How I Turned a Mac SE into a PC (short Version)

1. Obtain a non-functioning Mac SE
   
2. Gut it.
3. Get a flexatx form factor motherboard, celeron, fans, harddrive, 9" crt monitor, PC100 memory, usb mouse+keyboard, 1U power supply.
4. Remove the parts of the Mac that are in the way
5. Peal off the 9" monitor casing.
6. Cram all parts into the Mac husk.
7. Install linux, icewm, and a MacOS theme.
8. Enjoy.
   

How I Turned a Mac SE into a PC (long version)

• Motivation.
  At this point you may be asking yourself, why? Why on earth would you do such a thing? Well, there are a few reasons.
  1. Vince put the idea in my head.
  2. Vince then provided me with a non functioning mac.
  3. Lately I've been obsessed with small, interesting, quiet computers. What could be smaller or cuter than a classic mac? (i recently got a little shuttle spacewalker sv24. Sure its smaller than the mac but it doesn't include a monitor)
     
  4. Its much more useful than a fish tank.
  5. I wanted to replace the laptop I was using for an mp3 station.
• Parts:
  1. One Mac SE. I got mine from vince . Vince got it from WeirdStuff.
  2. Intel D810EMU motherboard. Its slightly wider than the mac motherboard but if you bend out the Mac's motherboard brackets it will fit. $39 from somebody on pricewatch.com.
  3. HardDrive. Any old thing'll do. I got a 40 GB IBM drive for ~$80.
  4. Harddrive bay cooler. I used this to mount the drive. I originally thought the fans were just an added bonus, but after I couldn't find a good place to mount a case fan I've decided they are necessary. I got it from PC Power and Cooling
  5. Generic 64 MB pc100 dimm.
  6. Celereon 900
  7. 1U power supply from PC Power and Cooling again.
  8. I got a 9" viewmagic monitor off of e-bay. Model #1035e. Don't get this one its too long, but with a little determination it can be made to work.
  9. Any old usb keyboard and mouse
• Gut the Mac.
  Getting the mac apart wasn't all that complicated. It just took torx and phillips screwdirvers. Once the casing is off the inside looks something like this:
  
  (Note that this mac already had the motherboard removed so it isn't shown anywhere. The cat was sold separately)
  However, remodeling the inside of the mac to hold a different monitor and PC components took a dremel, drill, hack saw, tin snips and pliers. At one point it looked like this:
  
  
• Building...
  
  • Once I got the mac apart I noticed that the contrast knob for the monitor is the exact same size as 2 usb ports. Cool.
    
    I couldn't let that go unused.
  • The brackets for the mac motherboard needed to bent out a bit to accomadate the new one. Not a problem
  • The bigger trouble came because there was only like an inch of clearance for the motherboard. That wasn't nearly enough for the heatsink/fan, memory, or capacitors. This is where the dremel, hack saw, and tin snips came in handy.
    

    before	after	slide the mobo in

  • From all I'd read there wasn't a good way to get the mac monitor to work with a PC. It was black and white and the resolution was pretty bad anyway. So I found a little 9" monitor on ebay that supposedly did 1024x768(Interlaced). The video card on the motherboard doesn't seem to be able to handled interlace mode so I'm stuck at 800x600. Thats already getting pretty small anyway so it'll do. When the monitor arrived it looked like this:
    
    It looked like it might be a little to long but I figured I already had it so I was going to use it. After taking the tube and circuit board out of the case I could see that it was a bit too long.
    
    I was trying to preserve the look of the mac so I didn't want to touch the front, but the back was fair game. So I cut out the back of the mac to make room.
  • Another problem was that the circuit bord for this monitor couldn't be bent off to the the side without cutting some wires. I was hoping I could mount it on the side in the same place it was on the original mac. I didn't want to go through the trouble of cutting and splicing so I decided to keep it underneath. It seemed to fit best there anyway. There were two long metal slats attached above the circuit board that originally held it to the front of the monitor casing. I moved these to the bottom of the circuit board. that way they could be used as stands to hold it up above the motherboard.
    
    
  • The monitor had 5 control knobs, as you can see above. I thought about moving these to the back but it was going to be a long stretch to get them there. So I decided to cut out a space on the front of the case for them. The cut was made underneath the front ledge so it couldn't really be seen unless the mac was tipped up.
    
  • Then I plopped the monitor in. Of course the screw holes didn't line up. In fact I had to cut off most of the brackets on the monitor just to get it to fit. I left just enough of the brackets on each corner so that I could tie in the monitor with some wire. Note: in the 3rd pic I actually ended up cutting out notches on the posts in the middle of the casing. Then I tied the wire from each corner to the closest post.
    
  • Once I got the monitor in I decided it was time for a sanity check to make sure it still worked. It didn't. So I checked all the wires and connections but couldn't find anything. I tried to manuever the board into different positions thinking maybe something from the monitor was pressing down on something it shouldn't but I didn't see anything it was hitting. When I pushed down on the back corner of the circuit board it worked. Its still a mystery to me why this mattered, maybe it was just moving the board away from some interference caused by the monitor. Anyway, this was a problem that could be fixed with a bit of wire. I tied the back corner down to the base of the mac and was on my way.
  • Unfortunately, putting the monitor circuit board underneath the monitor meant that I couldn't put the power supply where the old one was. After much soul searching, it became apparent that I would need to ressurect the mac monitor's circuit board. I could strip it of everything and then mount it on the side and then attach the power supply to it up by the monitor. So more destruction. I clipped everything off the board and mounted it where it used to be.
  • Putting the circuit board under the monitor did give me a good point on which I could mount the hard drive. I made a few holes in the slats I was using to hold the board up and attached the hard drive bay cooler to it. After attaching the harddrive and mounting the power supply it looked like this:
    
  • McGuyver was right, wire is the most useful tool on the planet.
  • Now slide on the case:
    
  • That just looked crappy. So I sawed off the back of the original monitor case and glued that on:
    
  • You can also see in the picture above that I made a hole for the monitor's on/off switch just above where the power cord comes out. It is just glued on to the bracket that holds the cord in place. I also added the power button for the PC to the back between VGA connector and the network port:
    
  • Add the intel-inside sticker.
  • Install a macos theme and enjoy [Note: I actually had everything together and installed on the hard drive outside of the mac. I needed to do this since I wasn't going to have room for a cdrom in there and wasn't going to install a floppy. Once it was together all updates were coming throught the net.]
    
• Appreciating...
  • Now that its done I have transfered my mp3 collection to it and its in the living room serving mp3's to the stereo.
  • I really want to put it up on a pedestal but I don't think Kimber'll go for it. I'm lucky I got it in the living room.
    
  • A few more pics of the PmaC in action, running mozilla and xmms with a few visualization plugins:
    

Created by James
This page has been viewed: times since April 26, 2002.