Mac68k Forums

Hi, hope this is an OK place to post this.

Just got a IIci (mostly for the monitor that came with it). I think it has a power supply issue. It will turn on in so much as the power light comes on, but it does not beep and it does not render anything on the monitor. Sometimes when I try it I hear the hard drive spin a bit but only for a few seconds. Is there anything obvious I should try?

It has an ethernet card, a color monitor card, and some sort of processor booster card.

The power supply is Delta brand.

Mostly I just want to play shufflepuck cafe with sound. Is there some trick to getting 68k games to play sounds under Power Macintosh hardware? If so, I might give up this project.

Yeah, with IIci era machines, replacing all the capacitors is almost always necessary and pretty much always the first place to start.
After doing that, there's a known failure point on IIci power supplies. I forget exactly what needs to be replaced in them, perhaps dougg3 or someone else that remembers can chime in when you get to that point.

Completely agreed with both techknight and bbraun about recapping. I've recapped both of my IIcis and they both exhibited difficulty powering on until I replaced the capacitors and cleaned the board with isopropyl alcohol. Here's what I know about the IIci power supply:

There are at least two different brands of power supplies used in the IIci: Astec and GE. The Astec ones are known to be problematic, and apparently the GE ones are a little more reliable. I don't really know for sure. I have two IIcis -- one with an Astec and one with a GE, and they both work fine, although I've run into weird unexplainable behavior in the past with them. While researching the problems I had, I found this:

http://www.shobaffum.com/iici/trickle.pdf

I've never attempted this repair, so I have no idea if it works...

There is a way to sort of "jump start" the IIci power supply to verify that it is working. It doesn't completely work because the power supply doesn't like it when there's no load, but you can at least test to make sure the fan moves. To do this I short pins 9 and 10 (/PFW and +5V trickle) together with a paper clip. The fan will start moving slowly and the power supply tries to turn on, but I believe it doesn't fully turn on and the output voltages won't be correct (it keeps restarting because there's no load, or something like that).

What os are you trying to boot? It could be bad RAM; there is a RAM test that runs on powerup, but it's always possible it's a problem that isn't caught. Do you know how much RAM is in the machine?