Internal Hard Drive Upgrades
Through the years several hard drive options have been available.
New technologies in both operating systems and the hard drives them selves
make one option optimal, the Sun 40 SCSI. The Sun 40 SCSI is a true SCSI
hard drive mounted on a SCSI card (see figure 30) that fits internally in
the Lisa or Mac XL via one of the expansion ports. The SCSI card also allows
you to connect external SCSI devices to your computer as well.
There are several reasons that this upgrade is so optimal. It uses the latest
SCSI hard drive technology which offer greater speed and reliability. It
also requires that you boot MacWorks Plus from a floppy. This small inconvenience
allows the SCSI drive to be formatted 100% Macintosh. As a clean Macintosh
drive you will be able to fix troubles using programs likeNorton Utilities.
Older hard drive options require that two environments exist on the
hard drive. This made user repairs virtually unheard of.
Memory Upgrades
Early AST Ramstack upgrades (long since discontinued) took the
Lisa/XL to 1 .5Mb or 2.OMb. RAM cards recently developed for the Lisa/XL
use PC-style 256Kx9 single inline memory modules (SIMMS). Upgrading beyond
2Mb requires CPU board modifications as well. Although the MC6800OG8 process
or can logically address 16 Mb, the original design of the Lisa/XL CPU board
contains only enough physical address lines for 2Mb. By contrast, the 128K
to 512K Mac CPU board contains just 0.5Mb of physical address lines, and
the Mac Plus CPU board contains physical address lines for 4Mb. The necessary
CPU board modifications add extra memory addresses, allowing you to populate
the Lisa SIMM card all the way to 4Mb.
Video Upgrades-External Monitors
All Lisa/Mac XL computers are equipped with a, composite video
out connector. As shown in Figure 28, the video connector is a standard
RCA jack located just to the right of the reset button, at the rear of the
computer. This connector accepts ordinary RCA phono cables, defined as shielded
2-conductor wire with an RCA phono plug on each end. Unlike the Macintosh
128K to Macintosh 11, it's not necessary to buy or build an add-on video
card to use an external monitor on the Lisa/Mac XL. All you need is an external
monitor with auto synchronous multiscanning capability and a matching composite
video-in connector.
Video Upgrades-Internal Monitor Macintosh XL Screen Kit
No recently restored Lisa/Mac XL is complete without a Macintosh XL Screen
Kit. Unlike the standard 9-inch Macintosh which has square pixels, the stock
Lisa/XL has rectangular pixels. With rectangular pixels, circles look like
footballs, squares look like spaghetti boxes. The purpose of the Macintosh
XL Screen Kit is to square up the pixels. Proportions become exactly the
same as on other Macs (1 to 1 ), but the overall display area (608 pixels
x 432 pixels) is made roughly the same as a 12-inch Macintosh 11 WYSIWYG
monitor (640 x 480). Standard 9-inch Macs only display 512 x 342 pixels.
The complete screen modification kit includes new 3A boot ROMs, a new video
ROM and a new yoke coil. (Newer software requires System Update 5.0 and
MacWorks Plus as well.) Conscientious installation of the complete screen
kit requires one to two hours. This summary will give you an idea of everything
that's involved: