I'll write you up some, hopefully money saving, tips, it's a sunny sunday here, so why not
-
Monitor:
Try to find the correct Mac video port to VGA adapter. Using this you can connect pretty much any regular monitor (even LCD) as long as it has a VGA input.
Example:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/PTC-Beige-...witches-DB15-Male-to-HD15-Female/323278828744
Some Amazon sellers have them as well...
You'll have to find out how to set the dip switches correctly so the LCIII knows to put out VGA signal at a useable resolution for the monitor you will be using.
Normally all the LC's are capable of this. Warning, a generic DB15 to HD15 adapter (without the dipswitches) will not work properly, or at all!
Probably a much cheaper option then finding an original and working Apple monitor!
A thread on this forum about just this:
I'm thinking about picking up an old Mac LC III or LC475. With the DB15 to VGA converter, are either of these machines capable of outputting to a basic LCD monitor? I have a much newer PowerMac that handles it perfectly, but what should I prepare for when using either machine with an LCD screen...
forums.macrumors.com
- Keyboard/Mouse:
Search Ebay! Actually, using the real model number of the keayboard usually gives you cheaper sellers compared to general "adb keyboard" searches.
For your LCiii that would be (I think anyway) the "Apple Keyboard 2" or model M0487
Same for the mouse!
Example, in my search a 19$ keyboard showed up! Just be carefull, those keyboards came with detacheable cable, so many are sold without the cable!
Get the best deals for M0487 at eBay.com. We have a great online selection at the lowest prices with Fast & Free shipping on many items!
www.ebay.com
Or if you just need a cable:
Manufactured by Kray cables to our standards. 4 pin mini din male connector to a 4 pin mini din male connector. Quality molded coiled cable. This will replace cables for all Apple and Macs that have the 4 pin keyboard connectors.
www.ebay.com
Don't be shy to use the "or best offer" option with those sellers!
-Recap:
If you are going to spend some money on it, please, get it recapped. Those boards are full with capacitors of an age/era, where the question is not "will they leak" but rather "when will they leak". Even if they are good now, they
will start leaking in the near future!
When they leak, the liquid goo comming out is corrosive and will start eating away at the copper traces, rendering your Mac soon totally dead, often even unreapairable (apart from replacing the complete affected board).
As well, they will by now be nowhere near rated capacitance, resulting in unstable operation, weird symptoms, sometimes needing several boot attempts before actually starting up, purely because of worn capacitors.
-Hard drive:
Those SCSI harddrives are pretty much all on their last legs. They are mechanical devices and they simply wear out eventually. Getting close to 30 years old, so they did make them pretty good as quite a few are actually still running!
Good, working ones are becoming more expensive with time, and you will never know when buying one how many years, months or even just days they will keep working.
There are quite a few SD to SCSI adapters (actually better called SCSI emulators) on the market.
With your LCIII you have two options, an internal one, which hooks up to the SCSI cable now going to your existing SCSI hard drive, or an external DB25 one, which you can just plug into the SCSI DB25 port on the back of your MAC.
This gives you one heck of an advantage I will describe in the next item (Basilisk).
For your Mac, the BlueSCSI is becoming rather popular! They are a bit less expensive then the competition, but with the limitation that they mainly only work on Macs, and not so much on other machines with SCSI drives (like vintage synthesizers for example).
I prefer the external one, mainly for the convenience of easily popping in and out the SD card.
Find your seller here:
BlueSCSI is a SCSI computer storage emulation platform, which speaks both SCSI-1 and SCSI-2. It pioneered the use of file-based SCSI HDD & CD-ROM images. It is opensource and built by a community of makers, and you!
scsi.blue
-Basilisk II
This is an emulator which you can install on pretty much any modern machine (both Windows, Linux and Mac).
www.emaculation.com
One very usefull feature is that you can create a "blank Mac drive" and make it visible in the emulated Mac system (I mainly use 7.5.5).
In the emulator you can then for example install one of the OS's on that Mac drive.
Then you can reboot the emulator using that fresh MacHD you just created and installed an OS on, so you are sure it works.
When booted into the emulator you can also make all your windows drives visible (" My Computer", when using Windows as host of course), so you can then very easily copy and paste any Mac software you have downloaded from the internet with your modern Windows computer onto the Mac HD in you emulator.
You can run installers for the software so they get installed onto that MacHD you just created.
When all that is done, from the comfort of your fast modern PC, you can just copy the MacHD image onto the SD card, pop it into the BlueSCSI and boot your vintage Mac just like you booted the emulator from that image.
This is a link to a youtube video with a very detailed tutorial on how to achieve the above I've just described, along with all the necesery links to needed downloads in the description of the video (apart from the needed ".rom file", you'll have to Google that one, some copyright issues apparently there, I found easily what I needed anyway).
Software and OS:
Pretty much all the old software you can use on those old machines is archived, so it never gets lost.
A platinum sanctuary for old software of the classic Mac OS era. Rediscover Mac treasures of the past!
www.macintoshrepository.org
Or on this one you can also find a fair bit:
WinWorld is an online museum dedicated to providing free and open access to one of the largest archives of abandonware software and information on the web.
winworldpc.com
You will have to learn about the type of files of that era and be able to recognize them and know how to use them!
.img disk (floppy) images, .bin installers, .sit compressed files (and accompanying "Stuffit" software of the correct generation), to be able to unpack those files.
Apple did kind of made a mess of that one though, with Stuffit upgrades and uncompatible filetypes between the different versions
So, if as you say you have no keyboard, mouse or monitor, without the cost of a VGA monitor (which you can get for next to nothing), you are looking at roundabout following expenses to get going:
VGA adapter +- 20 US$
Mouse/keyboard, with a bit of luck about 50$-70$
BlueSCSI, if you have no experience in soldering, fully built DB25 version, around 50$
Without shipping of course, above is assuming you are in the US, Europe likely to be about 10-15% more expensive.
