sure that it was a big and well known Asian company. I kind of doubt that Foxcon or who ever it is that makes the motherboards for Apple computers today get to stamp a large logo on the motherboards today.
28:43 - My Performa 635CD has the same kind of battery set-up, and when I was removing it I thought that the Velcro was glue. So I spent - no joke - over an hour slowly, gently pulling the battery off so I wouldn't break the board... and then when I realized my mistake after I had the darn thing out I laughed for several minutes. Gotta love the learning curve for things like this! 😂
That was a magnificent piece of work. I wish I had your patience for electronics!
Just a little shade-tree thing I did back in the day for a CPU removal tool (even though I had a few sitting around) was to use a metal blank card slot cover. Gave me quite the leverage and every PC had the tool built right in for the most part!
Before I met her, my wife went to a surplus auction at the Lawrence Livermore Labs and got a Macintosh SE/40. It was custom made for the Labs by Apple, but she didn't have any system disks for it so she ended up selling it.
There was an SE 1/40 - came with a 40MB HDD
Well done! It became a really nice machine after all the troubleshooting process and upgrade (and you even swapped the processor)! As always, upvoted.
I'm rewatching while stuck at home during the Texas Snow-ma-geddon.
Great video. I love to see your content. I miss you doing the recap and any soldering work, it is nice to see you working on it and also the music you put in the background while you work is quite pleasing, please do more soldering work on the videos :) Keep up the great work. I love your channel, so much cool stuff :D
"Don't quote me on that." - Adrian's Digital Basement
Amcurious to see how great that 3D printed pannel looks once snapped on that apple computer, it’s amezing that you can 3D print stuff these days, for instance instead of buying a new plastic toy for your kids,you || just 3D print them instead😀
HAHA, when Adrian does his voice overs, he sounds like a poor man's James Earl Jones. lol
Lifting a trace sounds so smooth. yet is so painful!
This will be useful for me to look back on later. I have a Color Classic and a Mystic motherboard but no vram or extra ram etc but plan to do this one day
The Quadra 605 was a very cool Mac as well. One of Apple’s best classic machines.
Adrian isnt the most common name round here, and I mentally add 's Digital Basement whenever I hear 'Adrian'. just thought you'd like to know that. never been a mac guy, but your dedication to revival, respect that. cheers for the content dude!
at around the 26min mark you talk about the brown slot, I’m pretty sure its a Comm Slot. It was dedicated for modems and some Ethernet cards. If you put a modem card in, it would disable the normal modem port.
Our second family computer was the LC 630 so i got to know the slots and ports quite well :)
Adrian, I noticed that you never use static protection when working with components like CPUs. Is the workbench static-safe or is there another reason?
This is my prefered era of electronics. You can still solder them by hand with ease. Also, they're small enough to make smaller and modern appliances
I have to say I'm pretty jealous Adrian! I've been looking for a mystic upgrade board for ages but these LC/Performa 575 boards are getting rare, especially in Europe.
That's a pretty awesome setup you've got there (once the sound issue is resolved)!
You might be able to rule out the internal amplifier by hooking up an external device to the audio in lines on the board and see if you get any sound output from the internal speaker.. To me it seems to be an issue with the logic board or its audio connection. In my experience the amp on the analog board either works or not so the intermittent issue points me towards the logic board unless it's a cold solder joint. Either way: Can't wait to see you fix this baby ;-)
I'm currently fixing a Classic II and your Mac repairathon videos helped a lot! Thanks again my friend!
That’s one heck of a speed upgrade! Nice machine.
I’ve heard of some other Mac models being known to have startup issues with a low/missing PRAM battery, but definitely not the Color Classic. Some of the thin “pizza box” models (475/605, 660AV, 6100) are known to lose their video output if the battery is dead.
I can confirm that this is my experience as well.
For the original Color Classic board, you could solder a wire to the output pin on the sound chip and hook it up to an oscilloscope. That might help make sure its definitely the chip at fault?
29:22 Ooo. Where is the EEVBlog multimeter? Broken maybe? :)
Awesome video, such a short time demoing the speed improved version. You teased the network card and I want to see it go online!!
Did you build your workbench out of an old commercial building door? I did and found out the thing was fire rated which meant it had a SOLID core of gypsum. It was a mess cutting it down but once I put new edging around it the thing it is a monster. It doesn’t flex, the finish they used was obviously a UV cured epoxy as nothing stains it. No chemicals such as denatured and isopropyl alcohol, acetone, lacquer thinner, MEC doesn’t affect it at all. I got the door from my employer at the time as they were about to toss it in the dumpster!
Again, very detailed video. “As always thank you for sharing.” Greetings from Karachi, Pakistan.
ColorClassic can run MacOs6x or even the lower versions. That is a must have. 7.5x can run on lot's of other machines LC475/PM6xxx...I would love to run the older software...my LC(1) does not come way back enough.... 6.0.8 is what I am using currently. You gave the essential point here. Use the OS that came with it and it is super fast. Look how responsive 6.0.8 is.
Whoever commented about the battery requirement probably generalized from the models that don't have +5V standby, such as some of the Macintosh II models, which do require the battery (or batteries, in parallel) to turn on the power supply relay.
The Performa 475 (which I have the motherboard for) is stock 68LC040; I put a “real” 68040 in mine as Spice (an electronic circuit simulator) needed the FPU instructions that aren’t in the ‘LC040. The performance figures seem about right given how similar the 475 motherboard and yours are. BTW, be sure to stick a heat sink on the CPU; your 040 will thank you for it! 🥰
Now it's fast and beautiful!
Between cold reboots 32 addressing and virtual memory is not kept without a batter but for a soft restart (from the special menu) it works. I have a color se/30 without a battery that I soft reboot whenever I need all of my ram.
@31:30 if i remember macs do a memory check before the screen comes on, and the more memory the longer it takes (at least on the older mac plus this was known, if you upgraded to 4mb of ram it took about 15sec more before you got an image on the screen)
Great video Adrian, I look forward to seeing the performance of the new CPU with the FPU.
Your level of commitment to that sound system is commendable! Hopefully you can find the external card you mentionedfor it, and bypass it; but it seems it's already been surpassed with the other 'snappy' mobo! 😁
This translucent bondi-blue Zip_Drive looks awesome.
yesss! part 3!! you didnt make us wait long!
I so need to dig out my Colour Classic!
I had been staring at that Zip drive in jealousy the whole episode until you mentioned it!
there is 1 or 2 MAC's that where put out in the early 90's Performa? that did need the battery installed.
Great video, have always wanted one of these, have a Classic, SE & SE30 and sold a Classic II a while ago. The compact form factor is my favourite, not easy to find these in the U.K. at sensible money, along with the Apple IIc which In an ideal world I would also like! Keep up the good work :-)
The original color classic sold for $999 in 1993. I have a color classic, performa 575 and Black macintosh TV. They all work. I maxed out the ram in them and hard drives. I like them. They play games great. I am worried that someday soon the logic boards will fail because they are original.
I believe w/o an actual accelerator board (or more extensive direct mobo mods), you can only boost a few MHz w/o affecting the I/O.
Hi! Nice video for my childhood dream computer... That I never had... Well for custom cooling solution I'm using enzotech heatsink, very cool and relatively cheap for efficient results. Thanks for your video. Take care
BTW, the Power Macintosh 5200 is actually a direct descendant of the LC 575. It actually uses the same chipset despite having a PowerPC 603 in it, which would explain why a Power Macintosh 6100 is actually faster despite having an older chip and slower clock.
The long boot is the memory test running with 36mb. There are hacked roms, but unfortunately it does not look like the rom sim slot was populated on that board.
I'd guess the headphone jack needs (needed) a shot (or 2) of Deox-ant (sp) or a reflow of the jack's connections (or, a new jack assembly!) glad that you did get (got) it sorted; way to go, buddy! :)
this is so amazing! thank you. Man I wish I had your skills
From my old Mac guy troubleshooting days, I recall that 7.5.5 was a real solid os version. You might consider using that instead of 7.5.3
Since the sound chip on the upgrade board works, it would be interesting to see if borrowing that chip could lead to a fix for the old board. Also, don't forget to add a resistor back to that board!
Guessing that extra slot is for a video capture card. You mentioned the PDS slot connects directly to the CPU bus, but this wouldn't have access to the video memory as that would connect to the video chip. Without direct access to the video memory, this would have to go through the CPU, which would be too slow for playing video, which is why a separate slot would be required that does have that direct access to the video memory. It may also have some analogue connections for video overlay.
Anyway, good to see the machine up and running! I wish I could work on my LC575, but the plastics are just so brittle that more of it breaks every time I work on it.
Play sound. Trace signal with scope or amplified speaker connected to test leads. Probably the amplifier chip driving the speaker, or switch circuitry that disables the PC speaker when external sound is connected.
Nice to keep these old Mac's running. But mini Vmac always works. Part 4 here we come.
Awesome video man! Lovely machine! I saw a dude installing a imac g3 board inside one of those color classics, and everything worked great! Maby that could be another challenge for you?
I couldn't find a reply here on this video so I did some googling: It looks like that port next to the PDS slot is a comm slot, into which you can fit modems or network cards. That means that with this upgrade or on a LC 575 you can (in theory at least) run both a network card AND an Apple IIe (or ][e?) card. Now, that would be something for sure!
My first thought was "Why does he has that USB zip drive next to the old Mac" - I do remember that fad in the late 90s when all sorts of computer peripherals - notably those designed to go with the original iMac - were made of translucent plastic
I'm pretty sure that I heard that Adrian needed more RAM as he couldn't find any at all. You guys know the drill by now, let's do this!
Again, Adrian is BEGGING to the community for more RAM. At 22:23 "I [...] finding memory that works in this machine isn't super easy [...], I guess whatever random pieces I stuck in there was the right piece". We can't let Adrian down like that with so little RAM that he has to throw random crap at it in the hope that it works as RAM for his repair :(
That ZIP drive would look incredible sitting next to an iMac G3!
Hahah. Love the shirt. I actually made a chicken pot pie for supper yesterday.
i love how apple has a sound called so su mi.... :D paaahaaahaaahaaaaa lol
There's even a Wikipedia article about it, which explains where the name comes from ... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosumi
They should make a new one for the 2020/21 Fortnite vs Apple Lawsuit.
Adrian, since the sound is kinda working on the 040 board, maybe you should poke around it with a multimeter and figure out the voltages and such on a semi-working board before looking at the nonfunctional ones? It's possible you could figure out what's going wrong?
I have a feeling that this speaker itself is dead - what I mean is the wiring inside it got burned/cracked. I'd suggest checking its impedance with a multimeter - if it shows nothing or kiloohm/megaohm values, it might just bring down the whole amp circuitry and obviously produce no sound. This also *probably* could kill the other two chips, but I'm not 100% sure about it. I had a couple of dead speakers that made my amps very angry before
That brown header next to the PDS slot is a COMM I slot. They had internal modems/FAX modems and early Ethernet cards available for these machines and the back plate had a knockout for the phone/RJ jack. There was also a COMM II slot that was faster but the key was different so you couldn't install in the other COMM version. If you went with the extreme TAKKY 6400/6500 CC upgrade you could go with COMM II.
This slot was probably not faster.
Some PDS video capture cards (Video Spigot) would instead use the knockout for the video input jack so you'd have to nix the modem or mod the back cover I'm guessing to have both(?).
I love the shirt!
The PCI like slot is a Comm Slot, used for modems and NICs, could be wrong but it's also PDS. The later Comm Slot 2 was PCI based.
I definitely remember that there were some Mac models that did not boot when the battery had run out. Might have been the LC I or the Performa 475. I also wonder if a PRAM reset might help the audio, but I presume you tried that? Maybe there's just junk in the PRAM?
I wonder if the problem with the sound on the first board is a dodgy headphone jack.
Seems weird. Yes, headphone jacks can get stuck thinking there’re headphones plugged in but then there would be audio coming out of it.
I kind of wish there was a all-in-one style chassis for the Apple IIGS reusing a color Mac but the GS coming out almost 10 years prior and being discontinued a year before this even came out give or take would make that a no go. It'd be a bit of a pain wedging in the GS board and have space for all the expansion slots unless you gutted the area for the disc drive/hard disk. No way I would chop up an original chassis, I'd end up fabricating/machining a replica out of metal like I've done with a few Amigas and Apple IIc's.
Ah well, I quite like the form factor of the GS anyway. My Woz edition I got as a kid second hand has been a permanent fixture in my room and then office/study ever since. Apple's use of basically velcro for the pieces is a bit interesting, definitely easier to service than double sided tape that's for sure.
Ooo 🥳 Happy new year 2021 cool PC
512x384 was introduced with the Mac LC and the 12" colour monitor and stuck later with the Color Classic. This is was for a lower cost colour Mac system as the 13" was 640x480.
A friend with a Centris (which he recently offered to you I think) has sound issues too, think it was leaky caps aswell, I'm sure he'll be waiting with baited breath for the solution, assuming his isn't also a dead sound chip... :D
That's a helluva speed increase. LOL.
I hope you get to open the package I sent you soon. It will go great with this Mac!
A 40mhz 040 with an fpu is awesome I've found that the fpu tends to help with drive read write speeds 🙂
Maybe you could bust out the old oscilloscope and see the activity on the legs of the sound chip or hook a clip lead on the output leg and try to see if there's any sort of sound signal coming out.
Was thinking the same thing.
Capitator juice? lol awesome
128MB RAM is actually reasonably easy to find for these, or at least was about 3 years ago when I got some for my similar 475. It is totally necessary though and takes forever to check at startup.