Macintosh SE

When Apple introduced the Macintosh II series, they redesigned the compact Mac case to match the new line. The result was the SE, which is performance-wise a slightly improved Mac Plus. It has the same 8 MHz 68000 processor, the same 1MB RAM, upgradable to 4MB, but an improved ROM and faster SCSI. It came with dual 800K floppy drives, or one floppy drive and a hard disk. Later models had the new 1.4M superdrives. It was sold between March 1987 and August 1989 for $2.900 (for the dual floppy version) and can run System 4.1 to 7.5.5.

My SE is an obviously well-loved and well-maintained machine. It has been upgraded as far as possible, not only does it have the full 4MB RAM, it has been equipped with a 30MB harddrive additionally to the dual floppies, which is tricky but possible. This harddrive has a 25MB partition for general use and a 5MB partition that serves as a sort of startup and rescue disk. The system installed is 6.0.5.

Things I Did on This Mac

At the time that I am writing this, I have owned it for less than twelve hours, a good part of which I was not at home, so I haven't had the chance to do a real lot. First thing I did was transfer all the black & white games from the Performa 630 and try them out on the kind of Mac they were meant for.

Iago	Othello	84
This Ain't Othello	Othello	86
Arkanoid	Arcade	88	Aborted with a memory error
Tetris
Carmen Sandiego	edu		Disappointing
Zork Zero	Adventure		Better than in color
Pipe Dream	strat	89
SimCity	strat	89
Darwin's Dilemma	Puzzle	90	Nicer in color
Hextris	tetris	90
Glider 3.1.2	Arcade	91
Kalah	Mancala	91
Oxyd	Puzzle	92
Jotto ][	Puzzle	93

There were a few surprises. One was Arkanoid, which wouldn't run on this Mac at all. It claimed it couldn't allocate memory for sound and video buffers and advised me to upgrade to 6.0.2 — pretty ironic since this box runs 6.0.5 already.

The other was Pipe Dream. From my experiment on the Performa I got the impression that this was a rather mediocre port. Wrong, this game is charming, but it obviously doesn't like newer systems.

Carmen Sandiego was a big disappointment. The music stops short of the possibilities of the Mac, sound and music is too loud, the graphics are crude. Treat yourself to the Amiga version.

Taking Screenshots

Of course, taking the screenshots is not a problem; just like on any other Mac, you just enter the highly intuitive key combination Control-Shift-3. The problem is making any use of these screenshots. They are stored in MacPaint format.

I transferred them to my Performa 630 and tried to open them in Photoshop. It didn't work. I opened one of them in ResEdit and found they didn't have a resource fork at all. Finally I got the idea to try GraphicConverter, and this worked.

There was another surprise: They were all in the format 576×720, more than twice the screen size. This is one of the oddities of MacPaint: It cannot handle graphics in just any format, just 576×720 or 1152×1440.

So now I transfer these screenshots to the Performa via AppleTalk, convert them to Windows bitmaps in GraphicConverter, transfer them to my PC via floppy, crop them in MS Paint, and finally convert them to PNGs in IrfanView.

The first of these screenshots can be admired on the Pipe Dream page.

Things I Did on This Mac

Taking Screenshots

Links