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| Author | Mac SE/30 full color upgrade board ! (Read 17445 times) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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MTT
256 MB  Posts: 394 SSW7 Oldtimer 
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on: October 30, 2025, 12:24
Got a Mac SE/30 and would like an impossible to find grayscale Xceed card? Forget it! There's a new board in town and it's called 30Video. If you want to keep the SE/30's existing CRT there's the 30Video GS, which offers a grayscale display plus color out to an attached RGB monitor. But, if your existing CRT is on the blink, then you might consider the 30Video HD, for a full color LCD replacement with a 640x480 resolution display. These upgrade boards for the SE/30 (and IIsi) are being produced in the US by a person trading as "ZigZagJoe's Vintage". Odd name but hey, you have to check this out it is awesome. Quote from: ZigZagJoe: "30Video is a series of video cards for Macintosh SE/30 & IIsi that I developed and released in July 2024. These cards are not a clone or reverse engineered board, they are a 100% new scratch hardware design I developed and wrote a ROM driver for." On the above linked page, under "SE/30 LCD Kits: Ditch the CRT!" check the "Demo!" link for a short (1min) mind blowing demo. Then if interested watch the "Video Review by JDW" linked below the demo link (almost 1 hour). What impressed me was by replacing the CRT with a color LCD, the amount of room freed up in removing the CRT. The SE/30 suddenly became a compact Mac easy to get inside of, to work in and replace components etc. |
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Last Edit: October 30, 2025, 12:46 by MTT
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wove
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1024 MB Posts: 1363
Reply #1 on: October 31, 2025, 00:14
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That is amazing. I do not have enough friends to have the bragging rights cover the investment. I did have an SE/30 with Exceed card. They became quite rare and valuable very early on. The marketing was confusing and seemed rather snarky. The video card was a pds video card, which provided color output. The internal greyscale adaptor was an separate add on and from what I recall only worked with the video card and getting both at the time was pretty expensive. Having the SE/30 with color output and greyscale internal did spur me on to purchase an Apple Scanner and really got me interested in digital pictures. When I did sell it I got enough from the SE/30 to get a nice PM 8600.
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cballero
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1024 MB Posts: 1176 System 7, today and forever
Reply #2 on: October 31, 2025, 12:42
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This is so cool!  here's an IA link for an install instruction PDF on the GitHub page 
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB  Posts: 2023
Reply #3 on: October 31, 2025, 14:01
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Wow, amazing announcement. This allows to turn your SE/30 into a kind of Color Classic II, essentially! I'm not a SE/30 owner but this is exciting news for them. Thanks for sharing, MTT!
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #4 on: October 31, 2025, 14:41
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Guys like ZigZagJoe are vintage heroes. 
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MTT
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256 MB Posts: 394 SSW7 Oldtimer
Reply #5 on: October 31, 2025, 23:39
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" a kind of Color Classic II, essentially" With the LCD upgrade, the SE/30 actually surpasses the Color Classic II in some important areas (but not all). 640x480 as opposed to the CC2's 512x384 color display, means the SE/30 can now play all of those early RGB games that demanded a 640x480 display. The ZigZagJoe site mentions that it supports thousands of colors up to 800x600 as well, but I see full color 640x480, as being a huge advancement over the SE/30's original mono 512x384 display ratio. Officially, the SE/30 supported 32MB RAM, it's well known that this Mac will support up to 128MB RAM. The CC2 supports up to 36MB. Tho' the CC2's RAM will be faster. On board FPU in the SE/30, Optional in the CC2. The 30Video HD board has VGA out, allowing for video mirroring. The SE/30 shipped with the infamous "dirty" ROM, requiring use of a 3rd party CP to enable 32bit addressing. The CC2 doesn't have that issue. The CC2 has a faster 33MHz CPU 2x the 16MHz speed of the SE/30 CPU. It would be interesting to bench-mark the CC2 against an upgraded SE/30. The CC2 would have to outperform here, at a guess. Still, the 640x480 display would be the clincher if I was to choose between the two. Yes, it is amazing that in 2025, there's a current upgrade path available for the SE/30 Mac. I don't have an SE/30. Like @wove I once owned one (without an Xceed card). But unlike wove, I never got to trade mine in for what seems to me, the deal of the century. Good one wove, that was amazing to read. I wish it had been me.
Last Edit: November 01, 2025, 02:44 by MTT
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wove
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1024 MB Posts: 1363
Reply #6 on: November 02, 2025, 00:12
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I always thought the SE/30 was the pinnacle of the compact Macs. It did have limitations and adding greyscale and color takes out a big limitation. I live in a small rural town with a college and a school system that are both very Apple centric institutions. In the spring and durning upgrading in the summer a lot of Macintosh gear shows up. Both the school and college pass older systems to the staff. The students at the small private college are a fairly entitled group, dumping the past sessions hardware into e-waste, assuming the parents will get them the latest. In small rural towns, I think there is more of a sense of community. You have something I can use and I have something you can use and we just make a trade seeing the value just in the items usefulness to us. The rise of eBay and Craig's list and Facebook Marketplace have tended to really skew that more cooperative view of what things might be worth. The fellow I traded with was a friend and still is a friend.
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cballero
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1024 MB Posts: 1176 System 7, today and forever
Reply #7 on: November 02, 2025, 15:30
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I had bookmarked a cool page with deals on the Color Classic II from a now retired website, mac512.com 
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