Chapter 5: Putting it all back together and preparing for lift-off

Putting the Macintosh back together was basically reverse of taking it apart. First comes the speaker-fan-assembly. It just clips in place with plastic hooks that are surprisingly tough for their age. After that the motherboard goes in. The locating-pegs gave me a bit of a challenge, but I managed to slot it in properly. The next thing I installed was the tested working PSU, plugging in all the power cables into the motherboard.

I also connected the three ribbon cables for IDE and the floppy drive at this point. I'm not sure about the build order here, because the connectors are more accessible at tis stage but the cables are in the way when putting in the drive assembly. But plugging them in later is also not fun because the connectors are partly covered by it.

What's not pictured is the new clock battery getting connected. Both that and the connectors for the power button, power LED, speaker and fan absolutely need to be connected before the drive assembly is inserted.

A clean motherboard installed back in the pc case.

The power supply being installed next to the motherboard

Two IDE cables being plugged into the motherboard.

Multiple cables with small connectors plugged into the motherboard next to the front fan.

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The next thing to install was the drive assembly, originally holding the floppy, CD and hard drive. That required some jiggling and stuff because of the aforementioned IDE cables. But once I got it in obstruction-free it could just slide into place. Initially I mounted back the original hard drive as well, but this one will be replaced later by an sd2ide mounted at the back. After installing the assembly I connected all the cables that need connecting to the drives.

the cramped space between the cd drive and the power supply where a bunch of cables are stuffed.

The back side of a floppy drive with one single cable coming out.

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To finish up the assembly for now, I installed the network card together with its riser and put the cross-brace that actually holds everything together back in place. When I got the machine there was a one cent piece glued to to bottom of the case. I decided to keep it with the computer and used some tape to hold it on top of the brace.

// The original Blog-Post has a video here. Here's the alt-text instead: The riser-card that hold the ethernet card being wiggled back and forth. //

The cross-brace installed ontop of the case, holding the riser-card.

A one-cent pice on a desk.

A one-cent piece taped to the cross-brace.

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To connect it to a more modern VGA display I used an adapter that came in a box with a bunch of cables from the same auction. When looking trough all of them last year I wasn't sure what it was, but after reading up a bit on how to connect a mac with DB-15 video I quickly remembered that I already have an adapter somewhere. I didn't have a manual for it and it also didn't have a sticker with the DIP-switch positions but while reading this

forum Thread

I realized pretty quickly that there's only three types of those adapters: double-row with 16 switches, single-row with 10 switches and single-row with 6 switches. There's different brands but they're mostly just clones of each other. Based of the manual for my variant I set it to something that made sense to me. Thanks to

Elemenoh for posting it

. (The picture of the adapter was taken before I changed switches to the configuration I used)

Now the PC was assembled and the display was connected. The only thing missing was a mouse and a keyboard, which I didn't have. My solution was an open-source project called ADBuino, which lets you connect modern USB hid-devices to computers using ADB. More on that later.

A mac video adapter with a DB-15 connector on one side and a VGA connector on the other. There's a row of ten dip-switches in the middle.

A table listing dip-switch settings for various display configurations.

A raspberry pi pico pcb soldered to another pcb with the same size.

The same pi pico with another pcb from the previous image with some cables plugged in

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