Color SE/30

A monitor that may work better as a donor would be an old-school 12" Apple RGB monitor:

http://www.everymac.com/monitors/apple/classic_monitors/specs/apple_mac_12_rgb.html

What you're doing is basically a color version of Stuart Bell's Poor Man's Greyscale Project:

http://www.stuartbell.dsl.pipex.com/PowerCC/PMGSP/PMGSP.html

I may be wrong but I read some where several years back that the SE/30 monitor was color capable and that Apple in order to save costs just used the grey scale instead of color. Has anyone else heard or read about this??

If someone have an exact model number of the CRT in an SE/30, then you can look it up and see if it is color capable. Otherwise, I'm betting you are remebering the addition of ColorQuickDraw in the SE/30 ROMs, to make it color capable with an expansion card.

And that on an external monitor only

Right. The SE/30's motherboard is capable of color, but the video hardware is not. Apple could not have built a color analog board and simply connected a greyscale CRT; it doesn't work that way. The analog board is most definitely only capable of supporting greyscale. If it were capable of color, back when the SE/30 was new and popular, instead of selling expansion video cards for it, developers would have instead sold color CRT upgrades.

I must be headed in a good direction if no one as yet has said this just won't work (and backed it up somehow).

Yes, it'd basically the color version of the poor man's greyscale project, and yes, as I already indicated, I may use the 13" Apple High Resolution RGB Monitor for a ring, but I am really hoping that the Radius 15" monitor's ring will fit the smaller tube... the extra space would be really, well, essential if I decide to throw an iBook mobo in there instead of the SE/30.

Hmm... no comments on the 9" LCD?

Well... there's pleanty of time, but I'm going to need suggestions for power, in both cases... because if it works, I'll likely do more than one anyway

SE/30 - how do I power the SE/30 analogue board (along with the mobo and at least 2 hard drives) and the other monitor's electronics? (It'd be great if I could just remove the analogue board, but then... how do I power the mobo...?)

iBook mobo - I don't even know where to begin with powering this... and where to get, uh, conversion cables to connect up 3.5" ATA drives to the internal bus... I could wimp out and only use firewire, but then... how do I power THOSE? There's prob enough room for a whole powerstrip in there, maybe, but I don't wanna do that...

I'm not going to say "impossible", but are you sure the TV tube has enough dots to show anything over 320x240, or interlaced to 640x480? You could use the iBook mobo with the TV-out dongle and keep the TV and tuner setup stock. That'd save a lot of mods, but you'd be stuck with a cruddy resolution.

But what are the chances that a 2 year old color TV has less resolution capability than a tube that is at least 12 years its senior? What really worries me is that the tube is just going to be too deep to work... or that its been so overused that its just shot... or that I'll never come across a Pivot monitor that doesn't cost a fortune to ship...

I never considered this... it would be kind of cool, becase the tv comes with a remote, to have it double as a TV... but how the heck would that work? It'd need some kind of switch... oh wait... its on the remote, isn't it... the AV channel or whatever... neat idea, but yeah, the resolution would blow...

Meh. Looks OK. You can get ones with a VGA socket as well though, and resolution to 800x600. That's the way I'd go.

I always thought it would be kind of cool to take one of those VCR/TV units (fully working) and recase the whole thing into a Mac shell. Have a little door discreetly cut into the SE front slots that drops down to access the VCR front panel.

Or vice versa - a boxmac built into the shell of a VCR/TV

The one I've linked to above is the first and ONLY 9" LCD I've ever seen that isn't widescreen...

Can you please please show me what you're talking about?

Like this one

Admittedly it's only 8", but I'm sure I've seen others. You could always fake up a black 0.5" surround, so it looks like a typically adjusted CRT

/edit/ for those of you looking for this thread for a link to CC-able LCDs, the seller's name is widesightdvd, shipping direct from Hong Kong, with 3814 positive feedbacks. Just in case the linked auction above slips off the radar.

In fact, you'll have an empty VCR/TV case with a 9" aperture after this, won't you

had no idea these existed... I've been looking for what feels like forever...
and the fake border wouldn't have to be quite .5", just a little over .25" would be seen...

9" (or 8&13/16" (22.3cm) perfect) would be nicer, though...
but this is hard to beat, thanks...

ah, one big step closer to the ultimate iBook in an SE/30 project... I really ecourage others to do something like this rather than the fish tank, espescially with the SE/30 shell. Too old and yellowed? Very fine grit sand paper and a little water takes care of that...

Just think of the possibilities! I have to credit iantm for turning me on to iBook boards... iBooks are so popular, the parts will be around a long time, and because so many young students have them, there are more and more of them with cracked screens, perfect for salvaging for this project... G4, firewire... I'm drooling...

I can even imagine the cluster... with an LCD in there, it opens up gobs of room, so how about 4 x G4 1.33s standing verticle, with 8 x 100GB 7200rpm seagates, with the firewire backend (or wireless)... maybe even room for an entire Airport Extreme and a Cable router, so the back would have an extra port, for the cable hookup, split inside so one goes to cable router, one to to the TV input, as well as maybe s-video/composite i/o, firewire, ... talk about a media center/load averaging web server/video processing server/wireless switch... just so many neat possibilities (difficulting being cost, cooling and powering everything... I guess you'd have just have to stick a power strip in there, with 6 or so line lumps, it wouldn't be light, and it'd run pretty damn hot so it'd need a really powerful (and loud) fan to suck through enough air... ah, well, nothing's perfect...

oh, yeah, I guess I should mention the lens idea I had (I've probably mentioned it before). I think just throwing an LCD in the box will look kind of strange, with the flat screen... so I am imagining a custom injection mold project with clear plastic that duplicates the exact 3D parabolas of the surface of the original SE/30 tube on the outside, but is flat and sits against (or very close) to the LCD on the inside, thus protecting the LCD, but hopefully, giving the effect of a CRT, maybe even magnifying the screen ever so slightly.

DrBunsen, or anyone, any time you come across different brands of those kinds of LCDs (800x600 w/ VGA), by all means, post them!

Well it's probably worth checking the exact screen dimension all round whatever you're getting. Might be a little over 8" as is.

Drool, personal SE/30 supercomputer. OS X has clustering built in...

even with one CPU/board that would make a kickass media centre, and you might be able to get away with passive cooling.

I would suggest cheating slightly and having an external power supply that does the AC to DC - keeps the heat out of the box, like those MiniITX 12v supplies. Then make or buy individual voltage regulators for each device.

Now that's some thinking...

No worries, will post any others I see.

I've always thought it would be cool to take a Classic Mac shell and fit a TV tube in there along with an old-school gaming console (the original NES comes to mind). An all-in-one old-school gaming centre!

Cheers,

The Czar

Arrived today... slightly too big. Weird. Who knew that color tube sizes ran large?
I guess we'll need an 8" or 8.5" tube.

I didn't think to take a picture, but the pins on the back of the tube do match up... but there was this little plastic thing there (for alignment with the card, I imagine). That would have to carefully be torn off.

The depth doesn't bother me too much... for a perfect fit I'd need the depth to be just half an inch shorter, so I could alter the case to make it a half inch longer. But the mounts not lineing up is a bigger concern for me. I guess I could have ripped the whole thing apart and stuck it in the shell to make sure, but it being this close to Christmas, and the fact that the tube image looks great... I couldn't justify it. So I gotta nice present for my Mom for under $40 (ship included in there). Oh yeah... they said the VCR didn't work... but it does. I had a TVCR where the VCR didn't work before, and I moved, and then it suddenly worked. I guess something got jarred back into place during shipping, or dust got knocked off some critical thing. Anyway... if you have a broken VCR that you're not going to get fixed, the best thing to do is throw it across the room against something hard, and then see if its not fixed.

The only model I can find is the Sony KV-8AD10 8" Trinitron:
and its kind of expensive used... and I'm gathering from the lack of Google search information that it hasn't been manufactured in a while.

If anyone can find any other 8" color TV's, or better yet, the part number for the Trinitron tube in the KV-8AD10 and a place that stocks it, I'd be most appreciative.

Also, after considering the overclocking options on a Quadra 605 (see links I left in this thread), and without even doing any real work, I've abandoned the idea of a stock Color SE/30... once again, I'm not sure why we haven't seen this before, but an overclocked Quadra 605 in an SE/30 shell looks much nicer to me, even without the color.

With a 68040 overclocked to 40MHz, a meg on board video, an ethernet card, and 132MB max RAM I can forgive the 5 MB/s narrow/slow scsi bus speed. The memory maxed overclocked Quadra 605 in an SE/30 shell sounds pretty sweet to me, with that 8-inch Trinitron tube and the ring and electronics from a Macintosh 16" Color Monitor, 832 X 624 resolution, it sounds even sweeter. Imagine that running System 8.1, A/UX, and NetBSD with the GNUstep GUI. I can hardly wait... its gonna be so great.

the built-in monitor is an analog greyscale monitor (as opposed to a digital TTL monochrome monitor). It's fully capable of displaying 256 shades of gray. Problem is the board's video output, which uses shared RAM, is not capable of supporting more than 1bpp (or monochrome). There were some SE/30 video cards that fit into the PDS slot to provide grayscale output to the builtin monitor or color output to an external monitor. Yes, the SE/30s ROMs are color capable, too. It's just a matter of connecting a video card that supports color or grayscale output.

I remember that in the early 1990s.. photoshop jockeys used SE/30s with Color Video Cards to drive up to 21" color monitors. They used the SE/30s built-in monitor to display the tool palettes and the notepad.

Unlike the Quadra 700, IIsi, and LCs the SE/30 supported up to 128MB of RAM just like its modular twin the IIcx and IIci.

Realistically speaking, they could place 32MB of RAM in an SE/30 using the more affordable 4MB SIMMs instead of the then prohibitive 16MB SIMMs, because the SE/30 had two banks of four slots each instead of one, as in the IIsi and Quadra 700

for those of you looking for this thread for a link to CC-able LCDs, the ebay.au seller's name is widesightdvd, shipping direct from Hong Kong, with 3814 positive feedbacks. Just in case the linked auction above slips off the radar.

we're warming up ....

Holy shitaki! that's pretty neat.

If only we knew of a color 9" VGA tube that could drop-in with no fit issues.

Isn't that OS X?

yeah it does look like osx

Doesn't the dock along the left edge give it away?

we actually have seen a color stock se/30 before linked by one of my post's here
http://www.applefritter.com/node/9025 linking to a webpage located here

http://www.se30ers.com/MySE30/myse30.html
but it's only usefull if you can read or translate japanese

Check the date on this posting, fellas...
see the orange material to the left of the photo? It looks like the box is about 1" thick. This is a gag.

Huh? Do you mean the photo-mockup of the TV behind the SE case front? He's never said it was all together and functional. I assumed that the first shot was just the SE case front propped againt the TV to show how the CRT fits the original cutout...

Where's the gag you see? The orange I see is some sort of material it's all resting on, I think.

I just picked up a colour 9" VGA which doesn't look -too- long. I'll have a better idea of fit potential when I get home.

Did this ever work out for you? I'm guessing the 9" tube didn't work This project seems really interesting.

What is the make and model!?

What would happen if you put the crt from a color classic in it? its 9 inch color.

It's too long. The case of an SE/30 is shorter that that of a CC.