Well after a year working on the board on and off, I got it to boot reliably and the garbage on the screen went away. The problem? One of the caps was an incorrect value, unbelievable that a single incorrect cap value can cause so much trouble.
But one step forward and two steps back, in the process of working on the board, the left two RAM slots stopped working. With a fully populated 4 x 1mb config, the machine only sees 2mb. If I remove the two memory modules in the right two slots, the mac will boot to a corrupted sad mac screen with the hex code:
0 0 0 E
0 0 F 0
Which is very odd because normal codes on this machine are 32 bit values, not 16 bit values.
If I replace the memory in the working right two RAM slots with 256k modules for 2.5MB of RAM, the mac will boot with alternating columns of corrupted and non corrupted graphics and throw a mostly illegible message about not enough RAM being installed, so it's not seeing the 2 x 1mb sticks at all. I can swap the right modules with the left modules and the behavior doesn't change, so I know the memory modules aren't bad. They also work in another SE so I know all four modules are good.
Has anyone had problems with the memory slots on the Mac SE?
