Things to consider when buying a Macintosh SE

[VERAULT]

Really? The drivers i have loaded say 8mb system ram. 4 on board and 4 on mainboard.

If the video out ran at anything higher than the low res compact mac screen. With the 68030 cpu run some real mac games.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

I have 16 MB on my board and while Gemstart can see that it has 16 MB, increasing the available memory with the slider instead uses the hard drive as virtual memory.

Another problem is the fragmented memory map in the 68000 address space. Instead of a contiguous block of memory mapped devices, they're all over the place in the 4-16 MB region. Since applications need a contiguous chunk of addressable memory, this reduces the maximum size of application you can run. One of the accelerator control panels has an option to reallocate where system devices are located in memory, but this breaks compatibility with some software expecting things to be at certain locations.

As for the video resolution, it's a mixed bag. If an application is just checking the screen size, then it will help having a larger display, but many games also check the bit depth and will still not launch if the detected bit depth is below a certain number.

 

[kasia35]

There's really not a lot in the realm of "specs", all Macintosh SE machines are the same, bar the RAM and storage options. They can come with 1, 2.5 or 4 MB of RAM and either one 800k floppy drive and a 20 MB hard drive, or two 800k floppy drives. The later Macintosh SE FDHD has one 1.44MB floppy and one 20 MB hard drive. This is the preferable machine to have because 800k floppies can only be read and written on other 68k Macs.

The more important thing to look out for is internally damaged/destroyed machines. Any compact mac is going to have a high chance of the clock battery exploding and leaking all over the logic board and the frame. Problems with the analog board and power supply are also common due to failed/leaking capacitors. Bad solder joints on the analog board and neck board are also very common due to the heat. The CRT having bad burn-in is yet another issue if the machine has high hours since people tended to not use screen savers on their machine.

In the worst case, you can end up spending several hundred dollars in parts for an old Mac SE to get it working.

Thanks for information.