This vintage upgrade made the Mac SE into a MONSTER!

I just opened an old Mac SE I got from a flea market, it’s one of those computers I don’t like fixing, especially with the CRT screen with that aging components! Also I wish those SE computers used HD floppy disks, because I had lots of old Mac games from that era like Dark Castle, Super Munchers, Alien Force, Diamonds, Daleks on floppy disks!

My first Mac was an SE with 2mb of RAM. I made a lot of ‘art’ on it using a Studio/1, an early graphics program by pre-evil Electronic Arts.

I tried Studio/1 again recently on my PowerBook 100 which is in theory twice as fast as the SE. But just filling gradient shapes was incredibly slow, something an FPU would have helped with.

I must have had a lot of patience back then because I used that gradient tool a lot….

This card blew me away! Thanks for sharing. You should get that memory controller chip! A color monitor would be cool too.

I have a Macintosh SE with a Mobius '030 accelerator card installed, giving me 16 MB RAM and a 25 MHz Motorola 68030. (It has a coprocessor slot for a Motorola FPU, but mine doesn't have one.) The Mobius card even has a video output for an external display for more screen real estate. I believe the previous owner used the display with it, although I unfortunately acquire it. He got a lot of use out of it... I believe it was used all the way up to the later '90s.

Good old days

So cool to see an after-market upgrade that really performs.

The Happy Mac with fangs is the cutest little detail I've ever seen :D

I had a lot of fun with ramdisks back in the day when I first starting using a computer. I couldn't do it on Windows, but Linux let me just create them willy-nilly. Although there wasn't much point on Linux since it had less to load and was a bit faster than Windows on top of that, unless of course you wanted to use it for some kind of security purposes. I kind of miss them being a thing as now you definitely don't need them.

I'm wondering if it played nice with sound output for games, especially the ones designed with the Sound Driver of the earliest System 6 and everything before 6.

My first Apple computer was an SE 40/4.

I really wonder why the SE didn't include a faster CPU. A 12.5 MHz 68000 was available.

I really enjoy these vintage Mac upgrade presentations. My SE/30 was a smash hit in its day and is now a computing classic! Thanks so much for sharing.

Great overview of a high end card. All of us SE owners in the day were so into accelerators they became a hobby in themselves. My first SE saw SuperMac, Radius, and Mobius cards during its life, but while fast, they were still limited by the 4MB max memory. The Prodigy SE's memory wizardry was impressive, and I wish that could be reverse engineered to make a modern SE accelerator today that would extend the RAM of this wonderful retro machine.

What a neat upgrade. Not gonna lie, I'm a little bit jealous lol

I want to see someone fully upgrade as much as possible in a Dell Latitude E6510 laptop from 2010 I really want to know how far you can upgrade one of them cause my friend has one and it can’t run basically anything good on it

Awesome material. :)

What. A. Score!

Why are the boards so dirty? Can’t they be cleaned before doing the video?

It's ironic that MacWrite was crashing with a system error of "Co-processor Not Installed", given that the upgrade board DID have the Co-processor installed and MacWrite runs perfectly well without one.

I had quite a few of these old classic Macs.. wish I had kept them instead of selling/giving them away back in the day... Alas...

WOW, that prodigy board sure is fast.
I've never seen a mac like that boot so fast. (when an old mac boots 10x faster than a 2013 imac, that's when you know)

You should have ended saying that you could make YOUR MacSE a... prodigy...

Man, that scrolling text document induced a flashback of writing book reports in DOS WordPerfect in the late 80's/early 90's. I got a simultaneous sense of joy and dread for a minute there.

I saved 2 original Macs 10001's (i think that the model number) from a dumpster and they both had a Hyperdrive 5MB HD installed which at the time I believe they were $2000 upgrades.

Omg, so Fast

More of this please! I also have a few SE accelerators and I find this era in Macintosh addons fascinating

This is catnip for enthusiasts!

Hey, I absolutely LOVE your classic Mac videos. Like, I really do! Keep making them please! I like your other videos as well - but the Mac ones just get me just right :]

Im still interested in seeing if someone gets a vampire amiga accelerator working on a 68k mac

not fangs, its supposed to be a tongue out

Thanks!

There were a ton of awesome upgrades for the 128k, 512k, 512ke, Plus, SE, and Classic. Not just PDS cards, but there were several upgrades that repackaged the system into a new case and allowed for external displays to be used. Of course, none in color since those Macs didn't support color. I need to look around and see if I can find some videos on those.

I knew a guy that bought an old SE back in the mid 1990's that had a radius upgrade with a full page monitor. Those full page monitors were awesome back in the day.

The Mac SE and SE/30 were super nice little machines.

late 80s and early 90s was such a fun time for Macintosh owners. Remember the Daystar Accelerator card? 68030 50MHz!

I didn't expect that the upgrade would have been over $3000, I expected $1500, maybe $2000 at most. The apple tax has always been around, even going back to the Apple 2, which costed about double of a PET or TRS80, it was more useable though.

it's strange to think, but I have an 8 year old i7. It does everything I need it to do and I haven't come close to tapping its full potential in some ways. Looking back, though, try to imagine using a Mac 128k in 1992 as your daily driver, as the machine you use to make your living. It would have been unthinkable! Even though I lived through it, it's sometimes hard to remember just how fast everything was evolving back then, and just how quickly any given machine became obsolete.

The Vampire Machine Icon makes this whole upgrade worthwhile!!! That is the kewlest Easter Egg for that time period and was very clever of the engineers. I tip my hat to them. 🧛🧛🧛🧛

I have this exact rare upgrade card for an old SE I have. I didn’t even realize it had the card when I bought it at a garage sale for $10. I only realized was when I booted it…it was WAY too fast and responsive for an SE, and showed 36mb of RAM, so I cracked it open, and it was like Christmas… 68020, FPU and MMU.

Still not my SE/30 powerhouse, but wow…it’s what the original SE should’ve been.

I wish I could sell my vintage mac stuff, I want to downsize the clutter but I doubt anyone is in the market for that kind of stuff and it would cost to much to ship anyway. Guess ill have to break it all down and toss it.

COLIN I need a hot shower 🚿🚿🚿🚿🚿🚿🚿🚿🚿🚿🚿🚿🚿 with you

I think I installed a 68030 33mghz card, and 1mb to 4mb. The SE was a dog otherwise at stock 68000 8mghz. The 17mb 60ms access SCSI drive was noisy and slow but a godsend compared to the floppy shuffle. Quickly outdated though.

Upgraded to a LC3 68040 @ 25mghz and color. Both were nice machines way ahead of their time.

My boss had this configuration. I would love to have one for memories.

Ya, SE/30 I totally forgot. That is a great machine.

I miss the good old days

Love your commentary, editing and historical details in your videos. Thanks for your great work!

Daystar, fighter of the Nightstar aaaaahhhhaaaa

This is so fascinating.